Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

INTRODUCTION

Somewhere along the line, this story collection got completely out of hand. It’s that age-old artistic decision of what to leave in and what to leave out. Some of the decisions were easy. All my Worthing stories would be part of an omnibus volume called The Worthing Saga, so I didn’t need to include any of them. And all my Mormon Sea stories would appear in the collection The Folk of the Fringe, so they wouldn’t need to be included in my general story collection, either. Even with those stories left out, however, no matter how I configured a reasonable-sized book, I was leaving out too many stories that I wanted to include.

So I settled on something not of reasonable size. I talked to my editor, Beth Meacham, and proposed that we release a single-volume hardcover collection, but then split it into two regular-length paperbacks. She thought it sounded weird but, being Beth Meacham, she didn’t reject it out of hand. Instead she thought about it until she liked the idea, and then went to Tom Doherty who also liked it, and voila—an egregiously oversized book was born. Because once the floodgate had opened, I pretty much included every story that I wasn’t actually ashamed of.

Which brings us to this part of the collection. Think of this as a bonus section, something that only buyers of the ridiculously expensive hardcover edition receive. It won’t be in any of the paperback volumes that bud off from this book. Only you will ever see it.

Why, you ask, are you so fortunate? It’s not as if this percentage of the book was free—you paid for the cost of the paper and typesetting of this part of the book as surely as you paid for all the rest. The thing is: As Beth and I looked over the list of stories that were going into Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, we realized that we were approaching the point where this book would be complete. It would be the volume of record. So why not go all the way? Why not include the stuff that was so weird or out-of-genre that it wasn’t going to appear anywhere else, ever.

I don’t want you to think, though, that we were completely indiscriminate in what we included. For instance, we didn’t include a single one of my two-dozen-or-so plays. Nor did we inflict on you any of my poetry except for “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow.” There are more than two hundred audioplays and a couple of dozen animated videoscripts from my work for Living Scriptures that aren’t included. Nor have we reprinted here any of my dozens of review columns for Fantasy and Science Fiction or Science Fiction Review. There are also dozens of computer articles and computer game reviews that you are being spared. When you think of it, we were downright selective.

There is also one published bit of science fiction that isn’t included here. Between this book, The Worthing Saga, and The Folk of the Fringe, all of my ASF and fantasy short stories will be in print, except for a harmless little story called “Happy Head”

which appeared in—well, someplace. In that story I used direct brain-to-computer hookups before the cyberpunks did, but that’s about the only thing about the story that doesn’t embarrass me now, so even if you happen to find it in your complete run of—a certain magazine—I urge you to think of it as something written by an earnest young graduate student rather than anything I did. I think the editor bought it only because it had some interesting ideas in it, not because anybody could actually take it seriously as a story. Everybody’s allowed to have a mistake or two that appears in print. But I don’t have to cooperate in bringing it to your attention, no matter how much amusement you might get from it.

The works in this section fall into several categories:

I’ve had a long habit of adapting some of my shorter works into novels; the trouble with this is that the shorter works are essentially killed. Yet at the time I wrote them, “Ender’s Game,” “Mikal’s Songbird,” and the epic poem “Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow” represented my very best work. I had no idea they would ever be expanded on; they were meant to stand complete. Furthermore, both stories were nominated for awards and the poem actually won one. For historical interest if nothing else, we figured they ought to be in print somewhere. This is the place.

I’m not ashamed of these stories—they were the best I could do at the time, and they still hold up rather well. But they just don’t deserve the same standing as the stories that I still believe in; and I didn’t think the ideas were worth the effort of going back and rewriting the stories so they were up to snuff. So here they are, for such entertainment as they offer. And perhaps they’ll also provide some encouragement to young authors who will read them, smile brightly, and say, “If these could get published, anything can!”

Let’s face it—if this collection has any commercial viability, it’s as a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories. But that isn’t the only kind of story I write. And Beth and I thought you might enjoy getting a look at the sort of thing I write for other audiences. Many of the stories were originally aimed at the Mormon audience. Others don’t have any discernable audience on God’s green Earth. But we thought there was even a valid genre reason for including them in a collection of science fiction and fantasy: For some of you, at least, reading Mormon fiction will be the most alien experience you’ve ever had.

ENDER’S GAME

“Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember—the enemy’s gate is down. If you step through your own door like you’re out for a stroll, you’re a big target and you deserve to get hit. With more than a flasher.” Ender Wiggins paused and looked over the group. Most were just watching him nervously. A few understanding. A few sullen and resisting.

First day with this army, all fresh from the teacher squads, and Ender had forgotten how young new kids could be. He’d been in it for three years, they’d had six months—nobody over nine years old in the whole bunch. But they were his. At eleven, he was half a year early to be a commander. He’d had a toon of his own and knew a few tricks, but there were forty in his new army. Green. All marksmen with a flasher, all in top shape, or they wouldn’t be here—but they were all just as likely as not to get wiped out first time into battle.

“Remember,” he went on, “they can’t see you till you get through that door. But the second you’re out, they’ll be on you. So hit that door the way you want to be when they shoot at you. Legs up under you, going straight down.” He pointed at a sullen kid who looked like he was only seven, the smallest of them all. “Which way is down, greenoh!”

“Toward the enemy door.” The answer was quick. It was also surly, as if to say, Yeah, yeah, now get on with the important stuff.

“Name, kid?”

“Bean.”

“Get that for size or for brains?”

Bean didn’t answer. The rest laughed a little. Ender had chosen right. This kid was younger than the rest, must have been advanced because he was sharp. The others didn’t like him much, they were happy to see him taken down a little. Like Ender’s first commander had taken him down.

“Well, Bean, you’re right onto things. Now I tell you this, nobody’s gonna get through that door without a good chance of getting hit. A lot of you are going to be turned into cement somewhere. Make sure it’s your legs. Right? If only your legs get hit, then only your legs get frozen, and in nullo that’s no sweat.” Ender turned to one of the dazed ones. “What’re legs for? Hmmm?”

Blank stare. Confusion. Stammer.

“Forget it. Guess I’ll have to ask Bean here.”

“Legs are for pushing off walls.” Still bored.

“Thanks, Bean. Get that, everybody?” They all got it, and didn’t like getting it from Bean. “Right. You can’t see with legs, you can’t shoot with legs, and most of the time they just get in the way. If they get frozen sticking straight out you’ve turned yourself into a blimp. No way to hide. So how do legs go?”

A few answered this time, to prove that Bean wasn’t the only one who knew anything. “Under you. Tucked up under.”

“Right. A shield. You’re kneeling on a shield, and the shield is your own legs. And there’s a trick to the suits. Even when your legs are flashed you can still kick off. I’ve never seen anybody do it but me—but you’re all gonna learn it.”

Ender Wiggins turned on his flasher. It glowed faintly green in his hand. Then he let himself rise in the weightless workout room, pulled his legs under him as though he were kneeling, and flashed both of them. Immediately his suit stiffened at the knees and ankles, so that he couldn’t bend at all.

“Okay, I’m frozen, see?”

He was floating a meter above them. They all looked up at him, puzzled. He leaned back and caught one of the handholds on the wall behind him, and pulled himself flush against the wall.

“I’m stuck at a wall. If I had legs, I’d use legs, and string myself out like a string bean, right?”

They laughed.

“But I don’t have legs, and that’s better, got it? Because of this.” Ender jackknifed at the waist, then straightened out violently. He was across the workout room in only a moment. From the other side he called to them. “Got that? I didn’t use hands, so I still had use of my flasher. And I didn’t have my legs floating five feet behind me. Now watch it again.”

He repeated the jackknife, and caught a handhold on the wall near them. “Now, I don’t just want you to do that when they’ve flashed your legs. I want you to do that when you’ve still got legs, because it’s better. And because they’ll never be expecting it. All right now, everybody up in the air and kneeling.”

Most were up in a few seconds. Ender flashed the stragglers, and they dangled, helplessly frozen, while the others laughed. “When I give an order, you move. Got it? When we’re at a door and they clear it, I’ll be giving you orders in two seconds, as soon as I see the setup. And when I give the order you better be out there, because whoever’s out there first is going to win, unless he’s a fool. I’m not. And you better not be, or I’ll have you back in the teacher squads.” He saw more than a few of them gulp, and the frozen ones looked at him with fear. “You guys who are hanging there. You watch. You’ll thaw out in about fifteen minutes, and let’s see if you can catch up to the others.”

For the next half hour Ender had them jackknifing off walls. He called a stop when he saw that they all had the basic idea. They were a good group, maybe. They’d get better.

“Now you’re warmed up,” he said to them, “we’ll start working.”

Ender was the last one out after practice, since he stayed to help some of the slower ones improve on technique. They’d had good teachers, but like all armies they were uneven, and some of them could be a real drawback in battle. Their first battle might be weeks away. It might be tomorrow. A schedule was never printed. The commander just woke up and found a note by his bunk, giving him the time of his battle and the name of his opponent. So for the first while he was going to drive his boys until they were in top shape—all of them. Ready for anything, at any time. Strategy was nice, but it was worth nothing if the soldiers couldn’t hold up under the strain.

He turned the corner into the residence wing and found himself face to face with Bean, the seven-year-old he had picked on all through practice that day. Problems. Ender didn’t want problems right now.

“Ho, Bean.”

“Ho, Ender.”

Pause.

“Sir,” Ender said softly.

“We’re not on duty.”

“In my army, Bean, we’re always on duty.” Ender brushed past him.

Bean’s high voice piped up behind him. “I know what you’re doing, Ender, sir, and I’m warning you.”

Ender turned slowly and looked at him. “Warning me?”

“I’m the best man you’ve got. But I’d better be treated like it.”

“Or what?” Ender smiled menacingly.

“Or I’ll be the worst man you’ve got. One or the other.”

“And what do you want? Love and kisses?” Ender was getting angry now.

Bean was unworried. “I want a toon.”

Ender walked back to him and stood looking down into his eyes. “I’ll give a toon,” he said, “to the boys who prove they’re worth something. They’ve got to be good soldiers, they’ve got to know how to take orders, they’ve got to be able to think for themselves in a pinch, and they’ve got to be able to keep respect. That’s how I got to be a commander. That’s how you’ll get to be a toon leader. Got it?”

Bean smiled. “That’s fair. If you actually work that way, I’ll be a toon leader in a month.”

Ender reached down and grabbed the front of his uniform and shoved him into the wall. “When I say I work a certain way, Bean, then that’s the way I work.”

Bean just smiled. Ender let go of him and walked away, and didn’t look back. He was sure, without looking, that Bean was still watching, still smiling, still just a little contemptuous. He might make a good toon leader at that. Ender would keep an eye on him.

Captain Graff, six foot two and a little chubby, stroked his belly as he leaned back in his chair. Across his desk sat Lieutenant Anderson, who was earnestly pointing out high points on a chart.

“Here it is, Captain,” Anderson said. “Ender’s already got them doing a tactic that’s going to throw off everyone who meets it. Doubled their speed.”

Graff nodded.

“And you know his test scores. He thinks well, too.”

Graff smiled. “All true, all true, Anderson, he’s a fine student, shows real promise.”

They waited.

Graff sighed. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Ender’s the one. He’s got to be.”

“He’ll never be ready in time, Lieutenant. He’s eleven, for heaven’s sake, man, what do you want, a miracle?”

“I want him into battles, every day starting tomorrow. I want him to have a year’s worth of battles in a month.”

Graff shook his head. “That would have his army in the hospital.”

“No, sir. He’s getting them into form. And we need Ender.”

“Correction, Lieutenant. We need somebody. You think it’s Ender.”

“All right, I think it’s Ender. Which of the commanders if it isn’t him?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant.” Graff ran his hands over his slightly fuzzy bald head. “These are children, Anderson. Do you realize that? Ender’s army is nine years old. Are we going to put them against the older kids? Are we going to put them through hell for a month like that?”

Lieutenant Anderson leaned even farther over Graffs desk.

“Ender’s test scores, Captain!”

“I’ve seen his bloody test scores! I’ve watched him in battle, I’ve listened to tapes of his training sessions, I’ve watched his sleep patterns, I’ve heard tapes of his conversations in the corridors and in the bathrooms, I’m more aware of Ender Wiggins than you could possibly imagine! And against all the arguments, against his obvious qualities, I’m weighing one thing. I have this picture of Ender a year from now, if you have your way. I see him completely useless, worn down, a failure, because he was pushed farther than he or any living person could go. But it doesn’t weigh enough, does it, Lieutenant, because there’s a war on, and our best talent is gone, and the biggest battles are ahead. So give Ender a battle every day this week. And then bring me a report.”

Anderson stood and saluted. “Thank you, sir.”

He had almost reached the door when Graff called his name. He turned and faced the captain.

“Anderson,” Captain Graff said. “Have you been outside, lately I mean?”

“Not since last leave, six months ago.”

“I didn’t think so. Not that it makes any difference. But have you ever been to Beaman Park, there in the city? Hmm? Beautiful park. Trees. Grass. No nullo, no battles, no worries. Do you know what else there is in Beaman Park?”

“What, sir?” Lieutenant Anderson asked.

“Children,” Graff answered.

“Of course children,” said Anderson.

“I mean children. I mean kids who get up in the morning when their mothers call them and they go to school and then in the afternoons they go to Beaman Park and play. They’re happy, they smile a lot, they laugh, they have fun. Hmmm?”

“I’m sure they do, sir.”

“Is that all you can say, Anderson?”

Anderson cleared his throat. “It’s good for children to have fun, I think, sir. I know I did when I was a boy. But right now the world needs soldiers. And this is the way to get them.”

Graff nodded and closed his eyes. “Oh, indeed, you’re right, by statistical proof and by all the important theories, and dammit they work and the system is right but all the same Ender’s older than I am. He’s not a child. He’s barely a person,”

“If that’s true, sir, then at least we all know that Ender is making it possible for the others of his age to be playing in the park.”

“And Jesus died to save all men, of course.” Graff sat up and looked at Anderson almost sadly. “But we’re the ones,” Graff said, “we’re the ones who are driving in the nails.”

Ender Wiggins lay on his bed staring at the ceiling. He never slept more than five hours a night—but the lights went off at 2200 and didn’t come on again until 0600. So he stared at the ceiling and thought.

He’d had his army for three and a half weeks. Dragon Army. The name was assigned, and it wasn’t a lucky one. Oh, the charts said that about nine years ago a Dragon Army had done fairly well. But for the next six years the name had been attached to inferior armies, and finally, because of the superstition that was beginning to play about the name, Dragon Army was retired. Until now. And now, Ender thought, smiling, Dragon Army was going to take them by surprise.

The door opened quietly. Ender did not turn his head. Someone stepped softly into his room, then left with the sound of the door shutting. When soft steps died away Ender rolled over and saw a white slip of paper lying on the floor. He reached down and picked it up.

“Dragon Army against Rabbit Army, Ender Wiggins and Cam Carby, 0700.”

The first battle. Ender got out of bed and quickly dressed. He went rapidly to the rooms of each of his toon leaders and told them to rouse their boys. In five minutes they were all gathered in the corridor, sleepy and slow. Ender spoke softly.

“First battle, 0700 against Rabbit Army. I’ve fought them twice before but they’ve got a new commander. Never heard of him. They’re an older group, though, and I know a few of their old tricks. Now wake up. Run, doublefast, warmup in workroom three.”

For an hour and a half they worked out, with three mock battles and calisthenics in the corridor out of the nullo. Then for fifteen minutes they all lay up in the air, totally relaxing in the weightlessness. At 0650 Ender roused them and they hurried into the corridor. Ender led them down the corridor, running again, and occasionally leaping to touch a light panel on the ceiling. The boys all touched the same light panel. And at 0658 they reached their gate to the battleroom.

The members of toons C and D grabbed the first eight handholds in the ceiling of the corridor. Toons A, B, and E crouched on the floor. Ender hooked his feet into two handholds in the middle of the ceiling, so he was out of everyone’s way.

“Which way is the enemy’s door?” he hissed.

“Down!” they whispered back, and laughed.

“Flashers on.” The boxes in their hands glowed green. They waited for a few seconds more, and then the gray wall in front of them disappeared and the battleroom was visible.

Ender sized it up immediately. The familiar open grid of most early games, like the monkey bars at the park, with seven or eight boxes scattered through the grid. They called the boxes stars. There were enough of them, and in forward enough positions, that they were worth going for. Ender decided this in a second, and he hissed, “Spread to near stars. E hold!”

The four groups in the corners plunged through the forcefield at the doorway and fell down into the battleroom. Before the enemy even appeared through the opposite gate Ender’s army had spread from the door to the nearest stars.

Then the enemy soldiers came through the door. From their stance Ender knew they had been in a different gravity, and didn’t know enough to disorient themselves from it. They came through standing up, their entire bodies spread and defenseless.

“Kill ’em, E!” Ender hissed, and threw himself out the door knees first, with his flasher between his legs and firing. While Ender’s group flew across the room the rest of Dragon Army lay down a protecting fire, so that E group reached a forward position with only one boy frozen completely, though they had all lost the use of their legs—which didn’t impair them in the least. There was a lull as Ender and his opponent, Cam Carby, assessed their positions. Aside from Rabbit Army’s losses at the gate, there had been few casualties, and both armies were near full strength. But Cam had no originality—he was in a four-corner spread that any five-year-old in the teacher squads might have thought of. And Ender knew how to defeat it.

He called out, loudly, “E covers A, C down. B, D angle east wall.” Under E toon’s cover, B and D toons lunged away from their stars. While they were still exposed, A and C toons left their stars and drifted toward the near wall. They reached it together, and together jackknifed off the wall. At double the normal speed they appeared behind the enemy’s stars, and opened fire. In a few seconds the battle was over, with the enemy almost entirely frozen, including the commander, and the rest scattered to the corners. For the next five minutes, in squads of four, Dragon Army cleaned out the dark corners of the battleroom and shepherded the enemy into the center, where their bodies, frozen at impossible angles, jostled each other. Then Ender took three of his boys to the enemy gate and went through the formality of reversing the one-way field by simultaneously touching a Dragon Army helmet at each corner. Then Ender assembled his army in vertical files near the knot of frozen Rabbit Army soldiers.

Only three of Dragon Army’s soldiers were immobile. Their victory margin—38 to 0—was ridiculously high, and Ender began to laugh. Dragon Army joined him, laughing long and loud. They were still laughing when Lieutenant Anderson and Lieutenant Morris came in from the teachergate at the south end of the battleroom.

Lieutenant Anderson kept his face stiff and unsmiling, but Ender saw him wink as he held out his hand and offered the stiff, formal congratulations that were ritually given to the victor in the game.

Morris found Cam Carby and unfroze him, and the thirteen-year-old came and presented himself to Ender, who laughed without malice and held out his hand. Cam graciously took Ender’s hand and bowed his head over it. It was that or be flashed again.

Lieutenant Anderson dismissed Dragon Army, and they silently left the battleroom through the enemy’s door—again part of the ritual. A light was blinking on the north side of the square door, indicating where the gravity was in that corridor. Ender, leading his soldiers, changed his orientation and went through the forcefield and into gravity on his feet. His army followed him at a brisk run back to the workroom. When they got there they formed up into squads, and Ender hung in the air, watching them.

“Good first battle,” he said, which was excuse enough for a cheer, which he quieted. “Dragon Army did all right against Rabbits. But the enemy isn’t always going to be that bad. And if that had been a good army we would have been smashed. We still would have won, but we would have been smashed. Now let me see B and D toons out here. Your takeoff from the stars was way too slow. If Rabbit Army knew how to aim a flasher, you all would have been frozen solid before A and C even got to the wall.”

They worked out for the rest of the day.

That night Ender went for the first time to the commanders’ mess hall. No one was allowed there until he had won at least one battle, and Ender was the youngest commander ever to make it. There was no great stir when he came in. But when some of the other boys saw the Dragon on his breast pocket, they stared at him openly, and by the time he got his tray and sat at an empty table, the entire room was silent, with the other commanders watching him. Intensely self-conscious, Ender wondered how they all knew, and why they all looked so hostile.

Then he looked above the door he had just come through. There was a huge Scoreboard across the entire wall. It showed the win/loss record for the commander of every army; that day’s battles were lit in red. Only four of them. The other three winners had barely made it—the best of them had only two men whole and eleven mobile at the end of the game. Dragon Army’s score of thirty-eight mobile was embarrassingly better.

Other new commanders had been admitted to the commanders’ mess hall with cheers and congratulations. Other new commanders hadn’t won thirty-eight to zero.

Ender looked for Rabbit Army on the Scoreboard. He was surprised to find that Cam Carby’s score to date was eight wins and three losses. Was he that good? Or had he only fought against inferior armies? Whichever, there was still a zero in Cam’s mobile and whole columns, and Ender looked down from the Scoreboard grinning. No one smiled back, and Ender knew that they were afraid of him, which meant that they would hate him, which meant that anyone who went into battle against Dragon Army would be scared and angry and less competent. Ender looked for Cam Carby in the crowd, and found him not too far away. He stared at Carby until one of the other boys nudged the Rabbit commander and pointed to Ender. Ender smiled again and waved slightly. Carby turned red, and Ender, satisfied, leaned over his dinner and began to eat.

At the end of the week Dragon Army had fought seven battles in seven days. The score stood 7 wins and 0 losses. Ender had never had more than five boys frozen in any game. It was no longer possible for the other commanders to ignore Ender. A few of them sat with him and quietly conversed about game strategies that Ender’s opponents had used. Other much larger groups were talking with the commanders that Ender had defeated, trying to find out what Ender had done to beat them.

In the middle of the meal the teacher door opened and the groups fell silent as Lieutenant Anderson stepped in and looked over the group. When he located Ender he strode quickly across the room and whispered in Ender’s ear. Ender nodded, finished his glass of water, and left with the lieutenant. On the way out, Anderson handed a slip of paper to one of the older boys. The room became very noisy with conversation as Anderson and Ender left.

Ender was escorted down corridors he had never seen before. They didn’t have the blue glow of the soldier corridors. Most were wood paneled, and the floors were carpeted. The doors were wood, with nameplates on them, and they stopped at one that said “Captain Graff, supervisor.” Anderson knocked softly, and a low voice said, “Come in.”

They went in. Captain Graff was seated behind a desk, his hands folded across his potbelly. He nodded, and Anderson sat. Ender also sat down. Graff cleared his throat and spoke.

“Seven days since your first battle, Ender.”

Ender did not reply.

“Won seven battles, one every day.”

Ender nodded.

“Scores unusually high, too.”

Ender blinked.

“Why?” Graff asked him.

Ender glanced at Anderson, and then spoke to the captain behind the desk. “Two new tactics, sir. Legs doubled up as a shield, so that a flash doesn’t immobilize. Jackknife takeoffs from the walls. Superior strategy, as Lieutenant Anderson taught, think places, not spaces. Five toons of eight instead of four of ten. Incompetent opponents. Excellent toon leaders, good soldiers.”

Graff looked at Ender without expression. Waiting for what, Ender wondered. Lieutenant Anderson spoke up.

“Ender, what’s the condition of your army?”

Do they want me to ask for relief? Not a chance, he decided. “A little tired, in peak condition, morale high, learning fast. Anxious for the next battle.”

Anderson looked at Graff. Graff shrugged slightly and turned to Ender.

“Is there anything you want to know?”

Ender held his hands loosely in his lap. “When are you going to put us up against a good army?”

Graffs laughter rang in the room, and when it stopped, Graff handed a piece of paper to Ender. “Now,” the captain said, and Ender read the paper: “Dragon Army against Leopard Army, Ender Wiggins and Pol Slattery, 2000.”

Ender looked up at Captain Graff. “That’s ten minutes from now, sir.”

Graff smiled. “Better hurry, then, boy.”

As Ender left he realized Pol Slattery was the boy who had been handed his orders as Ender left the mess hall.

He got to his army five minutes later. Three toon leaders were already undressed and lying naked on their beds. He sent them all flying down the corridors to rouse their toons, and gathered up their suits himself. When all his boys were assembled in the corridor, most of them still getting dressed, Ender spoke to them.

“This one’s hot and there’s no time. We’ll be late to the door, and the enemy’ll be deployed right outside our gate. Ambush, and I’ve never heard of it happening before. So we’ll take our time at the door. A and B toons, keep your belts loose, and give your flashers to the leaders and seconds of the other toons.”

Puzzled, his soldiers complied. By then all were dressed, and Ender led them at a trot to the gate. When they reached it the forcefield was already on one-way, and some of his soldiers were panting. They had had one battle that day and a full workout. They were tired.

Ender stopped at the entrance and looked at the placement of the enemy soldiers. Some of them were grouped not more than twenty feet out from the gate. There was no grid, there were no stars. A big empty space. Where were most of the enemy soldiers? There should have been thirty more.

“They’re flat against this wall,” Ender said, “where we can’t see them.”

He took A and B toons and made them kneel, their hands on their hips. Then he flashed them, so that their bodies were frozen rigid.

“You’re shields,” Ender said, and then had boys from C and D kneel on their legs and hook both arms under the frozen boys’ belts. Each boy was holding two flashers. Then Ender and the members of E toon picked up the duos, three at a time, and threw them out the door.

Of course, the enemy opened fire immediately. But they mainly hit the boys who were already flashed, and in a few moments pandemonium broke out in the battleroom. All the soldiers of Leopard Army were easy targets as they lay pressed flat against the wall or floated, unprotected, in the middle of the battleroom; and Ender’s soldiers, armed with two flashers each, carved them up easily. Pol Slattery reacted quickly, ordering his men away from the wall, but not quickly enough—only a few were able to move, and they were flashed before they could get a quarter of the way across the battleroom.

When the battle was over Dragon Army had only twelve boys whole, the lowest score they had ever had. But Ender was satisfied. And during the ritual of surrender Pol Slattery broke form by shaking hands and asking, “Why did you wait so long getting out of the gate?”

Ender glanced at Anderson, who was floating nearby. “I was informed late,” he said. “It was an ambush.”

Slattery grinned, and gripped Ender’s hand again. “Good game.”

Ender didn’t smile at Anderson this time. He knew that now the games would be arranged against him, to even up the odds. He didn’t like it.

It was 2150, nearly time for lights out, when Ender knocked at the door of the room shared by Bean and three other soldiers. One of the others opened the door, then stepped back and held it wide. Ender stood for a moment, then asked if he could come in. They answered, of course, of course, come in, and he walked to the upper bunk, where Bean had set down his book and was leaning on one elbow to look at Ender.

“Bean, can you give me twenty minutes?”

“Near lights out,” Bean answered.

“My room,” Ender answered. “I’ll cover for you.”

Bean sat up and slid off his bed. Together he and Ender padded silently down the corridor to Ender’s room. Ender entered first, and Ender closed the door behind them.

“Sit down,” Ender said, and they both sat on the edge of the bed, looking at each other.

“Remember four weeks ago, Bean? When you told me to make you a toon leader?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve made five toon leaders since then, haven’t I? And none of them was you.”

Bean looked at him calmly.

“Was I right?” Ender asked.

“Yes, sir,” Bean answered.

Ender nodded. “How have you done in these battles?”

Bean cocked his head to one side. “I’ve never been immobilized, sir, and I’ve immobilized forty-three of the enemy. I’ve obeyed orders quickly, and I’ve commanded a squad in mop-up and never lost a soldier.”

“Then you’ll understand this.” Ender paused, then decided to back up and say something else first.

“You know you’re early, Bean, by a good half year. I was, too, and I’ve been made a commander six months early. Now they’ve put me into battles after only three weeks of training with my army. They’ve given me eight battles in seven days. I’ve already had more battles than boys who were made commander four months ago. I’ve won more battles than many who’ve been commanders for a year. And then tonight. You know what happened tonight.”

Bean nodded. “They told you late.”

“I don’t know what the teachers are doing. But my army is getting tired, and I’m getting tired, and now they’re changing the rules of the game. You see, Bean, I’ve looked in the old charts. No one has ever destroyed so many enemies and kept so many of his own soldiers whole in the history of the game. I’m unique—and I’m getting unique treatment.”

Bean smiled. “You’re the best, Ender.”

Ender shook his head. “Maybe. But it was no accident that I got the soldiers I got. My worst soldier could be a toon leader in another army. I’ve got the best. They’ve loaded things my way—but now they’re loading it all against me. I don’t know why. But I know I have to be ready for it. I need your help.”

“Why mine?”

“Because even though there are some better soldiers than you in Dragon Army—not many, but some—there’s nobody who can think better and faster than you.” Bean said nothing. They both knew it was true.

Ender continued, “I need to be ready, but I can’t retrain the whole army. So I’m going to cut every toon down by one, including you. With four others you’ll be a special squad under me. And you’ll learn to do some new things. Most of the time you’ll be in the regular toons just like you are now. But when I need you. See?”

Bean smiled and nodded. “That’s right, that’s good, can I pick them myself?”

“One from each toon except your own, and you can’t take any toon leaders.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Bean, I don’t know. I don’t know what they’ll throw at us. What would you do if suddenly our flashers didn’t work, and the enemy’s did? What would you do if we had to face two armies at once? The only thing I know is—there may be a game where we don’t even try for score. Where we just go for the enemy’s gate. That’s when the battle is technically won—four helmets at the corners of the gate. I want you ready to do that any time I call for it. Got it? You take them for two hours a day during regular workout. Then you and I and your soldiers, we’ll work at night after dinner.”

“We’ll get tired.”

“I have a feeling we don’t know what tired is.” Ender reached out and took Bean’s hand, and gripped it. “Even when it’s rigged against us, Bean. We’ll win.”

Bean left in silence and padded down the corridor.

Dragon Army wasn’t the only army working out after hours now. The other commanders had finally realized they had some catching up to do. From early morning to lights out soldiers all over Training and Command Center, none of them over fourteen years old, were learning to jackknife off walls and use each other as living shields.

But while other commanders mastered the techniques that Ender had used to defeat them, Ender and Bean worked on solutions to problems that had never come up.

There were still battles every day, but for a while they were normal, with grids and stars and sudden plunges through the gate. And after the battles, Ender and Bean and four other soldiers would leave the main group and practice strange maneuvers. Attacks without flashers, using feet to physically disarm or disorient an enemy. Using four frozen soldiers to reverse the enemy’s gate in less than two seconds. And one day Bean came to workout with a 300-meter cord.

“What’s that for?”

“I don’t know yet.” Absently Bean spun one end of the cord. It wasn’t more than an eighth of an inch thick, but it could have lifted ten adults without breaking.

“Where did you get it?”

“Commissary. They asked what for. I said to practice tying knots.”

Bean tied a loop in the end of the rope and slid it over his shoulders.

“Here, you two, hang on to the wall here. Now don’t let go of the rope. Give me about fifty yards of slack.” They complied, and Bean moved about ten feet from them along the wall. As soon as he was sure they were ready, he jackknifed off the wall and flew straight out, fifty yards. Then the rope snapped taut. It was so fine that it was virtually invisible, but it was strong enough to force Bean to veer off at almost a right angle. It happened so suddenly that he had inscribed a perfect arc and hit the wall hard before most of the other soldiers knew what had happened. Bean did a perfect rebound and drifted quickly back to where Ender and the others waited for him.

Many of the soldiers in the five regular squads hadn’t noticed the rope, and were demanding to know how it was done. It was impossible to change direction that abruptly in nullo. Bean just laughed.

“Wait till the next game without a grid! They’ll never know what hit them.”

They never did. The next game was only two hours later, but Bean and two others had become pretty good at aiming and shooting while they flew at ridiculous speeds at the end of the rope. The slip of paper was delivered, and Dragon Army trotted off to the gate, to battle with Griffin Army. Bean coiled the rope all the way.

When the gate opened, all they could see was a large brown star only fifteen feet away, completely blocking their view of the enemy’s gate.

Ender didn’t pause. “Bean, give yourself fifty feet of rope and go around the star.” Bean and his four soldiers dropped through the gate and in a moment Bean was launched sideways away from the star. The rope snapped taut, and Bean flew forward. As the rope was stopped by each edge of the star in turn, his arc became tighter and his speed greater, until when he hit the wall only a few feet away from the gate he was barely able to control his rebound to end up behind the star. But he immediately moved all his arms and legs so that those waiting inside the gate would know that the enemy hadn’t flashed him anywhere.

Ender dropped through the gate, and Bean quickly told him how Griffin Army was situated. “They’ve got two squares of stars, all the way around the gate. All their soldiers are under cover, and there’s no way to hit any of them until we’re clear to the bottom wall. Even with shields, we’d get there at half strength and we wouldn’t have a chance.”

“They moving?” Ender asked.

“Do they need to?”

“I would.” Ender thought for a moment. “This one’s tough. We’ll go for the gate, Bean.”

Griffin Army began to call out to them.

“Hey, is anybody there!”

“Wake up, there’s a war on!”

“We wanna join the picnic!”

They were still calling when Ender’s army came out from behind their star with a shield of fourteen frozen soldiers. William Bee, Griffin Army’s commander, waited patiently as the screen approached, his men waiting at the fringes of their stars for the moment when whatever was behind the screen became visible. About ten yards away the screen suddenly exploded as the soldiers behind it shoved the screen north. The momentum carried them south twice as fast, and at the same moment the rest of Dragon Army burst from behind their star at the opposite end of the room, firing rapidly.

William Bee’s boys joined battle immediately, of course, but William Bee was far more interested in what had been left behind when the shield disappeared. A formation of four frozen Dragon Army soldiers was moving headfirst toward the Griffin Army gate, held together by another frozen soldier whose feet and hands were hooked through their belts. A sixth soldier hung to his waist and trailed like the tail of a kite. Griffin Army was winning the battle easily, and William Bee concentrated on the formation as it approached the gate. Suddenly the soldier trailing in back moved—he wasn’t frozen at all! And even though William Bee flashed him immediately, the damage was done. The formation drifted to the Griffin Army gate, and their helmets touched all four corners simultaneously. A buzzer sounded, the gate reversed, and the frozen soldier in the middle was carried by momentum right through the gate. All the flashers stopped working, and the game was over.

The teachergate opened and Lieutenant Anderson came in. Anderson stopped himself with a slight movement of his hands when he reached the center of the battleroom. “Ender,” he called, breaking protocol. One of the frozen Dragon soldiers near the south wall tried to call through jaws that were clamped shut by the suit. Anderson drifted to him and unfroze him.

Ender was smiling.

“I beat you again, sir,” Ender said.

Anderson didn’t smile. “That’s nonsense, Ender,” Anderson said softly. “Your battle was with William Bee of Griffin Army.”

Ender raised an eyebrow.

“After that maneuver,” Anderson said, “the rules are being revised to require that all of the enemy’s soldiers must be immobilized before the gate can be reversed.”

“That’s all right,” Ender said. “It could only work once, anyway.” Anderson nodded, and was turning away when Ender added, “Is there going to be a new rule that armies be given equal positions to fight from?”

Anderson turned back around. “If you’re in one of the positions, Ender, you can hardly call them equal, whatever they are.”

William Bee counted carefully and wondered how in the world he had lost when not one of his soldiers had been flashed and only four of Ender’s soldiers were even mobile.

And that night as Ender came into the commanders’ mess hall, he was greeted with applause and cheers, and his table was crowded with respectful commanders, many of them two or three years older than he was. He was friendly, but while he ate he wondered what the teachers would do to him in his next battle. He didn’t need to worry. His next two battles were easy victories, and after that he never saw the battleroom again.

It was 2100 and Ender was a little irritated to hear someone knock at his door. His army was exhausted, and he had ordered them all to be in bed after 2030. The last two days had been regular battles, and Ender was expecting the worst in the morning.

It was Bean. He came in sheepishly, and saluted.

Ender returned his salute and snapped, “Bean, I wanted everybody in bed.”

Bean nodded but didn’t leave. Ender considered ordering him out. But as he looked at Bean it occurred to him for the first time in weeks just how young Bean was. He had turned eight a week before, and he was still small and—no, Ender thought, he wasn’t young. Nobody was young. Bean had been in battle, and with a whole army depending on him he had come through and won. And even though he was small, Ender could never think of him as young again.

Ender shrugged and Bean came over and sat on the edge of the bed. The younger boy looked at his hands for a while, and finally Ender grew impatient and asked, “Well, what is it?”

“I’m transferred. Got orders just a few minutes ago.”

Ender closed his eyes for a moment. “I knew they’d pull something new. Now they’re taking—where are you going?”

“Rabbit Army.”

“How can they put you under an idiot like Carn Carby!”

“Cam was graduated. Support squads.”

Ender looked up. “Well, who’s commanding Rabbit then?”

Bean held his hands out helplessly.

“Me,” he said.

Ender nodded, and then smiled. “Of course. After all, you’re only four years younger than the regular age.”

“It isn’t funny,” Bean said. “I don’t know what’s going on here. First all the changes in the game. And now this. I wasn’t the only one transferred, either, Ender. Ren, Peder, Brian, Wins, Younger. All commanders now.”

Ender stood up angrily and strode to the wall. “Every damn toon leader I’ve got!” he said, and whirled to face Bean. “If they’re going to break up my army, Bean, why did they bother making me a commander at all?”

Bean shook his head. “I don’t know. You’re the best, Ender. Nobody’s ever done what you’ve done. Nineteen battles in fifteen days, sir, and you won every one of them, no matter what they did to you.”

“And now you and the others are commanders. You know every trick I’ve got, I trained you, and who am I supposed to replace you with? Are they going to stick me with six greenohs?”

“It stinks, Ender, but you know that if they gave you five crippled midgets and armed you with a roll of toilet paper you’d win.”

They both laughed, and then they noticed that the door was open.

Lieutenant Anderson stepped in. He was followed by Captain Graff.

“Ender Wiggins,” Graff said, holding his hands across his stomach.

“Yes, sir,” Ender answered.

“Orders.”

Anderson extended a slip of paper. Ender read it quickly, then crumpled it, still looking at the air where the paper had been. After a few moments he asked, “Can I tell my army?”

“They’ll find out,” Graff answered. “It’s better not to talk to them after orders. It makes it easier.”

“For you or for me?” Ender asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned quickly to Bean, took his hand for a moment, and then headed for the door.

“Wait,” Bean said. “Where are you going? Tactical or Support School?”

“Command School,” Ender answered, and then he was gone and Anderson closed the door.

Command School, Bean thought. Nobody went to Command School until they had gone through three years of Tactical. But then, nobody went to Tactical until they had been through at least five years of Battle School. Ender had only had three.

The system was breaking up. No doubt about it, Bean thought. Either somebody at the top was going crazy, or something was going wrong with the war—the real war, the one they were training to fight in. Why else would they break down the training system, advance somebody—even somebody as good as Ender—straight to Command School? Why else would they ever have an eight-year-old greenoh like Bean command an army?

Bean wondered about it for a long time, and then he finally lay down on Ender’s bed and realized that he’d never see Ender again, probably. For some reason that made him want to cry. But he didn’t cry, of course. Training in the preschools had taught him how to force down emotions like that. He remembered how his first teacher, when he was three, would have been upset to see his lip quivering and his eyes full of tears. Bean went through the relaxing routine until he didn’t feel like crying anymore. Then he drifted off to sleep. His hand was near his mouth. It lay on his pillow hesitantly, as if Bean couldn’t decide whether to bite his nails or suck on his fingertips. His forehead was creased and furrowed. His breathing was quick and light. He was a soldier, and if anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he wouldn’t have known what they meant.

There’s a war on, they said, and that was excuse enough for all the hurry in the world. They said it like a password and flashed a little card at every ticket counter and customs check and guard station. It got them to the head of every line.

Ender Wiggins was rushed from place to place so quickly he had no time to examine anything. But he did see trees for the first time. He saw men who were not in uniform. He saw women. He saw strange animals that didn’t speak, but that followed docilely behind women and small children. He saw suitcases and conveyor belts and signs that said words he had never heard of. He would have asked someone what the words meant, except that purpose and authority surrounded him in the persons of four very high officers who never spoke to each other and never spoke to him.

Ender Wiggins was a stranger to the world he was being trained to save. He did not remember ever leaving Battle School before. His earliest memories were of childish war games under the direction of a teacher, of meals with other boys in the gray and green uniforms of the armed forces of his world. He did not know that the gray represented the sky and the green represented the great forests of his planet. All he knew of the world was from vague references to “outside.”

And before he could make any sense of the strange world he was seeing for the first time, they enclosed him again within the shell of the military, where nobody had to say There’s a war on anymore because no one within the shell of the military forgot it for a single instant of a single day.

They put him in a spaceship and launched him to a large artificial satellite that circled the world.

This space station was called Command School. It held the ansible.

On his first day Ender Wiggins was taught about the ansible and what it meant to warfare. It meant that even though the starships of today’s battles were launched a hundred years ago, the commanders of the starships were men of today, who used the ansible to send messages to the computers and the few men on each ship. The ansible sent words as they were spoken, orders as they were made. Battleplans as they were fought. Light was a pedestrian.

For two months Ender Wiggins didn’t meet a single person. They came to him namelessly, taught him what they knew, and left him to other teachers. He had no time to miss his friends at Battle School. He only had time to learn how to operate the simulator, which flashed battle patterns around him as if he were in a starship at the center of the battle. How to command mock ships in mock battles by manipulating the keys on the simulator and speaking words into the ansible. How to recognize instantly every enemy ship and the weapons it carried by the pattern that the simulator showed. How to transfer all that he learned in the nullo battles at Battle School to the starship battles at Command School.

He had thought the game was taken seriously before. Here they hurried him through every step, were angry and worried beyond reason every time he forgot something or made a mistake. But he worked as he had always worked, and learned as he had always learned. After a while he didn’t make any more mistakes. He used the simulator as if it were a part of himself. Then they stopped being worried and gave him a teacher.

Maezr Rackham was sitting cross-legged on the floor when Ender awoke. He said nothing as Ender got up and showered and dressed, and Ender did not bother to ask him anything. He had long since learned that when something unusual was going on, he would often find out more information faster by waiting than by asking.

Maezr still hadn’t spoken when Ender was ready and went to the door to leave the room. The door didn’t open. Ender turned to face the man sitting on the floor. Maezr was at least forty, which made him the oldest man Ender had ever seen close up. He had a day’s growth of black and white whiskers that grizzled his face only slightly less than his close-cut hair. His face sagged a little and his eyes were surrounded by creases and lines. He looked at Ender without interest.

Ender turned back to the door and tried again to open it.

“All right,” he said, giving up. “Why’s the door locked?”

Maezr continued to look at him blankly.

Ender became impatient. “I’m going to be late. If I’m not supposed to be there until later, then tell me so I can go back to bed.” No answer. “Is it a guessing game?” Ender asked. No answer. Ender decided that maybe the man was trying to make him angry, so he went through a relaxing exercise as he leaned on the door, and soon he was calm again. Maezr didn’t take his eyes off Ender.

For the next two hours the silence endured, Maezr watching Ender constantly, Ender trying to pretend he didn’t notice the old man. The boy became more and more nervous, and finally ended up walking from one end of the room to the other in a sporadic pattern.

He walked by Maezr as he had several times before, and Maezr’s hand shot out and pushed Ender’s left leg into his right in the middle of a step. Ender fell flat on the floor.

He leaped to his feet immediately, furious. He found Maezr sitting calmly, cross-legged, as if he had never moved. Ender stood poised to fight. But the other’s immobility made it impossible for Ender to attack, and he found himself wondering if he had only imagined the old man’s hand tripping him up.

The pacing continued for another hour, with Ender Wiggins trying the door every now and then. At last he gave up and took off his uniform and walked to his bed.

As he leaned over to pull the covers back, he felt a hand jab roughly between his thighs and another hand grab his hair. In a moment he had been turned upside down. His face and shoulders were being pressed into the floor by the old man’s knee, while his back was excruciatingly bent and his legs were pinioned by Maezr’s arm. Ender was helpless to use his arms, and he couldn’t bend his back to gain slack so he could use his legs. In less than two seconds the old man had completely defeated Ender Wiggins.

“All right,” Ender gasped. “You win.”

Maezr’s knee thrust painfully downward.

“Since when,” Maezr asked in a soft, rasping voice, “do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?”

Ender remained silent.

“I surprised you once, Ender Wiggins. Why didn’t you destroy me immediately afterward? Just because I looked peaceful? You turned your back on me. Stupid. You have learned nothing. You have never had a teacher.”

Ender was angry now. “I’ve had too many damned teachers, how was I supposed to know you’d turn out to be a—” Ender hunted for a word. Maezr supplied one.

“An enemy, Ender Wiggins,” Maezr whispered. “I am your enemy, the first one you’ve ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy, Ender Wiggins. No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. I am your enemy, from now on. From now on I am your teacher.”

Then Maezr let Ender’s legs fall to the floor. Because the old man still held Ender’s head to the floor, the boy couldn’t use his arms to compensate, and his legs hit the plastic surface with a loud crack and a sickening pain that made Ender wince. Then Maezr stood and let Ender rise.

Slowly the boy pulled his legs under him, with a faint groan of pain, and he knelt on all fours for a moment, recovering. Then his right arm flashed out. Maezr quickly danced back and Ender’s hand closed on air as his teacher’s foot shot forward to catch Ender on the chin.

Ender’s chin wasn’t there. He was lying flat on his back, spinning on the floor, and during the moment that Maezr was off balance from his kick Ender’s feet smashed into Maezr’s other leg. The old man fell on the ground in a heap.

What seemed to be a heap was really a hornet’s nest. Ender couldn’t find an arm or a leg that held still long enough to be grabbed, and in the meantime blows were landing on his back and arms. Ender was smaller—he couldn’t reach past the old man’s flailing limbs.

So he leaped back out of the way and stood poised near the door.

The old man stopped thrashing about and sat up, cross-legged again, laughing. “Better, this time, boy. But slow. You will have to be better with a fleet than you are with your body or no one will be safe with you in command. Lesson learned?”

Ender nodded slowly.

Maezr smiled. “Good. Then we’ll never have such a battle again. All the rest with the simulator. I will program your battles, I will devise the strategy of your enemy, and you will learn to be quick and discover what tricks the enemy has for you. Remember, boy. From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.”

Then Maezr’s face became serious again. “You will be about to lose, Ender, but you will win. You will learn to defeat the enemy. He will teach you how.”

Maezr got up and walked toward the door. Ender stepped back out of the way. As the old man touched the handle of the door, Ender leaped into the air and kicked Maezr in the small of the back with both feet. He hit hard enough that he rebounded onto his feet, as Maezr cried out and collapsed on the floor.

Maezr got up slowly, holding on to the door handle, his face contorted with pain. He seemed disabled, but Ender didn’t trust him. He waited warily. And yet in spite of his suspicion he was caught off guard by Maezr’s speed. In a moment he found himself on the floor near the opposite wall, his nose and lip bleeding where his face had hit the bed. He was able to turn enough to see Maezr open the door and leave. The old man was limping and walking slowly.

Ender smiled in spite of the pain, then rolled over onto his back and laughed until his mouth filled with blood and he started to gag. Then he got up and painfully made his way to the bed. He lay down and in a few minutes a medic came and took care of his injuries.

As the drug had its effect and Ender drifted off to sleep he remembered the way Maezr limped out of his room and laughed again. He was still laughing softly as his mind went blank and the medic pulled the blanket over him and snapped off the light. He slept until pain woke him in the morning. He dreamed of defeating Maezr.

The next day Ender went to the simulator room with his nose bandaged and his lip still puffy. Maezr was not there. Instead, a captain who had worked with him before showed him an addition that had been made. The captain pointed to a tube with a loop at one end. “Radio. Primitive, I know, but it loops over your ear and we tuck the other end into your mouth like this.”

“Watch it,” Ender said as the captain pushed the end of the tube into his swollen lip.

“Sorry. Now you just talk.”

“Good. Who to?”

The captain smiled. “Ask and see.”

Ender shrugged and turned to the simulator. As he did a voice reverberated through his skull. It was too loud for him to understand, and he ripped the radio off his ear.

“What are you trying to do, make me deaf?”

The captain shook his head and turned a dial on a small box on a nearby table. Ender put the radio back on.

“Commander,” the radio said in a familiar voice.

Ender answered, “Yes.”

“Instructions, sir?”

The voice was definitely familiar. “Bean?” Ender asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Bean, this is Ender.”

Silence. And then a burst of laughter from the other side. Then six or seven more voices laughing, and Ender waited for silence to return. When it did, he asked, “Who else?”

A few voices spoke at once, but Bean drowned them out. “Me, I’m Bean, and Peder, Wins, Younger, Lee, and Vlad.”

Ender thought for a moment. Then he asked what the hell was going on. They laughed again.

“They can’t break up the group,” Bean said. “We were commanders for maybe two weeks, and here we are at Command School, training with the simulator, and all of a sudden they told us we were going to form a fleet with a new commander. And that’s you.”

Ender smiled. “Are you boys any good?”

“If we aren’t, you’ll let us know.”

Ender chuckled a little. “Might work out. A fleet.”

For the next ten days Ender trained his toon leaders until they could maneuver their ships like precision dancers. It was like being back in the battleroom again, except that now Ender could always see everything, and could speak to his toon leaders and change their orders at any time.

One day as Ender sat down at the control board and switched on the simulator, harsh green lights appeared in the space—the enemy.

“This is it,” Ender said. “X, Y, bullet, C, D, reserve screen, E, south loop, Bean, angle north.”

The enemy was grouped in a globe, and outnumbered Ender two to one. Half of Ender’s force was grouped in a tight, bulletlike formation, with the rest in a flat circular screen—except for a tiny force under Bean that moved off the simulator, heading behind the enemy’s formation. Ender quickly learned the enemy’s strategy: whenever Ender’s bullet formation came close, the enemy would give way, hoping to draw Ender inside the globe where he would be surrounded. So Ender obligingly fell into the trap, bringing his bullet to the center of the globe.

The enemy began to contract slowly, not wanting to come within range until all their weapons could be brought to bear at once. Then Ender began to work in earnest. His reserve screen approached the outside of the globe, and the enemy began to concentrate his forces there. Then Bean’s force appeared on the opposite side, and the enemy again deployed ships on that side.

Which left most of the globe only thinly defended. Ender’s bullet attacked, and since at the point of attack it outnumbered the enemy overwhelmingly, he tore a hole in the formation. The enemy reacted to try to plug the gap, but in the confusion the reserve force and Bean’s small force attacked simultaneously, while the bullet moved to another part of the globe. In a few more minutes the formation was shattered, most of the enemy ships destroyed, and the few survivors rushing away as fast as they could go.

Ender switched the simulator off. All the lights faded. Maezr was standing beside Ender, his hands in his pockets, his body tense. Ender looked up at him.

“I thought you said the enemy would be smart,” Ender said.

Maezr’s face remained expressionless. “What did you learn?”

“I learned that a sphere only works if your enemy’s a fool. He had his forces so spread out that I outnumbered him whenever I engaged him.”

“And?”

“And,” Ender said, “you can’t stay committed to one pattern. It makes you too easy to predict.”

“Is that all?” Maezr asked quietly.

Ender took off his radio. “The enemy could have defeated me by breaking the sphere earlier.”

Maezr nodded. “You had an unfair advantage.”

Ender looked up at him coldly. “I was outnumbered two to one.”

Maezr shook his head. “You have the ansible. The enemy doesn’t. We include that in the mock battles. Their messages travel at the speed of light.”

Ender glanced toward the simulator. “Is there enough space to make a difference?”

“Don’t you know?” Maezr asked. “None of the ships was ever closer than thirty thousand kilometers to any other.”

Ender tried to figure the size of the enemy’s sphere. Astronomy was beyond him. But now his curiosity was stirred.

“What kind of weapons are on those ships? To be able to strike so fast?”

Maezr shook his head. “The science is too much for you. You’d have to study many more years than you’ve lived to understand even the basics. All you need to know is that the weapons work.”

“Why do we have to come so close to be in range?”

“The ships are all protected by forcefields. A certain distance away the weapons are weaker and can’t get through. Closer in the weapons are stronger than the shields. But the computers take care of all that. They’re constantly firing in any direction that won’t hurt one of our ships. The computers pick targets, aim; they do all the detail work. You just tell them when and get them in a position to win. All right?”

“No.” Ender twisted the tube of the radio around his fingers. “I have to know how the weapons work.”

“I told you, it would take—”

“I can’t command a fleet—not even on the simulator—unless I know.” Ender waited a moment, then added, “Just the rough idea.”

Maezr stood up and walked a few steps away. “All right, Ender. It won’t make any sense, but I’ll try. As simply as I can.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “It’s this way, Ender. Everything is made up of atoms, little particles so small you can’t see them with your eyes. These atoms, there are only a few different types, and they’re all made up of even smaller particles that are pretty much the same. These atoms can be broken, so that they stop being atoms. So that this metal doesn’t hold together anymore. Or the plastic floor. Or your body. Or even the air. They just seem to disappear, if you break the atoms. All that’s left is the pieces. And they fly around and break more atoms. The weapons on the ships set up an area where it’s impossible for atoms of anything to stay together. They all break down. So things in that area—they disappear.”

Ender nodded. “You’re right, I don’t understand it. Can it be blocked?”

“No. But it gets wider and weaker the farther it goes from the ship, so that after a while a forcefield will block it. OK? And to make it strong at all, it has to be focused, so that a ship can only fire effectively in maybe three or four directions at once.”

Ender nodded again, but he didn’t really understand, not well enough. “If the pieces of the broken atoms go breaking more atoms, why doesn’t it just make everything disappear?”

“Space. Those thousands of kilometers between the ships, they’re empty. Almost no atoms. The pieces don’t hit anything, and when they finally do hit something, they’re so spread out they can’t do any harm.” Maezr cocked his head quizzically. “Anything else you need to know?”

“Do the weapons on the ships—do they work against anything besides ships?”

Maezr moved in close to Ender and said firmly, “We only use them against ships. Never anything else. If we used them against anything else, the enemy would use them against us. Got it?”

Maezr walked away, and was nearly out the door when Ender called to him.

“I don’t know your name yet,” Ender said blandly.

“Maezr Rackham.”

“Maezr Rackham,” Ender said, “I defeated you.”

Maezr laughed.

“Ender, you weren’t fighting me today,” he said. “You were fighting the stupidest computer in the Command School, set on a ten-year-old program. You don’t think I’d use a sphere, do you?” He shook his head. “Ender, my dear little fellow, when you fight me you’ll know it. Because you’ll lose.” And Maezr left the room.

Ender still practiced ten hours a day with his toon leaders. He never saw them, though, only heard their voices on the radio. Battles came every two or three days. The enemy had something new every time, something harder—but Ender coped with it. And won every time. And after every battle Maezr would point out mistakes and show Ender that he had really lost. Maezr only let Ender finish so that he would learn to handle the end of the game.

Until finally Maezr came in and solemnly shook Ender’s hand and said, “That, boy, was a good battle.”

Because the praise was so long in coming, it pleased Ender more than praise had ever pleased him before. And because it was so condescending, he resented it.

“So from now on,” Maezr said, “we can give you hard ones.”

From then on Ender’s life was a slow nervous breakdown.

He began fighting two battles a day, with problems that steadily grew more difficult. He had been trained in nothing but the game all his life, but now the game began to consume him. He woke in the morning with new strategies for the simulator and went fitfully to sleep at night with the mistakes of the day preying on him. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night crying for a reason he didn’t remember. Sometimes he woke with his knuckles bloody from biting them. But every day he went impassively to the simulator and drilled his toon leaders until the battles, and drilled his toon leaders after the battles, and endured and studied the harsh criticism that Maezr Rackham piled on him. He noted that Rackham perversely criticized him more after his hardest battles. He noted that every time he thought of a new strategy the enemy was using it within a few days. And he noted that while his fleet always stayed the same size, the enemy increased in numbers every day.

He asked his teacher.

“We are showing you what it will be like when you really command. The ratios of enemy to us.”

“Why does the enemy always outnumber us?”

Maezr bowed his gray head for a moment, as if deciding whether to answer. Finally he looked up and reached out his hand and touched Ender on the shoulder. “I will tell you, even though the information is secret. You see, the enemy attacked us first. He had good reason to attack us, but that is a matter for politicians, and whether the fault was ours or his, we could not let him win. So when the enemy came to our worlds, we fought back, hard, and spent the finest of our young men in the fleets. But we won, and the enemy retreated.”

Maezr smiled ruefully. “But the enemy was not through, boy. The enemy would never be through. They came again, with more numbers, and it was harder to beat them. And another generation of young men was spent. Only a few survived. So we came up with a plan—the big men came up with the plan. We knew that we had to destroy the enemy once and for all, totally, eliminate his ability to make war against us. To do that we had to go to his home worlds—his home world, really, since the enemy’s empire is all tied to his capital world.”

“And so?” Ender asked.

“And so we made a fleet. We made more ships than the enemy ever had. We made a hundred ships for every ship he had sent against us. And we launched them against his twenty-eight worlds. They started leaving a hundred years ago. And they carried on them the ansible, and only a few men. So that someday a commander could sit on a planet somewhere far from the battle and command the fleet. So that our best minds would not be destroyed by the enemy.”

Ender’s question had still not been answered. “Why do they outnumber us?”

Maezr laughed. “Because it took a hundred years for our ships to get there. They’ve had a hundred years to prepare for us. They’d be fools, don’t you think, boy, if they waited in old tugboats to defend their harbors. They have new ships, great ships, hundreds of ships. All we have is the ansible, that and the fact that they have to put a commander with every fleet, and when they lose—and they will lose—they lose one of their best minds every time.”

Ender started to ask another question.

“No more, Ender Wiggins. I’ve told you more than you ought to know as it is.”

Ender stood angrily and turned away. “I have a right to know. Do you think this can go on forever, pushing me through one school and another and never telling me what my life is for? You use me and the others as a tool, someday we’ll command your ships, someday maybe we’ll save your lives, but I’m not a computer, and I have to know!”

“Ask me a question, then, boy,” Maezr said, “and if I can answer, I will.”

“If you use your best minds to command the fleets, and you never lose any, then what do you need me for? Who am I replacing, if they’re all still there?”

Maezr shook his head. “I can’t tell you the answer to that, Ender. Be content that we will need you, soon. It’s late. Go to bed. You have a battle in the morning.”

Ender walked out of the simulator room. But when Maezr left by the same door a few moments later, the boy was waiting in the hall.

“All right, boy,” Maezr said impatiently, “what is it? I don’t have all night and you need to sleep.”

Ender wasn’t sure what his question was, but Maezr waited. Finally Ender asked softly, “Do they live?”

“Does who live?”

“The other commanders. The ones now. And before me.”

Maezr snorted. “Live. Of course they live. He wonders if they live.” Still chuckling, the old man walked off down the hall. Ender stood in the corridor for a while, but at last he was tired and he went off to bed. They live, he thought. They live, but he can’t tell me what happens to them.

That night Ender didn’t wake up crying. But he did wake up with blood on his hands.

Months wore on with battles every day, until at last Ender settled into the routine of the destruction of himself. He slept less every night, dreamed more, and he began to have terrible pains in his stomach. They put him on a very bland diet, but soon he didn’t even have an appetite for that. “Eat,” Maezr said, and Ender would mechanically put food in his mouth. But if nobody told him to eat he didn’t eat.

One day as he was drilling his toon leaders the room went black and he woke up on the floor with his face bloody where he had hit the controls.

They put him to bed then, and for three days he was very ill. He remembered seeing faces in his dreams, but they weren’t real faces, and he knew it even while he thought he saw them. He thought he saw Bean sometimes, and sometimes he thought he saw Lieutenant Anderson and Captain Graff. And then he woke up and it was only his enemy, Maezr Rackham.

“I’m awake,” he said to Maezr.

“So I see,” Maezr answered. “Took you long enough. You have a battle today.”

So Ender got up and fought the battle and he won it. But there was no second battle that day, and they let him go to bed earlier. His hands were shaking as he undressed.

During the night he thought he felt hands touching him gently, and he dreamed he heard voices saying, “How long can he go on?”

“Long enough.”

“So soon?”

“In a few days, then he’s through.”

“How will he do?”

“Fine. Even today, he was better than ever.”

Ender recognized the last voice as Maezr Rackham’s. He resented Rackham’s intruding even in his sleep.

He woke up and fought another battle and won.

Then he went to bed.

He woke up and won again.

And the next day was his last day in Command School, though he didn’t know it. He got up and went to the simulator for the battle.

Maezr was waiting for him. Ender walked slowly into the simulator room. His step was slightly shuffling, and he seemed tired and dull. Maezr frowned.

“Are you awake, boy?” If Ender had been alert, he would have cared more about the concern in his teacher’s voice. Instead, he simply went to the controls and sat down. Maezr spoke to him.

“Today’s game needs a little explanation, Ender Wiggins. Please turn around and pay strict attention.”

Ender turned around, and for the first time he noticed that there were people at the back of the room. He recognized Graff and Anderson from Battle School, and vaguely remembered a few of the men from Command School—teachers for a few hours at some time or another. But most of the people he didn’t know at all.

“Who are they?”

Maezr shook his head and answered, “Observers. Every now and then we let observers come in to watch the battle. If you don’t want them, we’ll send them out.”

Ender shrugged. Maezr began his explanation. “Today’s game, boy, has a new element. We’re staging this battle around a planet. This will complicate things in two ways. The planet isn’t large, on the scale we’re using, but the ansible can’t detect anything on the other side of it—so there’s a blind spot. Also, it’s against the rules to use weapons against the planet itself. All right?”

“Why, don’t the weapons work against planets?”

Maezr answered coldly, “There are rules of war, Ender, that apply even in training games.”

Ender shook his head slowly. “Can the planet attack?”

Maezr looked nonplussed for a moment, then smiled. “I guess you’ll have to find that one out, boy. And one more thing. Today, Ender, your opponent isn’t the computer. I am your enemy today, and today I won’t be letting you off so easily. Today is a battle to the end. And I’ll use any means I can to defeat you.”

Then Maezr was gone, and Ender expressionlessly led his toon leaders through maneuvers. Ender was doing well, of course, but several of the observers shook their heads, and Graff kept clasping and unclasping his hands, crossing and uncrossing his legs. Ender would be slow today, and today Ender couldn’t afford to be slow.

A warning buzzer sounded, and Ender cleared the simulator board, waiting for today’s game to appear. He felt muddled today, and wondered why people were there watching. Were they going to judge him today? Decide if he was good enough for something else? For another two years of grueling training, another two years of struggling to exceed his best? Ender was twelve. He felt very old. And as he waited for the game to appear, he wished he could simply lose it, lose the battle badly and completely so that they would remove him from the program, punish him however they wanted, he didn’t care, just so he could sleep.

Then the enemy formation appeared, and Ender’s weariness turned to desperation.

The enemy outnumbered him a thousand to one, the simulator glowed green with them, and Ender knew that he couldn’t win.

And the enemy was not stupid. There was no formation that Ender could study and attack. Instead the vast swarms of ships were constantly moving, constantly shifting from one momentary formation to another, so that a space that for one moment was empty was immediately filled with a formidable enemy force. And even though Ender’s fleet was the largest he had ever had, there was no place he could deploy it where he would outnumber the enemy long enough to accomplish anything.

And behind the enemy was the planet. The planet, which Maezr had warned him about. What difference did a planet make, when Ender couldn’t hope to get near it? Ender waited, waited for the flash of insight that would tell him what to do, how to destroy the enemy. And as he waited, he heard the observers behind him begin to shift in their seats, wondering what Ender was doing, what plan he would follow. And finally it was obvious to everyone that Ender didn’t know what to do, that there was nothing to do, and a few of the men at the back of the room made quiet little sounds in their throats.

Then Ender heard Bean’s voice in his ear. Bean chuckled and said, “Remember, the enemy’s gate is down.” A few of the other toon leaders laughed, and Ender thought back to the simple games he had played and won in Battle School. They had put him against hopeless odds there, too. And he had beaten them. And he’d be damned if he’d let Maezr Rackham beat him with a cheap trick like outnumbering him a thousand to one. He had won a game in Battle School by going for something the enemy didn’t expect, something against the rules—he had won by going against the enemy’s gate.

And the enemy’s gate was down.

Ender smiled, and realized that if he broke this rule they’d probably kick him out of school, and that way he’d win for sure: He would never have to play a game again.

He whispered into the microphone. His six commanders each took a part of the fleet and launched themselves against the enemy. They pursued erratic courses, darting off in one direction and then another. The enemy immediately stopped his aimless maneuvering and began to group around Ender’s six fleets.

Ender took off his microphone, leaned back in his chair, and watched. The observers murmured out loud, now. Ender was doing nothing—he had thrown the game away.

But a pattern began to emerge from the quick confrontations with the enemy. Ender’s six groups lost ships constantly as they brushed with each enemy force—but they never stopped for a fight, even when for a moment they could have won a small tactical victory. Instead they continued on their erratic course that led, eventually, down. Toward the enemy planet.

And because of their seemingly random course the enemy didn’t realize it until the same time that the observers did. By then it was too late, just as it had been too late for William Bee to stop Ender’s soldiers from activating the gate. More of Ender’s ships could be hit and destroyed, so that of the six fleets only two were able to get to the planet, and those were decimated. But those tiny groups did get through, and they opened fire on the planet.

Ender leaned forward now, anxious to see if his guess would pay off. He half expected a buzzer to sound and the game to be stopped, because he had broken the rule. But he was betting on the accuracy of the simulator. If it could simulate a planet, it could simulate what would happen to a planet under attack.

It did.

The weapons that blew up little ships didn’t blow up the entire planet at first. But they did cause terrible explosions. And on the planet there was no space to dissipate the chain reaction. On the planet the chain reaction found more and more fuel to feed it.

The planet’s surface seemed to be moving back and forth, but soon the surface gave way in an immense explosion that sent light flashing in all directions. It swallowed up Ender’s entire fleet. And then it reached the enemy ships.

The first simply vanished in the explosion. Then, as the explosion spread and became less bright, it was clear what happened to each ship. As the light reached them they flashed brightly for a moment and disappeared. They were all fuel for the fire of the planet.

It took more than three minutes for the explosion to reach the limits of the simulator, and by then it was much fainter. All the ships were gone, and if any had escaped before the explosion reached them, they were few and not worth worrying about. Where the planet had been there was nothing. The simulator was empty.

Ender had destroyed the enemy by sacrificing his entire fleet and breaking the rule against destroying the enemy planet. He wasn’t sure whether to feel triumphant at his victory or defiant at the rebuke he was certain would come. So instead he felt nothing. He was tired. He wanted to go to bed and sleep.

He switched off the simulator, and finally heard the noise behind him.

There were no longer two rows of dignified military observers. Instead there was chaos. Some of them were slapping each other on the back; some of them were bowed, head in hands; others were openly weeping. Captain Graff detached himself from the group and came to Ender. Tears streamed down his face, but he was smiling. He reached out his arms, and to Ender’s surprise he embraced the boy, held him tightly, and whispered, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Ender.”

Soon all the observers were gathered around the bewildered child, thanking him and cheering him and patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand. Ender tried to make sense of what they were saying. Had he passed the test after all? Why did it matter so much to them?

Then the crowd parted and Maezr Rackham walked through. He came straight up to Ender Wiggins and held out his hand.

“You made the hard choice, boy. But heaven knows there was no other way you could have done it. Congratulations. You beat them, and it’s all over.”

All over. Beat them. “I beat you, Maezr Rackham.”

Maezr laughed, a loud laugh that filled the room. “Ender Wiggins, you never played me. You never played a game since I was your teacher.”

Ender didn’t get the joke. He had played a great many games, at a terrible cost to himself. He began to get angry.

Maezr reached out and touched his shoulder. Ender shrugged him off. Maezr then grew serious and said, “Ender Wiggins, for the last months you have been the commander of our fleets. There were no games. The battles were real. Your only enemy was the enemy. You won every battle. And finally today you fought them at their home world, and you destroyed their world, their fleet, you destroyed them completely, and they’ll never come against us again. You did it. You.”

Real. Not a game. Ender’s mind was too tired to cope with it all. He walked away from Maezr, walked silently through the crowd that still whispered thanks and congratulations to the boy, walked out of the simulator room and finally arrived in his bedroom and closed the door.

He was asleep when Graff and Maezr Rackham found him. They came in quietly and roused him. He awoke slowly, and when he recognized them he turned away to go back to sleep.

“Ender,” Graff said. “We need to talk to you.”

Ender rolled back to face them. He said nothing.

Graff smiled. “It was a shock to you yesterday, 1 know. But it must make you feel good to know you won the war.”

Ender nodded slowly.

“Maezr Rackham here, he never played against you. He only analyzed your battles to find out your weak spots, to help you improve. It worked, didn’t it?”

Ender closed his eyes tightly. They waited. He said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Maezr smiled. “A hundred years ago, Ender, we found out some things. That when a commander’s life is in danger he becomes afraid, and fear slows down his thinking. When a commander knows that he’s killing people, he becomes cautious or insane, and neither of those help him do well. And when he’s mature, when he has responsibilities and an understanding of the world, he becomes cautious and sluggish and can’t do his job. So we trained children, who didn’t know anything but the game, and never knew when it would become real. That was the theory, and you proved that the theory worked.”

Graff reached out and touched Ender’s shoulder. “We launched the ships so that they would all arrive at their destination during these few months. We knew that we’d probably have only one good commander, if we were lucky. In history it’s been very rare to have more than one genius in a war. So we planned on having a genius. We were gambling. And you came along and we won.”

Ender opened his eyes again and they realized that he was angry. “Yes, you won.”

Graff and Maezr Rackham looked at each other. “He doesn’t understand,” Graff whispered.

“I understand,” Ender said. “You needed a weapon, and you got it, and it was me.”

“That’s right,” Maezr answered.

“So tell me,” Ender went on, “how many people lived on that planet that I destroyed.”

They didn’t answer him. They waited awhile in silence, and then Graff spoke. “Weapons don’t need to understand what they’re pointed at, Ender. We did the pointing, and so we’re responsible. You just did your job.”

Maezr smiled. “Of course, Ender, you’ll be taken care of. The government will never forget you. You served us all very well.”

Ender rolled over and faced the wall, and even though they tried to talk to him, he didn’t answer them. Finally they left.

Ender lay in his bed for a long time before anyone disturbed him again. The door opened softly. Ender didn’t turn to see who it was. Then a hand touched him softly.

“Ender, it’s me, Bean.”

Ender turned over and looked at the little boy who was standing by his bed.

“Sit down,” Ender said.

Bean sat. “That last battle, Ender. I didn’t know how you’d get us out of it.”

Ender smiled. “I didn’t. I cheated. I thought they’d kick me out.”

“Can you believe it! We won the war. The whole war’s over, and we thought we’d have to wait till we grew up to fight in it, and it was us fighting it all the time. I mean, Ender, we’re little kids. I’m a little kid, anyway.” Bean laughed and Ender smiled. Then they were silent for a little while, Bean sitting on the edge of the bed, Ender watching him out of half-closed eyes.

Finally Bean thought of something else to say.

“What will we do now that the war’s over?” he said.

Ender closed his eyes and said, “I need some sleep, Bean.”

Bean got up and left and Ender slept.

Graff and Anderson walked through the gates into the park. There was a breeze, but the sun was hot on their shoulders.

“Abba Technics? In the capital?” Graff asked.

“No, in Biggock County. Training division,” Anderson replied. “They think my work with children is good preparation. And you?”

Graff smiled and shook his head. “No plans. I’ll be here for a few more months. Reports, winding down. I’ve had offers. Personnel development for DCIA, executive vice-president for U and P, but I said no. Publisher wants me to do memoirs of the war. I don’t know.”

They sat on a bench and watched leaves shivering in the breeze. Children on the monkey bars were laughing and yelling, but the wind and the distance swallowed their words. “Look,” Graff said, pointing. A little boy jumped from the bars and ran near the bench where the two men sat. Another boy followed him, and holding his hands like a gun he made an explosive sound. The child he was shooting at didn’t stop. He fired again.

“I got you! Come back here!”

The other little boy ran on out of sight.

“Don’t you know when you’re dead?” The boy shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked a rock back to the monkey bars. Anderson smiled and shook his head. “Kids,” he said. Then he and Graff stood up and walked on out of the park.

MIKAL’S SONGBIRD

The doorknob turned. That would be dinner. Ansset rolled over on the hard bed, his muscles aching. As always, he tried to ignore the burning feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach. But it was not Husk with food on a tray. This time it was the man called Master, though Ansset believed that was not his name. Master was always angry and fearsomely strong, one of the few men who could make Ansset feel and act like the eleven-year-old child his body said he was.

“Get up, Songbird.”

Ansset slowly stood. They kept him naked in his prison, and only his pride kept him from turning away from the harsh eyes that looked him up and down. Ansset’s cheeks burned with shame that took the place of the guilt he had wakened to.

“It’s a good-bye feast we’re having for you, Chirp, and ye’re going to twitter for us.”

Ansset shook his head.

“If ye can sing for the bastarrd Mikal, ye can sing for honest freemen.”

Ansset’s eyes blazed. “Watch how you speak of him, you barbarian traitor! He’s your emperor!”

Master advanced a step, raising his hand angrily. “My orders was not to mark you, Chirp, but I can give you pain that doesn’t leave a scar if ye don’t mind how you talk to a freeman. Now ye’ll sing.”

Ansset, afraid of the man’s brutality as only someone who has never known physical punishment can be afraid, nodded—but still hung back. “Can you please give me my clothing?”

“It ain’t cold where we’re going,” Master retorted.

“I’ve never sung like this,” Ansset said, embarrassed. “I’ve never performed without clothing.”

Master leered. “What is it then that you do without clothing? Mikal’s catamite has naw secrets we can’t see.”

Ansset didn’t understand the word, but he understood the leer, and he followed Master out the door and down a dark corridor with his heart even more darkly filled with shame. He wondered why they were having a “good-bye feast” for him. Was he to be set free? (Had someone paid some unknown ransom for him?) Or was he to be killed?

The floor rocked gently as they walked down the wooden corridor. Ansset had long since decided he was imprisoned on a ship. The amount of real wood used in it would have seemed gaudy and pretentious in a rich man’s home. Here it seemed only shabby.

Far above he could hear the distant cry of a bird, and a steady singing sound that he imagined to be wind whipping through ropes and cables. He had sung the melody himself sometimes, and often harmonized.

And then Master opened the door and with a mocking bow indicated that Ansset should enter first. The boy stopped in the doorframe. Gathered around a long table were twenty or so men, some of whom he had seen before, all of them dressed in the strange costumes of Earth barbarians. Ansset couldn’t help remembering Mikal’s raucous laughter whenever they came to court, pretending to be heirs of great civilizations that to minds accustomed to thinking on a galactic scale were petty and insignificant indeed. And yet as he stood looking at their rough faces and unsmiling eyes, he felt that it was he, with the soft skin of the imperial court, that was petty and insignificant, a mere naked child, while these men held the strength of worlds in their rough, gnarled hands.

They looked at him with the same curious, knowing, lustful look that Master had given him. Ansset relaxed his stomach and firmed his back and ribs to conquer emotion, as he had been taught in the Songhouse before he turned three. He stepped into the room.

“Up on the table!” roared Master behind him, and hands lifted him onto the wood smeared with spilled wine and rough with crumbs and fragments of food. “Now sing, ye little bastarrd.”

The eyes looked his naked body over, and Ansset almost cried. But he was a Songbird, and many called him the best who had ever lived. Hadn’t Mikal brought him from one end of the galaxy to his new Capital on old Earth? And when he sang, no matter who the audience, he would sing well.

And so he closed his eyes and shaped the ribs around his lungs, and let a low tone pass through his throat. At first he sang without words, soft and low, knowing the sound would be hard to hear. “Louder,” someone said, but he ignored the instructions. Gradually the jokes and laughter died down as the men strained to hear.

The melody was a wandering one, passing through tones and quarter tones easily, gracefully, still low in pitch, but rising and falling rhythmically. Unconsciously Ansset moved his hands in strange gestures to accompany his song. He was never aware of those gestures, except that once he had read in a newsheet, “To hear Mikal’s Songbird is heavenly, but to watch his hands dance as he sings is nirvana.” That was a prudent thing to write about Mikal’s favorite—when the writer lived in Capital. Nevertheless, no one had even privately disputed the comment.

And now Ansset began to sing words. They were words of his own captivity, and the melody became high, in the soft upper notes that opened his throat and tightened the muscles at the back of his head and tensed the muscles along the front of his thighs. The notes pierced, and as he slid up and down through haunting third tones (a technique that few Songbirds could master) his words spoke of dark, shameful evenings in a dirty cell, a longing for the kind looks of Father Mikal (not by name, never by name in front of these barbarians), of dreams of the broad lawns that stretched from the palace to the Susquehanna River, and of lost, forgetten days that ended in wakeful evenings in a tiny cell of splintered wood.

And he sang of his guilt.

At last he became tired, and the song drifted off into a whispered dorian scale that ended on the wrong note, on a dissonant note that faded into silence that sounded like part of the song.

Finally Ansset opened his eyes. All the men who were not weeping were watching him. None seemed willing to break the mood, until a youngish man down the table said in the thick accent, “Ah, but thet was better than hame and Mitherma.” His comment was greeted by sighs and chuckles of agreement, and the looks that met Ansset’s eyes were no longer leering and lustful, but rather soft and kind. Ansset had never thought to see such looks in those rough faces.

“Will ye have some wine, boy?” asked Master’s voice behind him, and Husk poured. Ansset sipped the wine, and dipped a finger in it to cast a drop into the air in the graceful gesture of court. “Thank you,” he said, handing back the metal cup with the same grace he would have used with a goblet at court. He lowered his head, though it hurt him to use that gesture of respect to such men, and asked, “May I leave now?”

“Do you have to? Can’t you sing again?” the men around the table murmured, as if they had forgotten he was their prisoner. And Ansset refused as if he were free to choose. “I can’t do it twice. I can never do it twice.”

They lifted him off the table, then, and Master’s strong arms carried him back to his room. Ansset lay on the bed after the door locked shut, trembling. The last time he had sung was for Mikal, and the song had been light and happy. Then Mikal had smiled the soft smile that only touched his old face when he was alone with his Songbird, had touched the back of Ansset’s hand, and Ansset had kissed the old hand and gone out to walk along the river. It was then that they had taken him—rough hands from behind, the sharp slap of the needle, and then waking in the cell where now he lay looking at the walls.

He always woke in the evening, aching from some unknown effort of the day, and wracked by guilt. He strained to remember, but always in the effort drifted off to sleep, only to wake again the next evening suffering from the lost day behind him. But tonight he did not try to puzzle out what lay behind the blocks in his mind. Instead he drifted off to sleep thinking of the songs in Mikal’s kind gray eyes, humming of the firm hands that ruled an empire a galaxy wide and could still stroke the forehead of a sweet-singing child and weep at a sorrowful song. Ah, sang Ansset in his mind, ah, the weeping of Mikal’s sorrowful hands.

Ansset woke walking down a street.

“Out of the way, ya chark!” shouted a harsh accent behind him, and Ansset dodged to the left as an eletrecart zipped past his right arm. “Sausages,” shouted a sign on the trunk behind the driver.

Then Ansset was seized by a terrible vertigo as he realized that he was not in the cell of his captivity, that he was fully dressed (in native Earth costume, but clothing for all that), was alive, was free. The quick joy that realization brought was immediately soured by a rush of the old guilt, and the conflicting emotions and the suddenness of his liberation were too much for him, and for a moment too long he forgot to breathe, and the darkening ground slid sideways, tipped up, hit him—

“Hey, boy, are you all right?”

“Did the chark slam you, boy?”

“Ya got the license number? Ya got the number?”

“Four-eight-seven something, who can tell.”

“He’s comin’ around and to.”

Ansset opened his eyes. “Where is this place?” he asked softly.

Why, this is Northet, they said.

“How far is the palace?” Ansset asked, vaguely remembering that Northet was a town not far to the north and east of Capital.

“The palace? What palace?”

“Mikal’s palace—I must go to Mikal—” Ansett tried to get up, but his head spun and he staggered. Hands held him up.

“The kit’s kinky, that’s what.”

“Mikal’s palace.”

“It’s only eighteen kilometer, boy, ya plan to fly?”

The joke brought a burst of laughter, but Ansset impatiently regained control of his body and stood. Whatever drug had kept him unconscious was now nearly worked out of his system. “Find me a policeman,” Ansset said. “Mikal will want to see me immediately.”

Some still laughed, a man’s voice said, “We’ll be sure to tell him you’re here when he comes to my house for supper!” but some others looked carefully at Ansset, realizing he spoke without American accent, and that his bearing was not that of a streetchild, despite his clothing. “Who are you, boy?”

“I’m Ansset. Mikal’s Songbird.”

Then there was silence, and half the crowd rushed off to find the policeman, and the other half stayed to look at him and realize how beautiful his eyes were, to touch him with their own eyes and hold the moment to tell about it to children and grandchildren. Ansset, Mikal’s Songbird, more valuable than all the treasure Mikal owned.

“I touched him myself, helping him up, I held him up.”

“You would’ve fallen, but for me, sir,” said a large strong man bowing ridiculously low.

“Can I shake your hand, sir?”

Ansset smiled at them, not in amusement but in gratitude for their respect for him. “Thank you. You’ve all helped me. Thank you.”

The policeman came, and after apologizing for the dirtiness of his armored eletrecart he lifted Ansset onto the seat and took him to the headquarters, where a flyer from the palace was already settling down on the pad. The Chamberlain leaped from the flyer, along with half a dozen servants, who gingerly touched Ansset and helped him to the flyer. The door slid shut, and Ansset closed his eyes to hide the tears as he felt the ground rush away as the palace came to meet him.

But for two days they kept him away from Mikal. “Quarantine,” they said at first, until Ansset stamped his foot and said, “Nonsense,” and refused to answer any more of the hundreds of questions they kept firing at him from dawn to dark and long after dark. The Chamberlain came.

“What’s this I hear about you not wanting to answer questions, my boy?” asked the Chamberlain with the false joviality that Ansset had long since learned to recognize as a mask for anger or fear.

“I’m not your boy,” Ansset retorted, determined to frighten some cooperation out of the Chamberlain. Now and then it had worked in the past. “I’m Mikal’s and he wants to see me. Why am I being kept like a prisoner?”

“Quaran—”

“Chamberlain, I’m healthier than I’ve ever been before, and these questions don’t have a thing to do with my health.”

“All right,” the Chamberlain said, fluttering his hands with impatience and nervousness. Ansset had once sung to Mikal of the Chamberlain’s hands, and Mikal had laughed for hours at some of the words. “I’ll explain. But don’t get angry at me, because it’s Mikal’s orders.”

“That I be kept away from him?”

“Until you answer the questions! You’ve been in court long enough, Songbird, and you’re surely bright enough to know that Mikal has enemies in this world.”

“I know that. Are you one of them?” Ansset was deliberately goading the Chamberlain, using his voice like a whip in all the ways that made the Chamberlain angry and fretful and so forgetful.

“Hold your tongue, boy!” the Chamberlain said. Ansset inwardly smiled. Victory. “You’re also bright enough to know that you weren’t kidnapped five months ago by any friends of the emperor’s. We have to know everything about your captivity.”

“I’ve told you everything a hundred times over.”

“You haven’t told us how you spent your days.”

Again Ansset felt a stab of emotion. “I don’t remember my days.”

“And that’s why you can’t see Mikal!” the Chamberlain snapped. “Do you think we don’t know what happened? We’ve used the probes and the tasters and no matter how skillfully we question, we can’t get past the blocks. Either the person who worked on your mind laid the blocks very skillfully, or you yourself are holding them locked, and either way we can’t get in.”

“I can’t help it,” Ansset said, realizing now what the questioning meant. “How can you think I mean any danger to Father Mikal.”

The Chamberlain smiled beatifically, in the pose he reserved for polite triumph. “Behind the block, someone may have very carefully planted a command for you to—”

“I’m not an assassin!” Ansset shouted.

“How would you know,” the Chamberlain snarled back. “It’s my duty to protect the person of the emperor. Do you know how many assassination attempts we stop? Dozens, every week. The poison, the treason, the weapons, the traps, that’s what half the people who work here do, is watch everyone who comes in and watch each other too. Most of the assassination attempts are stopped immediately. Some get closer. Yours may be the closest of all.”

“Mikal must want to see me!”

“Of course he does, Ansset! And that’s exactly why you can’t—because whoever worked on your mind must know that you’re the only person that Mikal would allow near him after something like this—Ansset! Ansset, you little fool! Call the Captain of the Guard. Ansset, slow down!”

But the Chamberlain was slowing down with age, and he steadily lost ground to Ansset as the boy darted down the corridors of the palace. Ansset knew all the quickest ways, since exploring the palace was one of the most pleasant of his pastimes, and in five years in Mikal’s service no one knew the labyrinth better than Ansset.

He was stopped routinely at the doors to the Great Hall, and he quickly made his way through the detectors (Poison? No. Metal? No. Energy? No. Identification? Clear.) and he was just about to step through the vast doors when the Captain of the Guard arrived.

“Stop the boy.”

Ansset was stopped.

“Come back here, Songbird,” the Captain barked. But Ansset could see, at the far end of the huge platinum room, the small chair and the whitehaired man who sat on it. Surely Mikal could see him! Surely he’d call!

“Bring the boy back here before he embarrasses everyone by calling out.” Ansset was dragged back. “If you must know, Ansset, Mikal gave me orders to bring you within the hour, even before you made your ridiculous escape from the Chamberlain. But you’ll be searched first. My way.”

Ansset was taken off into one of the search rooms. He was stripped and his clothing was replaced with fresh clothes (that didn’t fit! Ansset thought angrily), and then the searchers’ fingers probed, painfully and deep, every aperture of his body that might hold a weapon. (“No weapon, and your prostate gland’s all right, too,” one of them joked. Ansset didn’t laugh.) Then the needles, probing far under the skin to sample for hidden poisons. A layer of skin was bloodlessly peeled off his palms and the soles of his feet, to be sampled for poisons or flexible plastic needles. The pain was irritating. The delay was excruciating.

But Ansset bore what had to be borne. He only showed anger or impatience when he thought that doing so might gain some good effect. No one, not even Mikal’s Songbird, survived long at court unless he remained in control of his temper, however he had to hide it.

At last Ansset was pronounced clean.

“Wait,” the Captain of the Guard said. “I don’t trust you yet.”

Ansset gave him a long, cold look. But the Captain of the Guard—like the Chamberlain—was one of the few people at court who knew Mikal well enough to know they had nothing to fear from Ansset unless they really treated him unjustly, for Mikal never did favors, not even for the boy, who was the only human being Mikal had ever shown a personal need for. And they knew Ansset well enough to know that he would never ask Mikal to punish someone unfairly, either.

The Captain took a nylon cord and bound Ansset’s hands together behind him, first at the wrists, and then just below the elbows. The constriction was painful.

“You’re hurting me,” Ansset said.

“I may be saving my emperor’s life,” the Captain answered blandly. And then Ansset passed through the huge doors to the Great Hall, his arms bound, surrounded by guards with lasers drawn, preceded by the Captain of the Guard.

Ansset still walked proudly, but he felt a hearty fury toward the guards, toward the courtiers and supplicants and guards and officials lining the walls of the unfurnished room, and especially toward the Captain. Only toward Mikal did he feel no anger.

They let him stop.

Mikal raised his hand in the ritual of recognition. Ansset knew that Mikal laughed at the rituals when they were alone together—but in front of the court, the ritual had to be followed strictly.

Ansset dropped to his knees on the cold and shining platinum floor.

“My Lord,” he said in clear, bell-like tones that he knew would reverberate from the metal ceiling, “I am Ansset, and I have come to ask for my life.” In the old days, Mikal had once explained, that ritual had real meaning, and many a rebel lord or soldier had died on the spot. Even now, the pro forma surrender of life was taken seriously, as Mikal maintained constant vigilance over his empire.

“Why should I spare you?” Mikal asked, his voice old but firm. Ansset thought he heard a quaver of eagerness in the voice. More likely a quaver of age, he told himself. Mikal would never allow himself to reveal emotion in front of the court.

“You should not,” Ansset said. This was leaving the ritual, and going down the dark road that met danger head-on. Mikal must have been told of the Chamberlain’s fears. Therefore, if Ansset made any attempt to hide the danger, his life would be forfeited by law.

“Why not?” Mikal said, impassively.

“Because, my Lord Mikal Imperator, I was kidnapped and held for five months, and during those months things were done to me that are now locked behind blocks in my mind. I may, unwittingly, be an assassin. I must not be allowed to live.”

“Nevertheless,” Mikal answered, “I grant you your life.”

Ansset, his muscles strong enough even after his captivity to allow him to bow despite his bound arms, touched his lips to the floor.

“Why are you bound?”

“For your safety, my Lord.”

“Unbind him,” said Mikal. The Captain of the Guard untied the nylon cord.

His arms free, Ansset stood. He went beyond form, and he turned his voice into a song, with an edge to his voice that snapped every head in the hall toward him. “My Lord, Father Mikal,” he sang, “there is a place in my mind where even I cannot go. In that place my captors may have taught me to want to kill you.” The words were a warning, but the song said safety, the song said love, and Mikal arose from his throne. He understood what Ansset was asking and he would grant it.

“I would rather, my Son Ansset, I would rather meet death in your hands than any other’s. Your life is more valuable to me than my own.” Then Mikal turned and went back into the door that led to his private chambers. Ansset and the Captain of the Guard followed, and as they left the whispers rose to a roar. Mikal had gone much farther than Ansset had even hoped. The entire Capital—and in a few weeks, the entire empire—would hear how Mikal had called his Songbird Son Ansset, and the words, “Your life is more valuable to me than my own,” would become the stuff of legends.

Ansset sighed a song as he entered the familiar rooms where Father Mikal lived.

Mikal turned abruptly and glared at the Captain of the Guard. “What did you mean by that little trick, you bastard?”

“I tied his hands as a precaution. I was within my duties as a warden of the gate.”

“I know you were within your duties, but you might use some common decency. What harm can an eleven-year-old boy do when you’ve probably already skinned him alive searching for weapons and you have a hundred lasers trained on him at every moment!”

“I wanted to be sure.”

“Well, you’re too damned thorough. Get out. And don’t let me ever catch you being any less thorough, even when it makes me angry. Get out!” The Captain of the Guard left, Mikal’s roar following him. As soon as the door closed, Mikal started to laugh. “What an ass! What a colossal donkey!” Then he threw himself to the floor with all the vigor of a young man, though Ansset knew his age to be one hundred and twenty-three, which was old, in a civilization where death normally came at a hundred and fifteen. Under him the floor that had been rigid when his weight pressed down on the two small spaces touched by his feet now softened, gave gently to fit the contours of his body. Ansset also went to the floor, and lay there laughing.

“Are you glad to be home, Ansset?” Mikal asked tenderly.

“Now I am. Until this moment I wasn’t home.”

“Ansset, my Son, you never can speak without singing.” Mikal laughed softly.

Ansset took the sound of the laugh and turned it into a song. It was a soft song, and it was short, but at the end of it Mikal was lying on his back looking at the ceiling, tears streaming down from his eyes.

“I didn’t mean the song to be sad, Father Mikal.”

“How was I to know that now, in my dotage, I’d do the foolish thing I avoided all my life? Oh, I’ve loved like I’ve done every other passionate thing, but when they took you I discovered, my Son, that I need you.” Mikal rolled over and looked at the beautiful face of the boy who lay looking at him adoringly. “Don’t worship me, boy, I’m an old bastard who’d kill his mother if one of my enemies hadn’t already done it.”

“You’d never harm me.”

“I harm everything I love,” Mikal said bitterly. Then he let his face show concern. “We were afraid for you. Since you were gone there was an outbreak of insane crime. People were kidnapped for no reason on the street, some in broad daylight, and a few days later their bodies would be found, broken and torn by someone or something. No ransom notes. Nothing. We thought you had been taken like that, and that somewhere we’d find your body. Are you whole? Are you well?”

“I’m stronger than I’ve ever been before.” Ansset laughed. “I tested my strength against the hook of my hammock, and I’m afraid I ripped it out of the wall.”

Mikal reached out and touched Ansset’s hand. “I’m afraid,” Mikal said, and Ansset listened, humming softly, as Mikal talked. The emperor never spoke in names and dates and facts and plans, for then if Ansset were taken by an enemy the enemy would know too much. He spoke to the Songbird in emotions instead, and Ansset sang solace to him. Other Songbirds had pretty voices, others could impress the crowds, and, indeed, Mikal used Ansset for just that purpose on certain state occasions. But of all Songbirds, only Ansset could sing his soul; and he loved Mikal from his soul.

Late in the night Mikal shouted in fury about his empire: “Did I build it to fall? Did I burn over a dozen worlds and rape a hundred others just to have the whole thing fall in chaos when I die?” He leaned down and whispered to Ansset, their eyes a few inches apart, “They call me Mikal the Terrible, but I built it so it would stand like an umbrella over the galaxy. They have it now: peace and prosperity and as much freedom as their little minds can cope with. But when I die they’ll throw it all away.” Mikal whirled and shouted at the walls of his soundproofed chamber, “In the name of nationalities and religions and races and family inheritances the fools will rip the umbrella down and then wonder why, all of a sudden, it’s raining.”

Ansset sang to him of hope.

“There’s no hope. I have fifty sons, three of them legitimate, all of them fools who try to flatter me. They couldn’t keep the empire for a week, not all of them, not any of them. There’s not a man I’ve met in all my life who could control what I’ve built in my lifetime. When I die, it all dies with me.” And Mikal sank to the floor wearily.

For once Ansset did not sing. Instead he jumped to his feet, the floor turning firm under him. He raised an arm above his head, and said, “For you, Father Mikal, I’ll grow up to be strong! Your empire shall not fall!” He spoke with such grandeur in his childish speaking voice that both he and Mikal had to laugh.

“It’s true, though,” Mikal said, tousling the child’s hair. “For you I’d do it, I’d give you the empire, except they’d kill you. And even if I lived long enough to train you to be a ruler of men, I wouldn’t do it. The man who will be my heir must be cruel and vicious and sly and wise, completely selfish and ambitious, contemptuous of all other people, brilliant in battle, able to outguess and outmaneuver every enemy, and strong enough inside himself to live utterly alone all his life.” Mikal smiled. “Even 7 don’t fit my list of qualifications, because now I’m not utterly alone.”

And then, as Mikal drifted off to sleep, Ansset sang to him of his captivity, the songs and words of his time of loneliness in captivity, and as the men on the ship had wept, so Mikal wept, only more. Then they both slept.

A few days later Mikal, Ansset, the Chamberlain, and the Captain of the Guard met in Mikal’s small receiving room, where a solid block of clear glass as perfect as a lens stretched as a meters-long table from one end of the room to the other. They gathered at one end. The Chamberlain was adamant.

“Ansset is a danger to you, my Lord.”

The Captain of the Guard was equally adamant. “We found the conspirators and killed them all.”

The Chamberlain rolled his eyes heavenward in disgust.

The Captain of the Guard became angry, though he kept the fact hidden behind heavy-lidded eyes. “It all fit—the accent that Ansset told us they had, the wooden ship, calling each other freemen, their emotionalism—they could have been no one else but the Freemen of Eire. Just another nationalist group, but they have a lot of sympathizers here in America—damn these ‘nations,’ where but on old Earth would people subdivide their planet and think the subdivisions meant anything.”

“So you went in and wiped them all out,” the Chamberlain sneered, “and not one of them had any knowledge of the plot.”

“Anyone who could block out the Songbird’s mind as well as he did can hide a conspiracy like that!” the Captain of the Guard snapped back.

“Our enemy is subtle,” the Chamberlain said. “He kept everything else from Ansset’s knowledge—so why did he let him have all these clues that steered us to Eire? I think we were given bait and you bit. Well, I haven’t bitten yet, and I’m still looking.”

“In the meantime,” Mikal said, “try to avoid harassing Ansset too much.”

“I don’t mind,” Ansset hurriedly said, though he minded very much: the constant searches, the frequent interrogations, the hypnotherapy, the guards who followed him constantly to keep him from meeting with anyone.

“I mind,” Mikal said. “It’s good for you to keep watch, because we still don’t know what they’ve done to Ansset’s mind. But in the meantime, let Ansset’s life be worth living.” Mikal glared pointedly at the Captain of the Guard, who got up and left. Then Mikal turned to the Chamberlain and said, “I don’t like how easily the Captain was fooled by such an obvious ploy. Keep up your investigation. And tell me anything your spies within the Captain’s forces might have to say.”

The Chamberlain tried for a moment to protest that he had no such spies—but Mikal laughed until the Chamberlain gave up and promised to complete a report.

“My days are numbered,” Mikal said to Ansset. “Sing to me of numbered days.” And so Ansset sang him a playful song about a man who decided to live for two hundred years and so counted his age backward, by the number of years he had left. “And he died when he was only eighty-three,” Ansset sang, and Mikal laughed and tossed another log on the fire. Only an emperor or a peasant in the protected forests of Siberia could afford to burn wood.

Then one day Ansset, as he wandered through the palace, noticed a different direction and a quickened pace to the hustling and bustling of servants down the halls. He went to the Chamberlain.

“Try to keep quiet about it,” the Chamberlain said. “You’re coming with us, anyway.”

And within an hour Ansset rode beside Mikal in an armored car as a convoy swept out of Capital. The roads were kept clear, and in an hour and fifteen minutes the armored car stopped. Ansset bounded out of the hatchway. He was startled to see that the entire convoy was missing, and only the single armored car remained. He immediately suspected treachery, and looked down at Mikal in fright.

“Don’t worry,” Mikal said. “We sent the convoy on.”

They got out of the car and with a dozen picked guards (not from the palace guard, Ansset noticed) they made their way through a sparse wood, along a stream, and finally to the banks of a huge river.

“The Delaware,” whispered the Chamberlain to Ansset, who had already guessed as much.

“Keep your esoterica to yourself,” Mikal said, sounding irritable, which meant he was enjoying himself immensely. He hadn’t been a part of any kind of planetside military operation in forty years, ever since he became an emperor and had to control fleets and planets instead of a few ships and a thousand men. There was a spring to his step that belied his century and a quarter.

Finally the Chamberlain stopped. “That’s the house, and that’s the boat.”

A flatboat was moored on the river by a shambling wooden house that looked like it had been built during the American colonial revival over a hundred years before.

They crept up on the house, but it was empty, and when they rushed the flatboat the only man on board aimed a laser at his own face and blasted it to a cinder. Not before Ansset had recognized him, though.

“That was Husk,” Ansset said, feeling sick as he looked at the ruined corpse. Inexplicably, he felt a nagging guilt. “He’s the man who fed me.”

Then Mikal and Chamberlain followed Ansset through the boat. “It’s not the same,” Ansset said.

“Of course not,” said the Chamberlain. “The paint is fresh. And there’s a smell of new wood. They’ve been remodeling. But is there anything familiar?”

There was. Ansset found a tiny room that could have been his cell, though now it was painted bright yellow and a new window let sunlight flood into the room. Mikal examined the windowframe. “New,” the emperor pronounced. And by trying to imagine the interior of the flatboat as it might have been unpainted, Ansset was able to find the large room where he had sung his last evening in captivity. There was no table. But the room seemed the same size, and Ansset agreed that this could very well have been the place he was held.

Down in the ship they heard the laughter of children and a passing eletrecart that clattered along the bumpy old asphalt road. The Chamberlain laughed. “Sorry I took you the long way. It’s really quite a populated area. I just wanted to be sure they didn’t have time to be warned.”

Mikal curled his lip. “If it’s a populated area we should have arrived in a bus. A group of armed men walking along a river are much more conspicuous.”

“I’m not a tactician,” said the Chamberlain.

“Tactician enough,” said Mikal. “We’ll go back to the palace now. Do you have anyone you can trust to make the arrest? I don’t want him harmed.”

But it didn’t do any good to give orders to that effect. When the Captain of the Guard was arrested, he raged and stormed and then a half-hour later, before there was time to examine him with the probe and taster, one of the guards slipped him some poison and he drifted off into death. The Chamberlain rashly had the offending guard impaled with nails until he bled to death.

Ansset was confused as he watched Mikal rage at the Chamberlain. It was obviously a sham, or half a sham, and Ansset was certain that the Chamberlain knew it. “Only a fool would have killed that soldier! How did the poison get into the palace past the detectors? How did the soldier get it to the Captain? None of the questions will ever be answered now!”

The Chamberlain made the mandatory ritual resignation. “My Lord Imperator, I was a fool. I deserve to die. I resign my position and ask for you to have me killed.”

Following the ritual, but obviously annoyed by having it thrust at him before he was through raging, Mikal lifted his hand and said, “Damn right you’re a fool.” Then, in proper form, he said, “I grant you your life because of your infinitely valuable services to me in apprehending the traitor in the first place.” Mikal cocked his head to one side. “So, Chamberlain, who do you think I should make the next Captain of the Guard?”

Ansset almost laughed out loud. It was an impossible question to answer. The safest answer (and the Chamberlain liked to do safe things) would be to say he had never given the matter any thought at all, and wouldn’t presume to advise the emperor on such a vital matter. But even so, the moment would be tense for the Chamberlain.

And Ansset was shocked to hear the Chamberlain answer, “Riktors Ashen, of course, my Lord.”

The “of course” was insolent. The naming of the man was ridiculous. At first Ansset looked at Mikal to see fury there. But instead Mikal was smiling. “Why of course,” he said blandly. “Riktors Ashen is the obvious choice. Tell him in my name that he’s appointed.”

Even the Chamberlain, who had mastered the art of blandness at will, looked surprised for a moment. Again Ansset almost laughed. He saw Mikal’s victory: the Chamberlain had probably named the one man in the palace guard that the Chamberlain had no control over, assuming that Mikal would never pick the man the Chamberlain recommended. And so Mikal had picked him: Riktors Ashen, the victor of the battle of Mantrynn, a planet that had revolted only three years before. He was known to be incorruptible, brilliant, and reliable. Well, now he’d have a chance to prove his reputation, Ansset thought.

Then he was startled out of his reverie by Mikal’s voice. “Do you know what his last words were to me?”

By the instant understanding that needed no referents for Mikal’s pronouns Ansset knew he was talking about the now-dead Captain of the Guard.

“He said, Tell Mikal that my death frees more plotters than it kills.’ And then he said that he loved me. Imagine, that cagey old bastard saying he loved me. I remembered him twenty years ago when he killed his closest friend in a squabble over a promotion. The bloodiest men get most sentimental in their old age, I suppose.”

Ansset asked a question—it seemed a safe time. “My Lord, why was the Captain arrested?”

“Hmmm?” Mikal looked surprised. “Oh, I suppose no one told you, then. He visited that house regularly throughout your captivity. He said he visited a woman there. But the neighbors all testified under the probe that a woman never lived there. And the Captain was a master at establishing mental blocks.”

“Then the conspiracy is broken!” Ansset said, joyfully assuming that the guards would stop harassing him and the questions would finally end.

“The conspiracy is barely dented. Someone was able to get poison to the Captain. Therefore plotters still exist within the palace. And therefore Riktors Ashen will be instructed to keep a close watch on you.”

Ansset tried to keep the smile on his face. He failed.

“I know, I know,” Mikal said wearily. “But it’s still locked in your mind.”

It was unlocked the next day. The court was gathered in the Great Hall, and Ansset resigned himself to a morning of wandering through the halls—or else standing near Mikal as he received the boring procession of dignitaries paying their respects to the emperor (and then going home to report how soon they thought Mikal the Terrible would die, and who might succeed him, and what the chances were for grabbing a piece of the empire). Because the palace bored him and he wanted to be near Mikal, and because the Chamberlain smiled at him and asked, “Are you coming to court?” Ansset decided to attend.

The order of dignitaries had been carefully worked out to honor loyal friends and humiliate upstarts whose dignity needed deflating. A minor official from a distant star cluster was officially honored, the first business of the day, and then the rituals began: princes and presidents and satraps and governors, depending on what title survived the conquest a decade or a score or fourscore years ago, all proceeding forward with their retinue, bowing (how low they bowed showed how afraid they were of Mikal, or how much they wanted to flatter him), uttering a few words, asking for private audience, being put off or being invited, in an endless array.

Ansset was startled to see a group of Black Kinshasans attired in their bizarre old Earth costumes. Kinshasa insisted it was an independent nation, a pathetic nose-thumbing claim when empires of planets had been swallowed up by Mikal Conqueror. Why were they being allowed to wear their native regalia and have an audience? Ansset raised an eyebrow at the Chamberlain, who also stood near the throne.

“It was Mikal’s idea,” the Chamberlain said voicelessly. “He’s letting them come and present a petition right before the president of Stuss. Those toads from Stuss’ll be madder than hell.”

At that moment Mikal raised his hand for some wine. Obviously he was as bored as anyone else.

The Chamberlain poured the wine, tasted it, as was the routine, and then took a step toward Mikal’s throne. Then he stopped, and beckoned to Ansset, who was already moving back to Mikal’s side. Surprised at the summons, Ansset came over.

“Why don’t you take the wine to Mikal, Sweet Songbird?” the Chamberlain said. The surprise fell away from Ansset’s eyes, and he took the wine and headed purposefully back to Mikal’s throne.

At that moment, however, pandemonium broke loose. The Kinshasan envoys reached into their elaborate curly-haired headdresses and withdrew wooden knives—which could pass every test given by machines at the doors of the palace. They rushed toward the throne. The guards fired quickly, their lasers dropping five of the Kinshasans, but all had aimed at the foremost assassins, and three continued unharmed. They rushed toward the throne, arms extended so the knives were already aimed directly at Mikal’s heart.

Mikal, old and unarmed, rose to meet them. A guard managed to shift his aim and get off a shot, but it was wild, and the others were hurriedly recharging their lasers—which only took a moment, but that was a moment too long.

Mikal looked death in the eye and did not seem disappointed.

But at that moment Ansset threw the wine goblet at one of the attackers and then leaped out in front of the emperor. He jumped easily into the air, and kicked the jaw of the first of the attackers. The angle of the kick was perfect, the force sharp and incredibly hard, and the Kinshasan’s head flew fifty feet away into the crowd, as his body slid forward until the wooden knife touched Mikal’s foot. Ansset came down from the jump in time to bring his hand upward into the abdomen of another attacker so sharply that his arm was buried to the elbow in bowels, and his fingers crushed the man’s heart.

The other attacker paused just a moment, thrown from his relentless charge by the sudden onslaught from the child who stood so harmlessly by the emperor’s throne. That pause was long enough for recharged lasers to be aimed, to flash, and the last Kinshasan assassin fell, dropping ashes as he collapsed, flaming slightly.

The whole thing, from the appearance of the wooden knives to the fall of the last attacker, had taken five seconds.

Ansset stood still in the middle of the hall, gore on his arm, blood splashed all over his body. He looked at the gory hand, at the body he had pulled it out of. A rush of long-blocked memories came back, and he remembered other such bodies, other heads kicked from torsos, other men who had died as Ansset learned the skill of killing with his hands. The guilt that had troubled him before swept through him with new force now that he knew the why of it.

The searches had all been in vain. Ansset himself was the weapon that was to have been used against Father Mikal.

The smell of blood and broken intestines combined with the emotions sweeping his body, and he doubled over, shuddering as he vomited.

The guards gingerly approached him, unsure what they should do.

But the Chamberlain was sure. Ansset heard the voice, trembling with fear at how close the assassination had come, and how easily a different assassination could have come, saying, “Keep him under guard. Wash him. Never let him be out of a laser’s aim for a moment. Then bring him to Mikal’s chambers in an hour.”

The guards looked toward Mikal, who nodded.

Ansset was still white and weak when he came into Mikal’s chambers. The guards still had lasers trained on him. The Chamberlain and the new Captain of the Guard, Riktors Ashen, stood between Mikal and the boy.

“Songbird,” Riktors said, “it seems that someone taught you new songs.”

Ansset lowered his head.

“You must have studied under a master.”

“I n-never,” Ansset stuttered. He had never stuttered in his life.

“Don’t torture the boy, Captain,” Mikal said.

The Chamberlain launched into his pro forma resignation. “I should have examined the boy’s muscle structure and realized what new skills he had been given. I submit my resignation. I beg you to take my life.”

The Chamberlain must be even more worried than usual, Ansset thought with that part of his mind that was still capable of thinking. The old man had prostrated himself in front of the emperor.

“Shut up and get up,” Mikal said rudely. The Chamberlain arose with his face gray. Mikal had not followed the ritual. The Chamberlain’s life was still on the line.

“We will now be certain,” Mikal said to Riktors. “Show him the pictures.”

Ansset stood watching as Riktors took a packet off a table and began removing newsheet clippings from it. Ansset looked at the first one and was merely sickened a little. The second one he recognized, and he gasped. With the third one he wept and threw the pictures away from him.

“Those are the pictures,” Mikal said, “of the people who were kidnapped and murdered during your captivity.”

“I k-killed them,” Ansset said, dimly aware that there was no trace of song in his voice, just the frightened stammering of an eleven-year-old boy caught up in something too monstrous for him to comprehend. “They had me practice on them.”

“Who had you practice!” Riktors demanded.

“They! The voices—from the box.” Ansset struggled to hold onto memories that had been hidden from him by the block. He also longed to let the block in his mind slide back into place, forget again, shut it out.

“What box?” Riktors would not let up.

“The box. A wooden box. Maybe a receiver, maybe a recording, I don’t know.”

“Did you know the voice?”

“Voices. Never the same. Not even for the same sentence, the voices changed for every word.”

Ansset kept seeing the faces of the bound men he was told to maim and then kill. He remembered that though he cried out against it, he was still forced to do it.

“How did they force you to do it!”

Was Riktors reading his mind? “I don’t know. I don’t know. There were words, and then I had to.”

“What words?”

“I don’t know! I never knew!” And Ansset was crying again.

Mikal spoke softly. “Who taught you how to kill that way?”

“A man. I never knew his name. On the last day, he was tied where the others had been. The voices made me kill him.” Ansset struggled with the words, the struggle made harder by the realization that this time, when he had killed his teacher, he had not had to be forced. He had killed because he hated the man. “I murdered him.”

“Nonsense,” the Chamberlain said. “You were a tool.”

“I said to shut up,” Mikal said curtly. “Can you remember anything else, my Son?”

“I killed the crew of the ship, too. All except Husk. The voices told me to. And then there were footsteps, above me, on the deck.”

“Did you see who it was?”

Ansset forced himself to remember. “No. He told me to lie down. He must have known the—code, whatever it is, I didn’t want to obey him, but I did.”

“And?”

“Footsteps, and a needle in my arm, and I woke up on the street.”

Everyone was silent then, for a few moments, all of them thinking quickly. The Chamberlain broke first. “My Lord, the great threat to you and the strength of the Songbird’s love for you must have impelled him despite the mental block—”

“Chamberlain,” Mikal said, “your life is over if you speak again before I address you. Captain. I want to know how those Kinshasan’s got past your guard?”

“They were dignitaries. By your order, my Lord, no dignitaries are given the body search. Their wooden knives passed all the detectors. I’m surprised this hadn’t been tried before.”

Ansset noticed that Riktors spoke confidently, not coweringly as another Captain might have done after assassins got through his guard. And, better in control of himself, Ansset listened for the melodies of Riktors’s voice. They were strong. They were dissonant. Ansset wondered if he would be able to detect Riktors in a lie. To a strong, selfish man all things that he chose to say became truth, and the songs of his voice said nothing.

“Riktors, you will prepare orders for the utter destruction of Kinshasa.”

Riktors saluted.

“Before Kinshasa is destroyed—and that means destroyed, not a blade of grass, Riktors—before Kinshasa is destroyed, I want to know what connection there is between the assassination attempt this morning and the manipulation of my Songbird.”

Riktors saluted again. Mikal spoke to the Chamberlain. “Chamberlain, what would you recommend I do with my Songbird?”

As usual, the Chamberlain took the safe way. “My Lord, it is not a matter to which I have given thought. The disposition of your Songbird is not a matter on which I feel it proper to advise you.”

“Very carefully said, my dear Chamberlain.” Ansset tried to be calm as he listened to them discuss how he should be disposed of. Mikal raised his hand in the gesture that, by ritual, spared the Chamberlain’s life. Ansset would have laughed at the Chamberlain’s struggle not to show his relief, but this was not a time for laughter, because Ansset knew his relief would not come so easily.

“My Lord,” Ansset said, “I beg you to put me to death.”

“Dammit, Ansset, I’m sick of the rituals,” Mikal said.

“This is no ritual,” Ansset said, his voice tired and husky from misuse. “And this is no song, Father Mikal. I’m a danger to you.”

“I know it.” Mikal looked back and forth between Riktors and the Chamberlain.

“Chamberlain, have Ansset’s possessions put together and readied for shipment to Alwiss. The prefect there is Timmis Hortmang, prepare a letter of explanation and a letter of mark. Ansset will arrive there wealthier than anyone else in the prefecture. Those are my orders. See to it.” He turned his head downward and to the right. Both Riktors and the Chamberlain moved to leave. Ansset—and therefore the guards who had lasers trained on him—did not.

“Father Mikal,” Ansset said softly, and he realized that the words had been a song.

But Mikal made no answer. He only got up from the chair and left the chamber.

Ansset had several hours before nightfall, and he spent them wandering through the palace and the palace grounds. The guards dogged his steps. At first he let the tears flow. Then, as the horror of the morning hid again behind the only partly broken block in his mind, he remembered what the Songmaster had taught him, again and again, “When you want to weep, let the tears come through your throat. Let pain come from the pressure in your thighs. Let sorrow rise and resonate through your head.”

Walking by the Susquehanna on the cold lawns of autumn afternoon shade, Ansset sang his grief. He sang softly, but the guards heard his song, and could not help but weep for him, too.

He stopped at a place where the water looked cold and clear, and began to strip off his tunic, preparing to swim. A guard reached out and stopped him. Ansset noticed the laser pointed at his foot. “I can’t let you do that. Mikal gave orders you were not to be allowed to take your own life.”

“I only want to swim,” Ansset answered, his voice low with persuasion.

“I would be killed if any harm came to you,” the guard said.

“I give you my oath that I will only swim, and not try to break free.”

The guard considered. The other guards seemed content to leave the decision up to him. Ansset hummed a sweet melody that he knew oozed confidence. The guard gave in.

Ansset stripped and dove into the water. It was icy cold, and stung him. He swam in broad strokes upstream, knowing that to the guards on the bank he would already seem like only a speck on the surface of the river. Then he dove and swam under the water, holding his breath as only a singer or a pearldiver could, and swam across the current toward the near shore, where the guards were waiting. He could hear, though muffled by the water, the cries of the guards. He surfaced, laughing.

Two of the guards had already thrown off their boots and were up to their waists in water, preparing to try to catch Ansset’s body as it swept by. But Ansset kept laughing at them, and they turned at him angrily.

“Why did you worry?” Ansset said. “I gave my word.”

Then the guards relaxed, and Ansset swam for an hour under the afternoon sun. The motion of the water, and constant exertion to keep place against the current took his mind off his troubles, to some extent. Only one guard watched him now, while the others played polys, casting fourteen-sided dice in a mad gambling game that soon engrossed them.

Ansset swam underwater from time to time, listening to the different sound the guards’ quarreling and laughing made when water covered his ears. The sun was nearly down, now, and Ansset dove underwater again to swim to shore on one breath. He was halfway to shore when he heard the sharp call of a bird overhead, muffled as it was by the river.

Ansset made a sudden connection in his mind, and came up immediately, coughing and sputtering. He dog-paddled in to shore, shook himself, and put on his tunic, wet as he was.

“We’ve got to get back to the palace,” he said, filling his voice with urgency, putting the pitch high to penetrate the guards’ sluggishness after an hour of gaming. The guards quickly followed him, overtook him.

“Where are you going?” one of them asked.

“To see Mikal.”

“We’re not to do that—we were ordered! You can’t go to Mikal.”

But Ansset walked on, fairly sure that until he actually got close to the emperor the guards would not try to restrain him. Even if they had not been present for the demonstration of Ansset’s skill in the Great Hall that morning, the story would surely have reached their ears that Mikal’s Songbird could kill two men in two seconds.

He had heard the call of a bird as he swam underwater. He remembered that on his last night of captivity in the ship, he had heard the cry of another bird high above him. But never, never had he heard another sound from outside.

And yet where the flatboat was the city noise had come loudly, could be heard clearly below decks. Therefore even if the boat was his prison, it had not been moored by that house. And if that were so, the evidence against the former Captain of the Guard was a fraud. And Ansset knew now who in the court had taken Ansset to use as an assassin.

They were met in a corridor by a messenger. “There you are. The Lord Mikal commands the presence of the Songbird, as quickly as possible. Here,” he said, handing the orders to the guard who made decisions, who took out his verifier and passed it over the seal on the orders. A sharp buzz testified that the orders were genuine.

“All right then, Songbird,” said the guard. “We’ll go there after all.” Ansset started to run. The guards kept up easily, following him through the labyrinth. To them it was almost a game, and one of them said, between breaths, “I never knew this way led where we’re going!” to which one of the other guards replied, “And you’ll never find it again, either.”

And then they were in Mikal’s chambers. Ansset’s hair was still wet, and his tunic still clung to his small body where it had not yet had time to dry from the river water.

Mikal was smiling. “Ansset, my Son, it’s fine now.” Mikal waved an arm, dismissing the guards. “We were so foolish to think we needed to send you away,” he said. “The Captain was the only one in the plot close enough to give the signal. Now that he’s dead, no one knows it! You’re safe now—and so am I!”

Mikal’s speech was jovial, delighted, but Ansset, who knew the songs of his voice as well as he knew his own, read in the words a warning, a lie, a declaration of danger. Ansset did not run to him. He waited.

“In fact,” Mikal said, “you’re my best possible bodyguard. You look small and weak, you’re always by my side, and you can kill faster than a guard with a laser.” Mikal laughed. Ansset was not fooled. There was no mirth in the laugh.

But the Chamberlain and Captain Riktors Ashen were fooled, and they laughed along with Mikal. Ansset forced himself to laugh, too. He listened to the sounds the others were making. Riktors sounded sincere enough, but the Chamberlain—

“It’s a cause for celebration. Here’s wine,” said the Chamberlain. “I brought us wine. Ansset, why don’t you pour it?”

Ansset shuddered with memories. “I?” he asked, surprised, and then not surprised at all. The Chamberlain held out the full bottle and the empty goblet. “For the Lord Mikal,” the Chamberlain said.

Ansset shouted and dashed the bottle to the floor. “Make him keep silent!”

The suddenness of Ansset’s violent action brought Riktors’s laser out of his belt and into his hand.

“Don’t let the Chamberlain speak!”

“Why not?” asked Mikal innocently, but Ansset knew there was no innocence behind the words. For some reason Mikal was pretending not to understand.

The Chamberlain believed it, believed he had a moment. He said quickly, almost urgently, “Why did you do that? I have another bottle. Sweet Songbird, let Mikal drink deeply!”

The words hammered into Ansset’s brain, and by reflex he whirled and faced Mikal. He knew what was happening, knew and screamed against it in his mind. But his hands came up against his will, his legs bent, he compressed to spring, all so quickly that he couldn’t stop himself. He knew that in less than a second his hand would be buried in Mikal’s face, Mikal’s beloved face, Mikal’s smiling face—

Mikal was smiling at him, kindly and without fear. Ansset stopped in midspring, forced himself to turn aside, despite the tearing in his brain. He could be forced to kill, but he couldn’t be forced to kill that face. He shoved his hand into the floor, bursting the tense surface, releasing the gel to flow out across the room.

Ansset hardly noticed the pain in his arm where the impact had broken the skin and the gel was agonizing the wound. All he felt was the pain in his mind as he still struggled against the compulsion he had only just barely deflected, that still drove him to try to kill Mikal, that still he fought against, fought down, tried to block.

His body heaved upward, his hand flew through the air, and shattered the back of the chair where Mikal still sat. Blood spurted and splashed, and Ansset was relieved to see that it was his own blood, and not Mikal’s.

In the distance he heard Mikal’s voice saying, “Don’t shoot him.” And, as suddenly as it had come, the compulsion ceased. His mind spun as he heard the Chamberlain’s words fading away: “Songbird, what have you done!”

Those were the words that had set him free.

Exhausted and bleeding, Ansset lay on the floor, his right arm covered with blood.

The pain reached him now, and he groaned, though his groan was as much a song of ecstasy as of pain. Somehow Ansset had withstood it long enough, and he had not killed Father Mikal.

Finally he rolled over and sat up, nursing his arm. The bleeding had settled to a slow trickle.

Mikal was still sitting in the chair, despite its shattered back where Ansset’s hand had struck. The Chamberlain stood where he had stood ten seconds before, at the beginning of Ansset’s ordeal, the goblet looking ridiculous in his hand. Riktors’s laser was aimed at the Chamberlain.

“Call the guards, Captain,” Mikal said.

“I already have,” Riktors said. The button on his belt was glowing. Guards came quickly into the room. “Take the Chamberlain to a cell,” he ordered them. “If any harm comes to him, all of you will die and your families, too. Do you understand?” The guards understood.

Ansset held his arm. Mikal and Riktors Ashen waited while a doctor treated it. The pain subsided.

The doctor left.

Riktors spoke first. “Of course you knew it was the Chamberlain, my Lord.”

Mikal smiled faintly.

“That was why you let him persuade you to call Ansset back here.”

Mikal’s smile grew broader.

“But, my Lord, only you could have known that the Songbird would be strong enough to resist a compulsion that was five months in the making.”

Mikal laughed. And this time Ansset heard mirth in the laughter.

“Riktors Ashen. Will they call you Riktors the Usurper? Or Riktors the Great?”

It took the Captain of the Guard a moment to realize what had been said. Only a moment. But before his hand could reach his laser, which was back in his belt, Mikal’s hand held a laser that was pointed at Riktors’s heart.

“Ansset my Son, will you take the Captain’s laser from him?”

Ansset got up and took the Captain’s laser from him. He could hear the song of triumph in Mikal’s voice. But Ansset’s head was still spinning, and he didn’t understand why lasers had been drawn between the emperor and his incorruptible Captain.

“Only one mistake, Riktors. Otherwise brilliantly done. And I really don’t see how you could have avoided the mistake, either.”

“You mean Ansset’s strength?”

“Not even I counted on that. I was prepared to kill him, if I needed to,” Mikal said, and Ansset, listening, knew it was true. He wondered why that knowledge didn’t hurt him. He had always known that, eventually, not even he would be indispensable to Mikal, if somehow his death served some vital purpose.

“Then I made no mistakes,” Riktors said. “How did you know?”

“Because my Chamberlain, unless he were under some sort of compulsion, would never have had the courage to suggest your name as the Captain’s successor. And without that, you wouldn’t have been in a position to take over after you exposed the Chamberlain as the engineer of my assassination, would you? It was good. The guard would have followed you loyally. No taint of assassination would have touched you. Of course, the entire empire would have rebelled immediately. But you’re a good tactician and a better strategist, and your men would have followed you well. I’d have given you one chance in four of making it—and that’s better odds than any other man in the empire.”

“I gave myself even odds,” Riktors said, but Ansset heard the fear singing through the back of his brave words. Well, why not? Death was certain now, and Ansset knew of no one, except perhaps an old man like Mikal, who could look at death, especially death that also meant failure, without some fear.

But Mikal did not push the button on the laser.

“Kill me now and finish it,” Riktors Ashen said.

Mikal tossed the laser away. “With this? It has no charge. The Chamberlain installed a charge detector at every door in my chambers over fifteen years ago. He would have known if I was armed.”

Immediately Riktors took a step forward, the beginning of a rush toward the emperor. Just as quickly Ansset was on his feet, despite the bandaged arm ready to kill with the other hand, with his feet, with his head. Riktors stopped cold.

“Ah,” Mikal said. “No one knows like you do what my bodyguard can accomplish in so short a time.”

And Ansset realized that if Mikal’s laser was not loaded, he couldn’t have stopped Ansset if Ansset had not had strength enough to stop himself. Mikal had trusted him.

And Mikal spoke again. “Riktors, your mistakes were very slight. I hope you have learned from them. So that when an assassin as bright as you are tries to take your life, you know all the enemies you have and all the allies you can call on and exactly what you can expect from each.”

Ansset’s hands trembled. “Let me kill him now,” he said.

Mikal sighed. “Don’t kill for pleasure, my Son. If you ever kill for pleasure you’ll come to hate yourself. Besides, weren’t you listening? I’m going to adopt Riktors Ashen as my heir.”

“I don’t believe you,” Riktors said. But Ansset heard hope in his voice.

“I’ll call in my sons—they stay around court, hoping to be closest to the palace when I die,” Mikal said. “I’ll make them sign an oath to respect you as my heir. Of course they’ll all sign it, and of course you’ll have them all killed the moment you take the throne. And, let’s see, that moment will be three weeks from tomorrow, that should give us time. I’ll abdicate in your favor, sign all the papers, it’ll make the headlines on the newsheets for days. I can just see all the potential rebels tearing their hair with rage. It’s a pleasant picture to retire on.”

Ansset didn’t understand. “Why?” he asked. “He tried to kill you.”

Mikal only laughed. It was Riktors who answered. “He thinks I can hold his empire together. But I want to know the price.”

Mikal leaned forward on his chair. “A small price. A house for myself and my Songbird until I die. And then he is to be free for the rest of his life, with an income that doesn’t make him dependent on anybody’s favors. Simple enough?”

“I agree.”

“How prudent.” And Mikal laughed again.

The vows were made, the abdication and coronation took a great deal of pomp and the Capital’s caterers became wealthy. All the contenders were slaughtered, and Riktors spent a year going from system to system to quell (brutally) all the rebellions.

After the first few planets were burned over, the other rebellions mostly quelled themselves.

It was only the day after the newsheets announced the quelling of the most threatening rebellion that the soldiers appeared at the door of the little house in Brazil where Mikal and Ansset lived.

“How can he!” Ansset cried out in anguish when he saw the soldiers at the door. “He gave his word.”

“Open the door for them, Son,” Mikal said.

“They’re here to kill you!”

“A year was all that I hoped for. I’ve had that year. Did you really expect Riktors to keep his word? There isn’t room in the galaxy for two heads that know the feel of the imperial crown.”

“I can kill most of them before they could come near. If you hide, perhaps—”

“Don’t kill anyone, Ansset. That’s not your song. The dance of your hands is nothing without the dance of your voice, Songbird.”

The soldiers began to beat on the door, which, because it was steel, did not give way easily. “They’ll blow it open in a moment,” Mikal said. “Promise me you won’t kill anyone. No matter who. Please. Don’t avenge me.”

“I will.”

“Don’t avenge me. Promise. On your life. On your love for me.”

Ansset promised. The door blew open. The soldiers killed Mikal with a flash of lasers that turned his body to ashes. They kept firing until nothing but ashes was left. Then they gathered them up. Ansset watched, keeping his promise but wishing with all his heart that somewhere in his mind there was a wall he could hide behind. Unfortunately, he was too sane.

They took the ashes of the emperor and twelve-year-old Ansset to Capital. The ashes were placed in a huge urn, and displayed with state honors. Ansset they brought to the funeral feast under heavy guard, for fear of what his hands might do.

After the meal, at which everyone pretended to be somber, Riktors called Ansset to him. The guards followed, but Riktors waved them away. The crown rested on his hair.

“I know I’m safe from you,” Riktors said.

“You’re a lying bastard,” Ansset said, “and if I hadn’t given my word I’d tear you end to end.”

It might have seemed ludicrous that a twelve-year-old should speak that way to an emperor, but Riktors didn’t laugh. “If I weren’t a lying bastard, Mikal would never have given the empire to me.”

Then Riktors stood. “My friends,” he said, and the sycophants gave a cheer. “From now on I am not to be known as Riktors Ashen, but as Riktors Mikal, The name Mikal shall pass to all my successors on the throne, in honor of the man who built this empire and brought peace to all mankind.” Riktors sat amid the applause and cheers, which sounded like some of the people might have been sincere. It was a nice speech, as impromptu speeches went.

Then Riktors commanded Ansset to sing.

“I’d rather die,” Ansset said.

“You will, when the time comes,” Riktors answered.

Ansset sang then, standing on the table so that everyone could see him, just as he had stood to sing to an audience he hated on his last night of captivity in the ship. His song was wordless, for all the words he might have said were treason. Instead he sang melody, flying unaccompanied from mode to mode, each note torn from his throat in pain, each note bringing pain to the ears that heard it. The song broke up the banquet as the grief they had all pretended to feel now burned within them. Many went home weeping; all felt the great loss of the man whose ashes dusted the bottom of the urn.

Only Riktors stayed at the table after Ansset’s song was over.

“Now,” Ansset said, “they’ll never forget Father Mikal.”

“Or Mikal’s Songbird,” Riktors said. “But I am Mikal now, as much of him as could survive. A name and an empire.”

“There’s nothing of Father Mikal in you,” Ansset said coldly.

“Is there not?” Riktors said softly. “Were you fooled by Mikal’s public cruelty? No, Songbird.” And in his voice Ansset heard the hints of pain that lay behind the harsh and haughty emperor.

“Stay and sing for me, Songbird,” Riktors said. Pleading played around the edges of his voice.

Ansset reached out his hand and touched the urn of ashes that rested on the table. “I’ll never love you,” he said, meaning the words to hurt.

“Nor I you,” Riktors answered. “But we may, nonetheless, feed each other something that we hunger for. Did Mikal sleep with you?”

“He never wanted to. I never offered.”

“Neither will I,” Riktors said. “I only want to hear your songs.”

There was no voice in Ansset for the word he decided to say. He nodded. Riktors had the grace not to smile. He just nodded in return, and left the table. Before he reached the doors, Ansset spoke: “What will you do with this?”

Riktors looked at where Ansset rested his hand. “The relics are yours. Do what you want.” Then Riktors Mikal was gone.

Ansset took the urn of ashes into the chamber where he and Father Mikal had sung so many songs to each other. Ansset stood for a long time before the fire, humming the memories to himself. He gave the songs back to Father Mikal, and then reached out and emptied the urn on the blazing fire.

The ashes put the fire out.

“The transition is complete,” Songmaster Onn said to Songmaster Esste as soon as the door was closed.

“I was afraid,” Songmaster Esste confided in a low melody that trembled. “Riktors Ashen is not unwise. But Ansset’s songs are stronger than wisdom.”

They sat together in the cold sunlight that filtered through the windows of the High Room of the Songhouse. “Ah,” sang Songmaster Onn, and the melody was of love for Songmaster Esste.

“Don’t praise me. The gift and power were Ansset’s.”

“But the teacher was Esste. In other hands Ansset might have been used as a tool for power, for wealth, for control. In your hands—”

“No, Brother Onn. Ansset himself is too much made of love and loyalty. He makes other men desire what he himself already is. He is a tool that cannot be used for evil.”

“Will he ever know?”

“Perhaps; I do not think he yet suspects the power of his gift. It would be better if he never found out how little like the other Songbirds he is. And as for the last block in his mind—we laid that well. He will never know it is there, and so he will never search for the truth about who controlled the transfer of the crown.”

Songmaster Onn sang tremulously of the delicate plots woven in the mind of a child of five, plots that could have unwoven at any point. “But the weaver was wise, and the cloth has held.”

“Mikal Conqueror,” said Songmaster Esste, “learned to love peace more than he loved himself, and so will Riktors Mikal. That is enough. We have done our duty for mankind. Now we must teach other little Songbirds.”

“Only the old songs,” sighed Songmaster Onn.

“No,” answered Songmaster Esste with a smile. “We will teach them to sing of Mikal’s Songbird.”

“Ansset has already sung that.”

They walked slowly out of the High Room as Songmaster Esste whispered, “Then we will harmonize!” Their laughter was music down the stairs.

PRENTICE ALVIN AND THE NO-GOOD PLOW

MALPRACTICE

FOLLOWER

Reuben Ives decided on his twelfth birthday that this would be his lucky year. His dog and his doctor disagreed, but he ignored them. Maynard could hide under the bed with his paws over his eyes, but it wouldn’t stop Reuben. And the doctor—well, he was one of them, and Reuben had nothing but contempt for him. He showed his contempt by always arriving exactly fifteen minutes late for his appointments, which he knew threw off the doctor’s schedule for the rest of the day. And every time the doctor got used to it and scheduled someone else into Reuben’s half hour, Reuben would arrive on time. It was just Reuben’s way of letting them know that he didn’t care, the doctor whispered to the nurse. Ho hum,

Reuben said to himself. And Maynard looked embarrassed and curled up under the chair looking more like a sheep than a sheepdog.

In fact, Reuben thought, he looks kind of sheepish.

“What are you laughing at?” the doctor asked.

Reuben sneered at him. “You. You look terrible with bifocals.”

“Thank you, Reuben,” said the doctor.

“I turned twelve this morning at 9:37,” Reuben announced.

“Happy birthday,” the doctor answered.

“Suck rocks,” Reuben responded. “How do you manage it?”

“Manage what?” asked the doctor, with imperturbable patience.

“Being sincere, whether you mean it or not. I mean can’t you—”

“But I mean it,” said the doctor. Reuben laughed.

“How do you feel,” the doctor asked, “about being twelve?”

“I’ve lived through a dozen years of being dumped on,” said Reuben.

“Really?” asked the doctor. He looked a little more interested than usual.

“Oh, doctor, yes!” cried Reuben frantically. “They’re all against me, they follow me everywhere! They’re out to get me, all of them. Protect me!”

The doctor sighed and shuffled papers on his desk.

Reuben fell to his knees on the floor. “You won’t help, then? You’re one of them. I can see it now. Maynard, protect me from them!” Reuben screamed, grabbing at the dog under his chair. Irritated, Maynard bit his hand.

Reuben looked at the scratch marks on his skin. “Et tu, Maynard,” he murmured. “Doctor, look. Even Maynard.”

“Paranoia isn’t a joke, Reuben,” the doctor said.

“A joke he says,” Reuben said to Maynard, laughing bitterly.

With the enemy ships circling our planet and everybody we meet a possible traitor, the doctor said to himself, paranoia is normal. The sky is our enemy. The world is our enemy. The only escape from fear is to be buried. But Reuben was not paranoid.

Reuben was chewing the leaves of the rubber plant.

“Isn’t it bad enough that you’re crazy,” the doctor said to him, “without you acting crazier than you are?”

“Uh uh uh,” Reuben said, getting back on the chair. “You must not express any negative emotions toward a disturbed person. Code Seven, paragraph three.”

“I’m a doctor,” the doctor reminded him. “I can tell you to go to hell if I want to.”

“Do you want to?” asked Reuben.

“Go to hell,” answered the doctor.

“I been there,” said Reuben in his backcountry voice, “and I ain’t goin’ back.”

“How do you feel,” asked the doctor, “about being twelve?”

“This,” said Reuben, “is my lucky year.”

The doctor looked at him blankly. “What do you mean, lucky?”

“Having luck,” Reuben answered. “Meeting with success; having good fortune. In other words, things is gonna go mah way.”

“And how,” asked the doctor, “is this marvelous thing going to occur?”

But Reuben sat quietly and did not answer. He just stroked Maynard for the rest of the half hour, until the doctor got up and opened the door and said, “Time’s up. Get lost, see you next week. Three-thirty. If you’re late, I’ll revoke your pass.”

“If I’m late,” Reuben said, “you’ll see me when I come.”

The doctor sighed as he watched Reuben go out the door. Reuben smiled. He never counted a visit as a success unless the doctor sighed as he went out the door.

Reuben got on the overhead, getting his ticket punched at the machine. When he got off at the downtown station, he flashed his purple pass at the man who took money and credit cards. The man smiled cheerfully and waved Reuben through, but Reuben noticed that he stepped back and that his eyes were full of fear as he looked at the boy. Reuben was not surprised—most people reacted to him that way. He didn’t like it. But at least he got through free—fringe benefits of being a Disturbed Person.

He walked out to the middle of the routing room, where the overhead train schedules flashed on large screens. A huge crowd was milling around. Reuben stopped and set Maynard down. (He always carried Maynard on the overhead because the vibrations made Maynard nervous and he would go to the bathroom on the floor.)

“Crowd’s a little bigger than usual,” Reuben said to Maynard. Maynard coughed.

Crowds were always big, Reuben thought. He wondered what it had been like back when it was legal to own your own car and people used to drive all over. How would the overhead stay in business then? It gave lousy service. There was always gum on the seats. Nobody would use the overhead unless they had to.

But they had to.

Reuben closed his eyes and counted to two hundred. People stared, but then they noticed the purple card in his hand and looked away. It was illegal to stare at disturbed persons.

Then Reuben opened his eyes. The first person he saw was a tall man in a business suit. The man was walking away, and Reuben stepped out to follow him. Then he realized that the man looked like his father, and he stopped dead. No, it wasn’t his father. But Reuben decided not to follow him anyway.

Reuben remembered the last time he had seen his father. It was his birthday, and his father had—his birthday. Father would be coming to visit him again today. Reuben felt very dark and somehow vaguely afraid.

Father would visit him and Mother would stay home. Reuben spat on the ground. The people around him did not look disgusted. It was illegal to look disgusted at the antisocial acts of disturbed persons.

Reuben closed his eyes and counted again. This time when he looked up he saw a short dumpy man in an expensive suit. He seemed uncomfortably hot, even in the air-conditioned station, and Reuben thought this one might be fun. So he put his purple card in his pocket and walked out of the station right behind the man.

Following was easy for the first few blocks, because the man was walking through crowds, and Reuben could stay ten feet behind without the man ever seeing him. Because Reuben was shorter than the adults in the crowd, staying out of sight was simple. It was one of the few times Reuben was glad he was not yet grown up.

But then the man left the crowds and went down a long alley. The only people were a few workmen unloading a truck. The man walked by and waved. The workmen waved back.

Reuben took a rubber ball out of his pocket and threw it down the alley, not far enough to reach the man, but well over halfway. “Okay, Maynard,” Reuben said, “Go earn your dog biscuits.”

Maynard took off down the alley after the ball. When he reached it he didn’t pick it up and bring it back. Instead, he pushed it farther along.

“Fetch!” yelled Reuben. The dog ignored him and pushed the ball even farther.

“Come back with that ball, you stupid mongrel!” Reuben yelled. Then he took off trotting down the alley.

The men stopped work and watched Reuben. Suspiciously, he thought. One of the workmen glanced up the alley, where the man Reuben was following was just turning the corner. Then the workman turned back and looked at Reuben.

“How come you ain in school, boy?” the man challenged.

Reuben pulled the purple card from his pocket.

“Oh, hey, boy,” the man said, embarrassed. “Hey, sorry, okay, kid?”

“Sure, fine,” Reuben answered. Maynard had the ball at the end of the alley.

“Dog doesn’t fetch too good, huh, kid?” the workman asked, trying to joke. A lot of people tried to be friendly to disturbed persons. Reuben felt nothing but contempt. He ran on after Maynard.

But when he got to the end of the alley and took the ball back from Maynard, he noticed that the workmen were still watching him. Suspiciously, Reuben thought again. What are they suspicious of? And they had seemed to know the man Reuben was following.

It didn’t matter. The man was nowhere to be seen on the busy street the alley opened into. Lost him, Reuben thought as he gave a biscuit to Maynard. “Not fast enough this time,” Reuben said. Maynard ignored him and gobbled the biscuit. “You’re not a dog,” Reuben said. “You’re a pig.”

Maynard stopped eating and glared at him.

“Okay, sorry,” Reuben said. “Geez, what a sensitive dog.”

Maynard swallowed the last of the biscuit and trotted on down the street.

“What is this,” Reuben said. “Trying to play hero and smell him out?” But Maynard went on until he had stopped in front of Auerbach’s department store. “Okay, Ugluk, Dog of the North, let’s go find somebody else.”

But Maynard wouldn’t budge. And then the man came out of the department store carrying a small sack. The chase was on again. Maynard strutted out ahead of Reuben. “Let’s not have any of that I-told-you-so crap,” Reuben said to Maynard. Maynard ignored him and went on strutting.

The man stopped one more time before they got to Liberty Park, and that was to buy a newspaper. When he got to the park he strolled to a bench under some trees where there were some guys throwing a frisbee, and a family having a picnic. He started reading the paper.

Reuben and Maynard watched for about five minutes. The man turned a page. “Whoopee,” Reuben said. “What a winner. Let’s go follow somebody else.” But just then the man looked at his watch, folded the paper, and left. Reuben almost got up to follow him, but the grass was too comfortable and the guy was dull anyway. He watched the frisbee game.

Then he glanced at the bench. The man had left the sack he had bought at Auerbach’s. What a dunce.

“Hey, Maynard,” Reuben said softly, stroking the dog’s neck. “We’ve been following a dunce. Left his bag on the bench.”

And then a woman with a poodle walked over to the bench and sat down to rest.

The poodle was in heat. Maynard was feeling frisky. He got up and trotted over to the poodle. The poodle seemed to sneer at the shambling sheepdog. Maynard didn’t mind. It didn’t seem to occur to him that a fellow dog could be snobbish.

But snobbish the poodle was, and she began to bark, running behind the woman for safety. Cheerfully persistent, Maynard followed. The poodle tried to go farther, but the leash stopped her. Maynard kept coming. So the poodle lunged away, snapping the leash out of the woman’s hand.

“Gertrude!” the woman shouted.

Gertrude took off at a brisk run. Maynard shuffled after her, gaining on her in his ramshackle way. The poodle dodged and headed back for the bench. Maynard turned faster than anyone would have thought he could, and began to head her off.

“Gertrude, come back here!” the woman yelled. “Whose dog is that? Leave Gertrude alone, you mangy mongrel!”

Reuben had been enjoying the show. But when the woman called his dog a mangy mongrel he got mad. “Who you calling mangy?” he called out.

“Is that your animal?” the woman asked.

“I feed him,” Reuben said.

“Get him away from my dog!” the woman demanded.

Reuben called to Maynard.

“Hey, Maynard, get back here,” he said. Maynard didn’t even glance back. “Come on, Maynard. You’ll probably get a disease anyway.”

The woman gasped in anger. At that moment Maynard got tired of chasing—he wasn’t used to having to ask twice—and came back. Gertrude, utterly exhausted, came back to the woman, who reached down and picked up the leash. “Gertrude, you poor thing,” the woman crooned. “Was that big nasty dog making you fraidsy? Was he, sweety?”

“Oh, Maynard, you poor poopsy-woopsy,” Reuben crooned in imitation. “Did that little warthog run away from you?” Maynard moved away in disgust, but Reuben got what he wanted: the woman had heard him.

“What do you mean, anyway,” the woman snapped, “letting your dog run around in a public park without a leash? I should have you arrested.”

Reubed pulled the purple card from his pocket. He loved to watch how people suddenly became kind and thoughtful.

The woman saw the card and suddenly became kind and thoughtful. “I’m so sorry,” she said sweetly, though Reuben could tell it was a strain. “I hope my dog didn’t disturb you,” she said as she moved away. Was that sarcastic? Reuben wondered. She had more spunk than most. But she was still a zero.

“She’s still a zero,” Reuben said to Maynard. Then he remembered the Auerbach’s package on the bench and went over to see what the man had bought.

But the package was gone. Reuben tried to remember if anyone had gone near the bench during the melee. No one. The woman must have lifted the package. Clever, Reuben thought. “Clever,” he said to Maynard. “The lady’s a thief.”

But something didn’t ring true in the whole situation. What had been in the bag? And when did the woman take it? And why, for that matter, had the man forgotten it? Why— Coincidence.

His father was waiting for him when he got home.

“Reuben, my boy,” said his father cheerfully. “Happy birthday, my lad. Good to see you.”

“Hello, Father,” Reuben said as he opened a can of dog food for Maynard.

“It’s been a long time,” his father said.

Reuben set the dog food down in a dish. Maynard slurped it up noisily. “Has it?” Reuben asked. “I’ve been busy.”

“I’ve been busy,” his father said. Then he realized that Reuben had just said that. “Oh, you just said that.” Then his father laughed. “Mother sends her love.”

“How nice,” Reuben said.

“And I brought you a present,” his father said. He had even wrapped it.

“Thank you,” Reuben said.

“Take it,” his father said, offering him the package.

Reuben took the package.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Reuben’s father asked.

“Do you want me to?”

His father’s patience snapped right then. It always snapped within the first five minutes.

“I don’t care if you flush it down the toilet.”

Reuben opened the package. It was a watch. Very expensive. The kind that told the time, the day, the weather, did math problems up to twelve digits, and played FM radio.

“Three hundred twenty-nine ninety-five plus tax,” Reuben said. “Or did you get a discount?”

His father looked angry. “I got a discount, Reuben. I own the store.”

“Ah,” Reuben said, putting on the watch. “Did you know that two plus two is four?”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“So did the watch. It’s a clever watch. Thank you.”

Then Reuben ran water into another dish and set it in front of Maynard. Maynard slopped into it, splashing all over the floor as he drank. Reuben’s father sat down on the couch. “Nice place,” he said.

“Yes,” Reuben answered. “The government gives us new furniture every three years. It makes us disturbed persons feel—not so disturbed. Of course, some of them can’t cope with new furniture, so they don’t change it. And others—the furniture slashers—they get new furniture more often. But me, I’m a regular disturbed person, so I got my new furniture at the regular time.”

“I’m glad they, uh, take care of you so well,” said Reuben’s father lamely.

“I’m sure you are. Eases the conscience, doesn’t it?”

“Reuben, do you have to?”

“Does Mother miss me?” Reuben asked. “Or has she forgotten her little boy?”

“She hasn’t forgotten.”

“Why don’t you tell her that my name is Reuben? It might remind her. I’m twelve, too, a big boy now, with bright eyes and tousled, sweet-looking blond hair. A lovely child, of whom she can be very proud.”

Reuben’s father had a sick look on his face. “Can’t you lay off? For one day a year?”

“Daddy, this is the only day in the year I get to lay on.”

“Well, I hope you’ve had a good time.”

“It’s been swell,” Reuben answered.

Reuben’s father paced angrily to the window and back again. “You aren’t crazy,” he finally said. “You aren’t crazy, Mr. Boy Genius. You just think you’re too good for the world. Come down off your IQ for a few minutes someday, Reuben. Maybe real human beings have something you don’t have.”

Reuben smiled at his father. “I love you, Daddy,” he said.

He watched his father struggle, trying not to answer, knowing what would happen if he did. Finally habit won, and his father said, “I love you, too, Reuben.”

Reuben began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, rolling on the couch, falling off and rolling on the floor. When he finally stopped laughing his father was gone, and Maynard was scratching his paws on the refrigerator door. Reuben lay on the floor looking at the ceiling for a while. Then he went to bed. For a few crazy moments he wanted to cry himself to sleep. But he hadn’t shed a tear in years. Not about to start now.

He dreamed about his mother.

He woke up with Maynard licking his face.

He followed the short dumpy man every day that week, and all the next week, too. The man had a routine. Mondays at the park, where he always forgot a package from Auerbach’s and the woman walking her dog happened to pick it up. Reuben never saw her take it, but it was always gone. Tuesdays to the airport, where he left a briefcase in a locker—Reuben followed on the overhead.

Wednesdays to the post office, where he took a letter from a post office box. The man opened the letter as he walked. Inside was another envelope, which he casually dropped by a mailbox. A few moments later another man came along, picked up the envelope, and walked away. Reuben followed this second man every time, and every time a block away from the mailbox the man opened the envelope, crumpled up the letter and threw it in a wastebasket without reading it, and saved the envelope Strange Reuben thought.

Thursdays the man was back in the park, only this time the woman came first and left an empty package of dog biscuits, which the man carried to the garbage and threw away. And Fridays the man went to a dirty movie and stayed there for three hours. So many people came and went that Reuben had no way of knowing if one of them was coming to meet the man.

And by the end of the two weeks, Reuben was more confused than ever. The short dumpy man was obviously a messenger. And obviously the messages he carried were secret. But who were the messages from? And who were they to?

Reuben imagined many things. Perhaps it was a gang of criminals passing the messages. But the short dumpy man didn’t seem like a criminal. That meant nothing, of course, as Reuben well knew. But he still didn’t think that that was the answer.

It might be government work. That fit much better, because the man’s regular routine seemed like just the sort of stupid thing the government would have somebody do. But why would the government be hiding its actions like this? It seemed to Reuben that the government spent most of its time hiding things from the people, not from itself.

Which left the last guess, which Reuben thought was crazier than the others. The man must be a spy.

Of course, everyone knew who a spy would be spying for. There was only one enemy. The spaceships circling the world had been there all Reuben’s life, a shadow hanging over the planet. All the enemy needed was an ally on the Earth and they would attack.

But who in the world would be friends with the enemy? What could anyone gain by being enslaved as the other planets had been enslaved?

It didn’t matter who, Reuben decided. It was the only possible answer to the things he had seen.

The next Wednesday when he followed the man, Reuben waited for his chance. Obviously the bit with the letter was so that if someone found it, they would simply mail it without ever realizing that it was something important. So when the short dumpy man dropped the letter, Reuben ran in before the other man could get there. He picked up the letter, looked carefully at the envelope, and dropped it in the slot. As he turned and left, he saw the other man come over to find the letter, then move quickly away when he realized it was gone.

They won’t suspect a thing, Reuben thought.

When he and Maynard got home that night, Reuben wrote down the address that had been on the envelope:

And that was all. An address and a return address.

Reuben decided it was a code. He sat down and copied out the alphabet and tried to link up all the letters in ways that might make an intelligent pattern. He tried assigning number values to the letters, and letter values to the numbers. But no matter what he did, it made no sense. He fell asleep at the table.

When he woke up he looked at his work of the night before and decided it had all been stupid. The letter meant nothing. The man just had some weird habits. He dropped letters a lot. He always left Auerbach’s sacks behind when he went to the park. He left briefcases in airport lockers just for fun. And he liked dirty movies. It meant nothing.

Then Reuben looked at the address again and realized how simple it really was. The address was real. It told where the real message was. The return address was just for show.

Reuben gathered up Maynard, who grumbled about leaving the house so early, and took the overhead to thirteenth south and twenty-first east. He walked from there to the corner of fourteenth and twenty-second.

There was no 1408.

Another theory down the drain. Discouraged, Reuben got back on the overhead and headed into town.

And just as he stepped off the overhead he realized what the address meant. He headed straight for the library and got the Forest Service map of Utah. He found Enterprise near the southwest corner of the state.

Fourteen miles north and seven miles west of the town of Enterprise, Utah, there was absolutely nothing but desert mountains. It was miles off the road, and there wasn’t a town or even a settlement close enough to matter.

So if on the fourteenth day of the eighth month, which was in three days, at 2200 hours—ten p.m., just after dark—something were to happen fourteen miles north and seven miles west of Enterprise, Utah, not a soul would see it.

What would it be? A meeting? A parachute drop? An important message? It didn’t matter. The short dumpy man had delivered the message, but it had not been received. Would the meeting or the message or the parachute drop take place anyway? They must have a backup system. It would undoubtedly happen right on schedule. And I have to do something about it, Reuben thought. It didn’t occur to him that it was none of his business. He might feel contempt for everyone he knew, but the enemy was the enemy.

Reuben went straight to the doctor’s office. It wasn’t time for his appointment, but the doctor was willing to see him anyway. Reuben explained about everything he had done in the last few weeks, about the short dumpy man and the messages, and finally about the address and what he had finally realized that it meant.

The doctor leaned forward across the desk.

“I think this is a very important day,” the doctor said.

“Of course it is,” Reuben answered. “We’ve got to tell the authorities. You’ve got to, I mean, because they’d never believe me.”

“And why do you think they’d never believe you, Reuben?” the doctor asked.

“Because I’m a disturbed person. They’d just send you a memo about what crazy thing I did this time.”

“And why do you think they’d do that?” the doctor asked.

“Because,” Reuben said, “this is just the sort of thing a paranoid schizophrenic would cook up. You know I’m not a paranoid schizophrenic. They don’t.”

The doctor looked very pleased with himself. “So you feel that you’re helpless without relying on an outside authority figure, is that it?”

Reuben cocked his head and looked at the doctor. “Yeah, Doc,” Reuben said. “That’s it.”

“You’ve had these feelings of personal helplessness for a long time, haven’t you? Or have they just started?”

Reuben got up. “Come on, Maynard. The doctor’s busy.”

“Not at all,” the doctor said, rising from his chair. “I have plenty of time to talk to you.”

“I’ve got things to do,” Reuben said. The doctor sighed. But this time Reuben felt no pleasure in it. He should have known that the doctor would only see this whole thing as another symptom.

So Reuben went to the only other person he could think of. His father’s office was in the old Kennecott Copper Building, right at the dead center of downtown.

Reuben’s hands were cold when he punched the buttons on the elevator. And when the elevator stopped abruptly on the sixteenth floor, Reuben’s knees were shaky and he was breathing hard. He had only been to his father’s office once before. And that was five years ago, before the—before. The secretary told him his father was not in.

“Don’t give me that,” Reuben said impatiently. “He’s always in. Tell him his little boy is here to see him.”

The secretary glared at him and left her desk, motioning to a security man standing nearby. The security man came and sat at the desk. The secretary came back in a few minutes and whispered in the security man’s ear.

“All right, sonny,” the security man said. “Come with me.”

They went down a thickly carpeted hall with real wood walls and several doors. At the end of the hall they turned right and went down another corridor. At last they came to Reuben’s father’s office. The security man opened the door and let Reuben in.

“Hello, Reuben,” his father said, looking at him strangely.

“Hello, Father,” Reuben said, wondering why in the world he had come to this man for help.

“What can I do for you?” his father asked.

“I need your help,” Reuben answered. Maynard scratched his paws on the front of Reuben’s father’s real wood desk. He reached down and picked Maynard up. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” his father said. “Sit down and tell me.”

So Reuben told him about the short dumpy man and the messages and the envelope and the desert northwest of Enterprise. And his father nodded all the way through.

“Have you told the police?” his father asked quizzically.

“No, Father. I’m a disturbed person, remember? I need you to tell them.”

His father nodded, and Reuben felt relieved. Until his father said, “Do you have any other evidence?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Reuben asked.

“Well, it seems a little farfetched. Why couldn’t it just be a wrong address that somebody put on the envelope?”

“But it all fits,” Reuben said, with a sinking feeling. “And what about the things this guy does?”

“Lots of people do lots of things,” his father said. “Have you talked to the doctor about this?”

Reuben looked at his father and realized how carefully he was thinking of his words before he spoke and how he was playing nervously with his telephone receiver. And he knew that his father didn’t believe him, that he was afraid of him, that he wanted the doctor to be there.

“The doctor?” Reuben asked. “Yes, Father. Go ahead and call him. I’m sure he’ll make you feel better about your little boy. He’ll call this a sign of incipient social interest, and tell you that you should be encouraged that my emotional dysfunction should now be bringing me to seek contact with my father and to try to win favor from society for my heroic but imagined deeds.” Reuben got up and went to the door. “Come on, Maynard. Don’t shed on the rug.” Maynard followed him out the door.

Back on the street Reuben felt angry and bitter. Why had he bothered? They had never believed him, never seen things his way. They all tried to cope with him, as if he were an epidemic or a forest fire that they had to keep under control. Even his mother, back in the early years—in all his memories of her, Reuben could see her trying to talk to him, trying to answer his questions, but afraid, like his father, like his doctor, like the people on the street.

He pulled out his purple card and watched people move aside, opening a path for him through the crowd. The huge trees on Main Street even seemed to recoil.

Maynard stopped and went to the bathroom on one of the trees. “Not a bad idea,” Reuben said. “Let ’em all drop dead. Let the enemy come down and take over everything. They deserve it.”

It was when Reuben was eating a sandwich at the restaurant in the overhead station that he thought of what an enemy invasion would mean. It was all right to think of huge blond men with white eyes dragging his father off in chains. But when he thought of them coming to his mother, he set down his sandwich, got off his chair, and left, flashing his purple card at the checkout lady, who smiled at him with fear in her eyes.

He took the overhead to Murray, where he transferred to the overhead up Cotton-wood Canyon. It was full of sightseers and retired people heading up to their cabins.

He got off at the seventh stop and walked up a winding asphalt path to a large house nestled among huge pines on the north slope of the canyon. The house was all wood—it could only belong to a millionaire many times over. Reuben chuckled to think of his father’s wealth.

He went to the door but did not touch the knob. Instead he stood and thought for a moment. They must have expected him to come here sometime. The doorknob would be keyed so that his palm or fingers would trigger an alarm. He remembered the household routine.

He knelt on the welcome mat close to the door, where the camera would not catch his face—only the top of his head, which would make him look like a little boy. He pushed the doorbell strip with his elbow.

A woman’s voice spoke. “Who is it?”

“Groceries,” Reuben answered.

“Today?” The woman paused. “This is Thursday. There aren’t supposed to be deliveries on Thursday.”

“They send me, I come,” Reuben answered.

“All right,” the woman sighed. The door slip open. Reuben came in on his knees. Once past the door he stood up. He could hear the kitchen intercom saying, “Just leave them on the table, please.” But he did not go into the kitchen. Instead he climbed the stairs in the living room and went down a short hall to the door that stood ajar. Inside the room someone was typing. Reuben went to the door and pushed it farther open. Well, there—

His mother sat at the typewriter, her long dark hair falling on the keys as she leaned over her work. He had often seen her like that, years ago when he had lived at home.

Then she felt his presence in the door and looked up. She was beautiful, with soft features and large eyes and a white scar down her left cheek.

She looked at him for a moment, and then fear and recognition entered her eyes at the same time.

“Reuben,” she whispered.

“Mother,” he said, stepping into the room.

She got up and moved back toward the window.

“Wait,” he said.

“Stay there,” she said.

“Mother, listen to me.”

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” she said, her voice husky with fear. “They’ll take away your card. They’ll put you in a—place.”

“Not if you listen to me. Not if you help me.”

She shook her head, her face white. She touched the scar on her cheek.

“Mother, I’m sorry,” Reuben said. “Please believe me. Please trust me.”

“Go away,” she said. A tear ran down her cheek.

“Mother, I love you,” Reuben said, reaching out his hand. “See? My hands are empty. I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“No.”

“Mother, you’ve got to listen to me!”

She closed her eyes. “I’m listening,” she whispered desperately.

And for the third time that day Reuben told the story of the short dumpy man and the message on the envelope. He told her about the doctor and about his father.

“Do you believe me?” Reuben asked.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Is it true?” she asked softly.

“Every word,” Reuben said, wanting to shout, but keeping his voice to a whisper. “I didn’t make any of it up.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if I believe you.”

Reuben’s heart sank again, only this time the pain and tightness in his chest and throat were more than he could bear. Tears came to his eyes.

“Well you’ve just got to,” he said. No sound came, but his mother saw his lips move. She took a step toward him and then stopped, seeing what no one had seen for five years. Tears on Reuben’s cheeks.

“Show me,” she said. “I’ll go with you and you show me.”

Reuben nodded, and then he fell to his knees and began to cry, saying, “You’ve got to believe me,” over and over again. When he stopped crying, his head dizzy and his throat thick, he realized that his mother’s arms were around him. Suddenly ashamed, he stood up and stepped away. He looked in her eyes and saw that even though she was looking lovingly at him, his sudden movement had made her afraid again. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Two-fifteen,” she said.

“There’s time. Come with me and I’ll show you.” They walked down the hill together to the overhead.

They got to the park a half hour later. He led her to a waiting place he had used before. “We’ll toss sticks for Maynard. It’ll look natural. Just pretend you’re my—”

She nodded. “All right,” she said.

In ten minutes the woman with the poodle came. Maynard looked over wistfully, but kept playing with the sticks. Reuben told his mother not to watch the woman. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her give a dog biscuit to Gertrude, then shake the box and toss it to the ground by the bench. Just like the last two weeks.

Then the woman got up and moved away. Reuben knelt by Maynard. “All right, Maynard,” he said. “Earn your biscuits. Get the box.”

Then Reuben stood and threw a stick toward the bench. Maynard took off after the stick, but when he got near the box he stopped and sniffed around, went to the bathroom on the bench, then picked up the box and ran back to Reuben.

“Bad dog,” Reuben said loudly, but Maynard understood, waiting patiently for the biscuit that Reuben surreptitiously dropped. Then Maynard set down the box and picked up the biscuit. Reuben grabbed the box and said to his mother, “All right. Let’s go. Slowly and naturally, in case they’re watching.”

They walked away from the park without looking back, and caught the overhead for Magna. On the first stop Reuben told her to get out, and he followed her to the overhead to Kearns. They hopped a few more overheads, then got on one heading back downtown. Only then did Reuben look at the box.

“What does the box mean?” asked his mother.

Reuben shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never picked up one of these before. I just know that she leaves this, and the guy picks it up and throws it away.”

And then he felt a terrible fear that the box would be meaningless and that his mother would think he had made it up, that he was really crazy. And she would tell the doctor, and the doctor would know that he had broken the rules and gone to see her, and he would lose his pass and go to the hospital, and he would rather die.

He reached into the box and found something taped to the inside. He peeled off the tape and pulled out three microfiches. It was too small to read, of course, but his mother looked at them and her face went white.

“There’s really something there,” she said.

She hadn’t believed him.

She turned to him and smiled. “Reuben, Reuben, I hoped so hard that it would be there.”

He felt strange. Her smile was so warm that he felt his face flush with heat that pulsed rapidly. She had hoped that they would find something.

“Here,” he said. “Put them in your purse. We’ll go to the federal building. There’s an FBI office there.”

“All right,” she said, putting the film in her purse.

“You saw,” he said. “You saw the woman leave the box. You saw how it happened.”

“Of course,” she said. “I saw it all. And with this, whatever it is, I’m sure there’ll be somebody down in Enterprise on the fourteenth.”

“There better be,” Reuben said. “This is a serious business.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence. But when Reuben got of the overhead to walk to the federal building, it seemed perfectly natural to be holding his mother’s hand.

The FBI believed Reuben and his mother. Or rather, they believed the microfilm. Reuben and his mother were in the federal building for several hours, explaining how and when and what and where, and the FBI agent listened respectfully to Reuben’s reasoning about the envelope.

“Thanks, kid,” the man said when it was over. “We’ll handle it from here.”

So Reuben and his mother left. Reuben went to the door of the house in the canyon with her, and she asked him to come in.

“I would only leave again,” Reuben said.

He turned to go, but then, as an afterthought, he said, “Mother.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Uh, Father shouldn’t…”

“I won’t tell him.” She closed the door.

Reuben and Maynard went back to the apartment. Reuben slept badly that night. He kept dreaming of his father hitting his mother, though he had never seen him do such a thing. And then he dreamed of the lady in the park with the dog named Gertrude. He watched her and watched her in his dream, but he could never see her pick up the package from Auerbach’s. It always just disappeared during the first split second he glanced away.

He woke up feeling foul. Even brushing his teeth didn’t take the taste out of his mouth. He went to where he usually found the short dumpy man and waited. Now that the FBI was taking care of things, there was no real point in following him. Except that there was nothing else to do.

But the man did not come. Reuben waited all day. Finally he went to the theater at the time the man usually came out. The dirty movie ended, but the short dumpy man was not among the crowd that came out.

Why did the routine change today?

But it was the weekend, and Reuben followed someone else on Saturday and Sunday.

On Saturday he followed a prostitute to the Nevada border. He didn’t have a passport, so he took the overhead back to Salt Lake.

On Sunday he followed a wino along Second South and finally used his purple card to buy a bottle of something. The wino said thank you and offered to share. Reuben said no but Maynard drank a little.

Reuben and Maynard went home and watched murders and happy families on television.

Sunday was October 22nd, and as he went to bed Reuben realized that northwest of Enterprise whatever the enemy was doing was being stopped tonight.

The next day the short dumpy man was right on schedule: the package from Auerbach’s, the bench in the park, and the lady with the dog. Since it was all over by now Reuben let Maynard chase Gertrude again.

The lady was more irritated than ever, and Reuben laughed. The two dogs raced barking along by the pond, and the geese swam away in a hurry.

“Stop your dog,” the lady said. “Please. Gertrude gets an upset stomach.” She spoke carefully, remembering Reuben’s purple card.

Reuben looked at the bench, ignoring her. Once again the Auerbach’s package had disappeared. But he was sure the woman hadn’t gone anywhere near it.

Gertrude ran back to the woman, who was trying to control her fury. She scooped up the female dog. Maynard bounded up and tried to jump on Gertrude. He missed, leaving muddy pawprints all over the lady’s skirt. Reuben laughed.

The lady kicked Maynard. Reuben stopped laughing. That was dangerous—Maynard had a mean streak a mile wide, and he always bit the legs that kicked him.

Maynard snapped at the lady. She kicked again, and this time Maynard bit, sinking his teeth into the loose flesh of her calf.

But the woman didn’t shriek as Reuben had expected. She just shook her leg, and Maynard loosed his grip and dropped away. She glared at Reuben and walked off, carrying Gertrude. She didn’t limp.

Maynard lay on the ground, not moving. Reuben walked up to him. “Hey, Maynard, getting weak in your old age?”

But Maynard didn’t even resent the gibe. He was dead.

When Reuben was sure of it, he picked up his dog’s corpse and walked home. He laid Maynard’s body on the carpet. There was no blood. There was no sign of any damage. There was no sign there was any’ disease. Maynard had bit the lady and died.

Reuben called the FBI. The man told him to come down and bring the dog. He sounded worried, Reuben decided.

“What happened?” Reuben said to the FBI man as soon as he arrived. At the same moment the FBI man looked at Maynard’s corpse and said, “What happened?”

Reuben answered, “The lady in the park. He bit her.”

“And?”

“And nothing. And he died.”

“What did she do?”

“She got bit,” Reuben said, a little angrily, though he knew it would be dangerous to let any emotion happen right now.

“And the dog died.”

“The man in the pinstripe suit wins the prize,” Reuben said, absentmindedly stroking the dog’s fur.

“Look, kid, I know you’ve told us straight so far, but you’re a DP, right? Do you hallucinate?”

Reuben glared at him. “Never.”

“Hey, okay,” the man said, “I just had to ask.”

“What happened? Down in the south?” Reuben asked.

“Well,” the FBI man said, “I don’t know if I can tell you, and unless the boss says I can tell you and signs it in triplicate in his own blood, I’m sure as hell not going to breathe a word.”

“They weren’t there, were they,” Reuben said.

The FBI man looked at him. “What makes you think they weren’t?”

“Because,” Reuben said, “the day after I told you they broke their routine, and the lady in the park knew enough to kill Maynard.”

“Who the hell is Maynard?” the FBI man asked.

“My dog,” said Reuben.

“Oh, he’s got a name,” the FBI man commented. “Hey, look, can I do an autopsy? Cause of death?”

“You?” Reuben asked.

“I mean one of our staff.”

“Sure,” Reuben said. “Maynard won’t give a damn.”

The FBI man laughed. “Right,” he said, and then stopped laughing when he saw the expression on Reuben’s face. “Hey, kid, I’ll have the dog right back, okay?”

Reuben nodded and sat down to wait. While he waited he wondered what they’d say if he told them about the way the lady in the park always snatched the packages when nobody could see, and how she never even seemed to get close to the bench. They’d be sure to think he was hallucinating after all.

It was a circle. No way out. He looked at the drab walls and his mind wandered.

What did the enemy look like, anyway? Nobody could say. On the few planets they had come to and had not yet conquered no one had ever seen them. On the planets they had conquered, no one would say. All that anyone knew—or at least all the government would let on—was that without active help from the people on the planet they were attacking, the enemy couldn’t do a thing. But with such help, they were irresistible.

What if thev were already on the Earth? Reuben looked at his hands, how the fingers were all the same and yet different. What if they could look just like us, and they were already going to the store, and holding down influential jobs, and—why not?—walking dogs in the park and picking up Auerbach’s packages without going near them? Possible, Reuben thought.

Maybe I do hallucinate, he thought. The idea frightened him.

The FBI man came back after about an hour.

“What did Maynard die of?” Reuben asked, jumping to his feet.

“Nothing,” said the man. “He’s not dead. I mean, he is, of course,” he caught himself, seeing the look of hope that Reuben couldn’t hide. “But there’s no reason in the world that the dog should be dead. Perfect shape. Good for years. Not an injury.”

“But dead anyway,” said another man who came through the door. Reuben hadn’t met him before.

“He’s The Boss,” the FBI man said, “and he wants to have a talk.” The Boss smiled. Reuben did not smile. The FBI man left the room.

Reuben and The Boss had a talk. During the talk Reuben figured out that nothing had happened down in southern Utah, that the whole thing was either called off or was so subtle that nobody saw it. The FBI was hunting for straws, because they did have the microfilm, and it had to mean something.

“Ideas?” The Boss asked.

“You’re asking me for ideas?” Reuben asked.

“Is there anyone else in the room?” The Boss asked.

“What kind of great ideas do you think I can give you when you’ve been trying so hard not to tell me that nothing happened down in Enterprise and that you don’t know what’s going on?” Reuben said with a look that made The Boss feel a little weak.

“So you can read between the lines,” The Boss whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Reuben asked.

“Get off my back for a minute,” The Boss said. “In my line of work we meet guys with brains about once every twenty years. Everybody else is a cop, a crook, or a congressman.”

“So let’s trade some secrets,” Reuben said, feeling, for some reason, a little less contempt for The Boss than he felt toward everyone else.

“All right,” The Boss agreed.

“You first,” Reuben said.

“Okay,” The Boss said, sighing. “So much for Top Secret. Right, nothing happened in Enterprise, even though everything pointed to it, and so we figure that either they were on to you, in which case why the hell did they have another rendezvous in the park today, or else the whole thing was a sham and they wanted someone to find out about Enterprise so we’d all go there while the real thing happened someplace else. In which case we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“And you want ideas,” Reuben said.

“You said we’d trade secrets,” The Boss said,

“All right,” Reuben said. “How’s this? Maybe it was a sham, like you said, only not to keep you from noticing something happening at the same time someplace else, but to keep you from noticing that it already happened awhile ago.”

The Boss looked at him. “Like?”

“Like you’re running around this time and maybe next time and maybe the time after, trying to find where the enemy is going to land—all the time not noticing that they’re already here and working right where you won’t notice them—under your noses.”

The Boss looked interested. “So if they can do that, what’ve they been waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” Reuben said, “unless maybe there aren’t very many of them, and they need to get up an organization, or else maybe they’re weak, and they have to divide us in order to take over. I don’t know. But I think they’re here.”

And then Reuben told The Boss about the way the woman in the park never seemed to touch the Auerbach’s package. “And the way Maynard died. My dog. Just bit her and then dropped dead.”

“Interesting theory,” The Boss said. “In fact it holds up pretty well, just the sort of devious thing we might expect. Except for one thing.”

“Yeah?” asked Reuben.

“We know who the lady is. Birth certificate, lots of relatives, no way she could be a plant, already thirty years old when the enemy ships came. Sorry. Just an ordinary Earth-type traitor.”

“Was she ever bit by a dog before?” Reuben asked.

“What does that have to do with anything?” The Boss asked.

“Because unless it’s ordinary for certain people to cause dogs to drop dead without an injury, then she isn’t ordinary. She’s changed, right?”

The Boss smiled. “Very good, Reuben,” he said. “We’ll check it out.”

Reuben shook his head. “Promise me something.”

The Boss said, “What in particular? Some promises I can’t make.”

“Promise me you’ll tell me what happens.”

On the way out Reuben stopped by Maynard’s corpse in the autopsy rooms. The body was kind of a mess, and Reuben did not touch Maynard’s fur.

“Want us to take care of this for you?” The Boss asked.

“Yeah,” Reuben said.

Three months later they told him what happened, and as Reuben had announced on his birthday, it was his lucky year. He got to meet the president of the United States and shake his hand and wear a medal, none of which impressed him much. He got to have his picture in every newspaper in the country, along with pictures of the people he had followed who turned out to be the enemy, which didn’t thrill him either.

However, he also got to go home.

His father wasn’t happy about it and Reuben noticed that there were new locks on all the bedroom doors, but Reuben just thought Suck Rocks and talked to his mother for an hour or two alone just to bug his father. They quarreled a lot, Reuben and his father. And his mother really didn’t understand him any better than she ever had. But all in all it beat hell out of the government-owned apartment and there were other compensations.

It turned out that the enemy was a very intelligent but not-too-tough marsh gas sort of thing, only about six of them, and they had to take over human bodies—curious people, who came too close—in order to do anything at all. And once they were in a human body, when the body died so did they. So—firing squads (Utah law) and the problem was over. The ships continued to circle around the Earth, but after a few months some air force shuttleships with heavy rockets shot them down. All the ships defenses, impregnable a few months before, were gone, and the ships fell into the Sargasso Sea.

It was on Reuben’s thirteenth birthday that he realized his lucky year was over. That was the day they took away his purple card and he had to start carrying money and asking permission. But he didn’t mind all that much. It was kind of fun.

The day after his thirteenth birthday his mother and father took him to the park. Out at the car, Reuben’s father remembered the camera.

“It’s upstairs in my closet,” his father said, and Reuben ran back up the asphalt path. He stopped just inside the front door. He bowed his head a moment, reached out his hand, and waited.

The camera materialized in his palm.

He opened his eyes, looked at the camera, smiled, and ran back outside, being careful to lock the door behind him as his father always asked. Then he skipped down the sidewalk, conversing with the stranger in his mind, who followed him far more closely than he would have thought possible back in the old days when he was a child, and still human.

HITCHING

Mort, he says to me, “Runt, you wanna bicycle, you gotta figure out how to get the money.” “Thanks,” I says. “Hey, Mort, you’re a real pal, I knew that already.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Mort, “I forgot, you got all the brains in the family.”

We always talk like that. I’d kill anybody else called me Runt, and he’d kill anybody else called him Mort, but we can’t kill each other, we’re brothers. Oh, every now and then he pounds the crap out of me, but these days he bleeds pretty bad before I call uncle and so he don’t fight me too much. Everybody else calls him Butch and me Ernie.

But it turned out it was Mort after all who thought up how I’d get the money for the bike I wanted so I could have a paper route so I could make some money. I asked the Olds for a bike, but the old man said no, I should earn the money myself, and I said how the hell can I do that with no bike for a route, and the old lady said you’re thirteen years old and you shouldn’t talk like that and I said something else and the old man strapped me. He thinks it still hurts. But after that I knew they’d rather die than get me the bike.

Mort saw as how I wasn’t feeling too good right then and like Mort always does he tried to joke about it and then he started smart-mouthing about how he’d never stand for it and how if I didn’t have him to look out for me I’d have let everybody walk all over me all my life.

He thinks he’s a real bigshot because he beat up Rodney Lawrence who nobody ever beat up before and because he and Darcia Kleinsmidt go up into her dad’s loft every Sunday and make out. He says he’s seen her without any clothes on but I think that’s a bunch of crap for the reason I will tell you when I get to that place in my story. He brags about a lot of things that I don’t think he ever did.

Anyway Mort comes to me on Tuesday after milking, it’s still early in the morning but it’s summer and so there isn’t any school and he says, “Hey, Runt, you still want a bike?”

“Hey shutup,” I said, thinking he’s making fun of me again.

He says, “OK, Runt, if that’s the way you want it. Only I know how you can get the money.”

Well, I thought that sounded pretty good, so I says to him, “Hey, Mort, what is it, Darcia paying you a dollar a smooch?”

“I’d be a millionaire then,” he says, and I think yeah, sure.

But I followed him around behind the barn and he tells me his plan. “See, we just hitch a ride with somebody over on I-15.”

“Somebody’s gonna pay us to hitchhike?” I says, real snotty, because if I get snotty he tells me faster.

“Don’t get snotty with me, Runt,” he says, and then like I figured he told me. “They’re gonna pay us to get out. I read about it in the newspaper.” That means that somebody who reads the newspaper told him. “You get a ride with somebody, and then you pull a gun or a knife and make them pull off onto some lonely place or a rest stop or somewhere there isn’t a lot of cars, and then you take their money and their car and leave ’em there. Or else you leave ’em their car and hitch a ride back with somebody else.”

I thought for a minute and I says, “I bet that’s stealing.”

“Ooooooh,” he says, making faces like an old lady who just heard a bad word. “Ooooooh, I forgot, you always go to Sunday School.”

Which is true. I have to keep going till I’m fourteen. The old man says that till you’re fourteen you can’t decide for yourself. But I always stick gum under the folding chairs.

“Look, Mort,” I says, “all I care about is that if we get caught they’ll stick us in jail.”

“They can’t,” says Mort, “because we’re both minors.”

“I am not,” I says, wondering what the hell being a miner has to do with going to jail.

“You are too and so am I. It means being under eighteen years old. That’s why we can’t buy beer or cigarettes. But it also means they can’t put is in jail.”

“Yeah, but we’d go to the JD place in Fillmore.”

“Jeez,” says Mort, “what a runt, Runt. This’d be the first thing we ever did wrong, they don’t send you to Fillmore till you done a lot of stuff.”

“What about painting Elton Barney’s cow green?”

He just rolled his eyes in his head. “You remember what Sheriff Burton said?” Mort asked me, like I was real dumb. “He said, ‘Boys will be boys.’”

He said that, but I still didn’t know about pulling a knife on somebody.

“Besides,” says Mort, “the guy we hit isn’t gonna know who we are or where we come from.”

“I don’t think I want a bike that bad,” I says, thinking how I really don’t want a paper route if I gotta go to the JD place for it.

“Man, what a knockout,” says Mort. “I find out that my brother’s a chicken, besides being a runt.”

Nobody calls me a chicken.

So there we were out on I-15 thumbing for a ride. Not too many people want to pick up farmers with manure on their boots, so we put on our Sunday clothes and snuck out of the house so the Olds wouldn’t ask us where we was going.

But the cars still wasn’t piling up in line to pick us up. Of course, on a lot of them Mort says, “Not this one.” And then I asked him why, and he says, “Car’s too old, this guy doesn’t have any dough,” and then one time he says, “This guy’s really rich, all he’s gonna have is checks and credit cards.” Credit cards in your pocket isn’t much good on the farm, and anyway nobody’d be fooled, they know me and Mort and they know we never could get a credit card.

So we waited for about two hours getting hotter and sweatier and I was thinking what the hell kind of dumb thing am I doing out here? But then we see this shiny new yellow car coming along and there’s just one person in it, either a girl with short hair or a guy with long hair, and old Mort jumps out in the freeway sticking his thumb out and the car slows down and the girl (this close we could tell she was a girl) flips open the back door. Me, I got in back, but old Mort, he reached through, unlocked the front, and sat down next to her.

Audi, bucket seats, thing looked like it cost a million bucks and when she started off it felt like we wasn’t even moving except the telephone poles flipped by like beanpoles when you’re running.

She was pretty but old, probably twenty or thirty, and if she wasn’t sitting right there I know old Mort would’ve leaned back and said, “Stacked, man, stacked.” Instead he just kept playing with his pocket where he had a knife.

“Where you going?” she asked us, and since we wasn’t going anyplace I didn’t know what to say, but Mort says, “Noplace you’re going, but maybe you’ll come close. Where you headed?” he asks her.

“Las Vegas,” she says, and I wonder if she’s one of them topless dancers.

“You one of them topless dancers?” Mort asks her.

“No,” she says, laughing. Jeez, Mort can be dumb sometimes.

“How old are you?” she asks us.

“I’m fourteen,” I lied. Mort said, “I’m seventeen,” which makes him a bigger liar than me, since I was only one year off, but Mort’s big and hairy and so everybody figures he’s older than he is.

Well, it was still hot but there was clouds coming in from the south and it looked like a dust storm was coming up and then rain, and so I figured we oughta get it over with so we could get back home before we got our Sunday clothes all wet and the old lady chewed us hollow. So I says, “Hey, Mort, what’re you waiting for?”

“What do you mean?” asks the girl.

“Oh, nothing,” says Mort, shooting me a glare like I should drop dead.

“Well?” says I, since I don’t like him glaring at me that way.

So he reached down into his pocket and pulled out his hunting knife and took it out of the sheath and reached over and stuck it right next to her ribs and he gets this mean look on his face and says, “Pull over.”

I gotta say that girl looked surprised and scared, but she didn’t go crazy or anything. She just had kind of a shaky voice when she said, “Right here?”

Mort thought a second and said, “No about a mile up ahead there’s a dirt road off to the right.”

And then her face turned all white and I felt real bad about what we was doing, because I wanted a ten-speed all right, but I didn’t like the way she looked.

She sped up to about seventy-five.

“There’s the road, right there, after that rock,” says Mort.

She sped up to eighty-five.

“What the hell’re you doing?” Mort says. “I said to pull over.” And his face got real mean looking, like it does when he’s trying to scare some sucker into backing down without a fight.

“I know your kind,” she says, her voice all shaky. “You’ll get me off there and take my money and my car and you’ll rape me and kill me.”

“No we won’t,” I says.

“I’ll kill you right here,” says Mort, really getting upset, I could tell because his ears was getting red.

“Go ahead,” she says. “At the speed I’m going if you kill me we’d smash up before you had a chance to get the car under control. Besides, I don’t think you know how to drive.”

Course we both did, we’d been driving a tractor since we was eight. But I sure didn’t want to crash at ninety miles an hour, and tell you the truth, I didn’t like it how her hands was shaking taking those turns.

“You’ll run out of gas pretty soon,” says Mort.

“I get fifty miles to the gallon,” she says, and her gas gauge was up above half. “I’ll get to Las Vegas first.”

“Slow down,” I says, because she wasn’t keeping in the lanes too good.

She sped up to a hundred and I needed to go to the bathroom.

“Please,” I says, “this isn’t safe.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “At this speed we’re bound to pass a highway patrolman and he’ll pull us over and I’ll tell him what you were trying to do.”

She was right. We was over a barrel, like they say, and Mort knew it too.

“Jeez,” he says, “I could cut you up into little pieces.”

He always says that when he’s mad but doesn’t want to fight.

She just shook harder and took a turn a little sharper and the car screeched a lot going around the turn. The wind had come up now cause we was driving into the storm, and I thought we’d get blown off the road in a minute.

“Hey, please Mort, let’s quit, OK?” I says.

Mort clicked his tongue and then he says, “Man, you got a chicken for a brother nothing goes right.” Then he put the knife back into the sheath. I didn’t even mind him calling me a chicken, just so the car slowed down.

But she didn’t slow down and the car was up around 105, probably as fast as it could go with a headwind.

“Hey, I put the knife away, slow down,” says Mort, and suddenly I figured out he was as scared as I was. In the old man’s Plymouth you never got much above 65, and we always went 55 if the old lady was in the car.

“If I slow down you’ll just pull the knife out and kill me,” she says.

“Mort’ll throw it out the window,” I says. “That way he can’t pull it out again. And then you can just let us out anywhere along here, we’ll walk.”

Mort glares at me again, but then we took another turn that slammed us over against the doors and Mort rolled down his window and threw out his knife. That knife cost him, too, and I knew he felt bad throwing it like that, even though I knew we’d hunt for it for a month before he’d ever give up finding it.

“OK, the knife’s gone, now pull over and let us out,” Mort says, and now his voice is shaky.

“Uh-uh,” says the girl, and then she says, “How do I know you don’t have something else hidden in your clothes.”

“Cause I said so,” says Mort.

“I’m supposed to believe you?” says the girl.

“I never told a lie in my life,” says Mort, though I figure that was about his ten millionth lie this year.

“You just go around pulling knives on people.”

“Hey, look,” says Mort, “we’re sorry.”

“Yeah, we’re sorry,” I says.

“Shutup, Runt,” he says.

“I’ll just wait until the highway patrol stops us,” she says.

And I noticed that her voice wasn’t shaky anymore.

“Please,” I says. “We’ll never do it again. We just wanted the money so I could get a ten-speed bike. We wasn’t gonna kill anybody.”

“Sure,” she says, and a gust of wind tossed us from the lefthand lane into the righthand lane, and I sure was glad we wasn’t driving in the righthand lane in the first place. “You’ve got a knife hidden somewhere else.”

“Honest, I don’t,” he says.

“Prove it,” she says.

“How?” he says.

“Take off your clothes and throw them out the window,” she says.

“The hell I will,” says Mort.

“That’s the only way I’ll know I’m safe,” she says. “But I’d rather wait till we pass a highway patrolman anyway.”

“We’ll be dead before that,” I says, because right then the dust storm hit, and you couldn’t see thirty feet ahead. And this was the windingest part of I-15.

“Take off your clothes and throw them out the window,” she says, and believe me, I just whipped off my shirt and my pants and my shoes and my socks and tossed them right out, even though when I opened the window the car filled up with dust. And after a minute Mort gritted his teeth and did the same. And there we sat in our jockey shorts, 5 for three dollars through the catalog.

“OK,” Mort says, “now let us out.”

“I said take off all your clothes,” she says, and I looked at her and figured out she wasn’t scared any more at all, she was just getting even for how we got her scared before. But it didn’t make no difference nohow, like the old man says, cause I’d have drunk straight 10/40 motor oil just to get out of that car in that dust storm. So I took off my shorts and tossed ’em out the window and then I leaned forward and kind of covered myself with my arms, which I folded in my lap like a little kid in Sunday School.

But Mort didn’t make a move to take off his shorts, and by then I was so scared I started yelling at him to take off his damn shorts and then I started to cry and so he did it and threw them out the window. But he leaned forward just like I did, and covered himself, and he turned red, and just looked at the floor, and I sure as hell knew right then that he hadn’t ever seen Darcia Kleinsmidt with all her clothes off or he wouldn’t be blushing like a bad sunburn right now.

And I stopped crying right then and for the first time in my life I felt sorry for old Mort and felt like I oughta help him. So I says, “OK, lady, you had your joke, now stop this car and let us get the hell out and get our clothes and go home.” I was madder’n hell and I glared her down as mean as I ever did the old lady when she made me help with the dishes, and she kind of looked sick and slowed down the car and stopped. It felt so good not to be going a hundred miles an hour that we just sat there for a second before she said, “Get the hell out of my car!” and then Mort and I opened the doors, even if it meant using one of our hands that was covering ourself, and we got out into the dust storm and she took off fast and there we were, stark naked on the freeway in a dust storm about fifteen miles from home and a mile from the nearest clothes.

And then, of course, the dust storm stopped and it started to rain like crazy and Mort says, “Damn damn damn damn damn,” and I says, “I wanta find my clothes.”

So we walked along the freeway until we saw a car coming and then we dove down off into the dirt and brush beside the road so they wouldn’t see us without any clothes on, only the dirt was mud from the rain and we was covered with it. “Damn damn damn,” says Mort, and I says, “Come on, Mort,” and he says, “You and your damn ten-speed bike.” We walked on to where we threw our underwear out the window only the wind had blown it away and we couldn’t see it anywheres and we was soaking wet.

But we figured as how our shoes and pants wouldn’t blow as far as our shorts, so we went on, dodging down into the mud whenever a car came, which wasn’t all that often around here. When we got out of the mud then the rain would wash it off until the next time.

Finally I found both my socks hung up on the bobwire fence along the edge of the freeway only thirty feet back and my shoes was right nearby, and Mort found one of his socks and both his shoes and finally I found my shirt hung up on the bobwire, too. I put it on, even though it was cold and wet, and I didn’t feel so naked cause it was my Sunday shirt with the long tails, but poor Mort was still stark naked with mud on his feet, carrying two shoes and one sock, and when he saw me standing there in my shirt he started yelling about how I’d screwed up the whole thing and if it hadn’t been for me and my ten-speed he’d be up in the barn with Darcia Kleinsmidt right now and what the hell did he have to have such a dumb little brother for and he wished he was an only child and it was all my fault and after this went on for a while I started to cry, because I felt like it was all true and I felt bad and anyway, I’d had a bad scare, I don’t want you to think I cry alot but I think that was about the worst time in my whole life, but after a while Mort’s calling me dumb made me mad and I took off running.

It was then that I saw both our pants out in the median strip hung up on some big sagebrush and I cut across the freeway without looking and so did Mort and just as we reached our pants we heard a car squeal to a stop and there was Sheriff Burton looking like he seen a ghost.

We just kind of stood there holding our pants while he crossed the road.

“Well, if it ain’t Morton and Ernest Olson,” he says, when he got over to us. “What the hell’re you doin’ stark naked in the middle of the freeway?”

We didn’t know exactly how to explain. But I was still mad at Mort and so I played dumb, seeing as how he always said I was. “Gee, Mr. Burton,” I says in my Sunday School voice, “I don’t know. Mort here is always telling me how I’m dumb, but he told me it’d be real fun to play around like this in the freeway.”

You shoulda seen the look on Mort’s face. But you really shoulda seen the look on Sheriff Burton’s face! He just grabbed Mort by the hair and said, “You better put those pants on fast and get in my car, boy.”

Mort started to tell him something but the sheriff just looked at him real mad and said, “I don’t wanna hear one word, boy. Your pa’s gonna have plenty to say to you when I tell him how you been playing with your little brother.”

So we put on our pants and carried our shoes and socks and got into Sheriff Burton’s car. The sheriff made me sit in front and he shoved Mort into the backseat and when he did I heard the sheriff say, “Fairy,” like the word was sour milk.

Well, when we got home the old man went off to talk with the sheriff while the old lady yelled bloody murder and made us take off our clothes and have a bath, saying all the time how much clothes cost and if us kids ever had to pay for our own clothes we wouldn’t go off playing in the rain in our Sunday best.

Then while I was in the tub with the old lady washing me like she hasn’t done in years since I was a kid, the old man came in with a real bad look on his face and said, “What happened,” and I thought of lying and then I figured that there wasn’t no way to explain how we got where we was except the truth, so I told him the whole thing, about the ten-speed and the girl in the Audi.

When I was done, the old man said, “That true?” and I said, “Swear to God,” and the old lady said, “Don’t take the name of the Lord,” and the old man said, “Thank God, Sheriff Burton said my boy Morton was a fairy,” and the old lady said, “Now, Bill, how can I teach these boys proper with you taking the Lord’s name and saying fairy in front of them?” but the old man was out of the bathroom and off to talk to the sheriff.

What all happened was that nothing happened except the Olds made us work all summer for nothing just to buy new Sunday clothes, which I didn’t think was fair cause we were growing out of ’em anyway and they would’ve had to buy us new ones before Christmas. Mort didn’t talk to me much for a long time, I thought he was mad but maybe he was just feeling bad about the whole thing, but anyway he’s never called me dumb since then.

Oh, the sheriff thought the whole thing was funny as hell and inside three days the whole county knew about it and Mort and I had to lick everybody all over again and some of ’em twice before they’d shutup about it. And the Olds never let us go down by the freeway for love or money, so Mort’s knife was gone for good, and I knew he felt real bad.

So that fall I got a job at Fernwood’s market sweeping and bagging and saved up my money so that at Christmastime I had a brand new knife for old Mort under the tree to make up for the old one, and the one I gave him was even better. But what was best of all was that the Olds gave both me and Mort ten-speed bikes that Christmas, even though it was a medium harvest, which meant that everything was OK again.

Mort and I spent a week falling down on the road a lot learning to ride, but by the time we went back to school after New Year’s we didn’t take the bus anymore because it was a lot more fun to ride the bikes except when it snowed. And Mort stopped calling me Runt. It was Speed and Ernie from then on, mostly cause even though I was fast, Mort was faster.

DAMN FINE NOVEL

Imagine, if you will, that you are now reading the story of a young writer, myself, who decides to write a first person story about a young writer, Abe Snow, who, after years of writer’s block, realizes one day that he must write a contemporary novel, the other periods already having provided exactly enough lecture notes to fill all the class periods in a one-semester university literature course. Furthermore, as he contemplates writing it he realizes that his novel will be the perfect novel, the one embodying novelness, comprising all that is novel and nothing that is not-novel, a novel that so transcends the particular that it is both generic and sui generis. I, the narrator of the story you imagine you are reading (as opposed to Abe Snow, the narrator of the first-person story whose composition and publication my story is about), first thought of having a fictional character write the ideal contemporary novel while I was browsing through the lingerie department of the San Francisco Union Square Macy’s, thinking about literature while testing how well I could see my hand through a silk teddy. It occurred to me that there would be a strong market for Minimalist underwear, which could be introduced with such advertising copy as:

or, with an appropriate photo:

Serious literature and marketing thus became entangled in my mind during a particularly strong hormonal flow. The result is (or will be, when I write it) my story about Abe Snow. He has long known, as all serious American writers know, that serious contemporary novels must all be about the suffering and struggles of writers (or ur-writers). He has also known, as all serious American writers know, that power and truth in serious contemporary novels derive from the author’s memories of childhood and the author’s fantasies about extramarital involvements, which we care about only to the degree that we are convinced the author is a genius whose life and mind are worthy of such minute examination.

Abe’s life-transforming insight is that serious contemporary American literature is squarely within the genre of celebrity autobiography, which can only be successful to the degree that the author/subject is, in fact, celebrated. Therefore the serious contemporary American novelist must become famous before publishing anything, so that when his fiction-cum-celeb-bio appears the public will not expect cognitive processes to be involved in the reading of the book.

Indeed, the book is not meant to be read. Rather it is purchased to be a talisman of the reader’s sympathy with the Celebrated One. Having been created by the celebrity, the book is the most easily obtained scrap of his or her personal detritus, giving its purchaser immeasurable powers in the arcane vodun of Celebrism, the folk religion of the American people. The book is not an end in itself; it is a channel to the god, and therefore must be endued with mystery. Any attempt to understand the novel would show the worshiper’s lack of faith in the Celebrated One, as if the presumptuous reader feels himself capable of judging whether the Celebrated One is worthy of celebration.

Hence Abe Snow realizes that to take his place in the pantheon of contemporary American letters it is essential that his genius and vision be so celebrated that he need not concern himself with the tedious labor of creating stories that people might voluntarily read for pleasure.

With this understanding, Abe’s long-time writer’s block evaporates at once, and he writes the ideal novel. Through a series of machinations that I have not yet thought of, Abe contrives to become a famous writer with a famous agent, and then his book brings more than a million dollars at auction.

Abe’s working title, and the title he expected to see on the finished book, was, as befitted the ideal novel, F---ing Good Read. The publisher, however, presents to him the results of a survey of literary opinion-makers showing that during the coming decade they will no longer be impressed by the word f---. The publisher offers as an alternative the title Damn Fine Novel. Abe Snow finds this acceptable, and eight million copies are printed, shipped, sold, and worshipfully not read.

In addition, Abe writes a very short story about the writing of Damn Fine Novel which is published, under the title “Damn Fine Novel,” in a magazine of unassailable literary reputation. This does not increase the audience for the ideal novel, but it does mean that Abe moves directly from the bestseller lists to the anthologies of contemporary literature assembled and xeroxed by literature professors for the edification of their graduate students, who will then write theological essays affirming that Damn Fine Novel is holy writ and should be required reading for all American students. This, plus heavy exploitation of foreign and film rights, guarantees that Abe Snow will never have to write again.

At this point I (not the narrator of the story you imagine that you are reading, but the implied author of the story you are in fact reading) am uncertain whether all this happened within Snow’s book Damn Fine Novel or whether his book Damn

Fine Novel was part of my own story “Damn Fine Novel,” which may or may not be the story that you, the inferred audience, are reading. And if you are in fact reading and attempting to understand it, I must say it shows a surprising lack of faith on your part, which hurts and disappoints me after all we’ve been through together.

BILLY’S BOX

The box was in the living room when Billy came home from school. “What’s in the box?” he asked. “You’ll see,” said Mom, “as soon as Dad comes home from work.”

When Dad came home, he opened the box. Inside was a television set. All of Billy’s older brothers and sisters were happy to see the television, but Billy was more interested in the box. It was as tall as Billy, and so wide he couldn’t touch both ends at the same time. Billy thought the empty box would be a lot more fun than the TV.

“Dad,” said Billy, “can I have the box?”

“Sure,” answered Dad.

The next day Billy hunted all over the house for things to put in his box. He found an empty toothpaste tube in the bathroom, and an empty cereal box in the kitchen. He found a whole box full of old buttons. He found a shoe that didn’t have a mate. And he put them all in his box in the living room.

When his sister Annie came home from school, she said, “What is that box still doing in the living room?”

When his brother Todd came home from school, he said, “Does Mom know you have all that stuff in here?”

When his sister Dora came home from school, she said, “Can’t you play without making a mess?”

And after dinner they all said, “What is all that stuff for, Billy?”

Billy didn’t say anything. He just sat inside his box, putting the cereal box, the toothpaste tube, the buttons, and the shoe right out in front.

Dad smiled. “Why, it’s a store, of course,” he said. “How much are those buttons selling for?”

Billy thought for a minute. “A hundred dollars,” he said.

“Oh,” said Dad. “I’m a little short this month, I can’t afford that. Don’t you have any bargains today?”

“Oh yes!” agreed Billy. “They’re on sale for two cents each.”

“That’s a real bargain,” Dad said. “I’ll take three buttons.”

Then he handed Billy six cents, and Billy handed him three buttons.

“Oh,” said Billy’s brother and sisters admiringly. “What a neat store!”

The next day Billy hunted for things again. This time he found a yardstick, and Mom gave him some string. He tied the ends of the string through the holes in the ends of the yardstick. He pulled back on the string and the yardstick bent a little. Then he let go of the string with a twang.

“SWICK!” he said. “SWISH! ZIP!”

When Annie came home from school, she said, “Is that box still in the living room?”

Billy was hiding down inside the box. When she said that he stood up and held the yardstick out, and twanged the string. “SWICK!” he said. Annie left the room, laughing.

Todd came home and said, “Does Mom know you’ve got the yardstick in your store?”

Billy twanged the string at Todd and said, “ZIP! No she doesn’t, cause it isn’t a store!”

Todd left the room, saying, “I thought it was a store.”

When Dora came in she said, “What’s all this twanging and zipping and swicking? Can’t you play without making noise?”

But Billy only twanged the string at her and whispered, “SWICK! ZIP! SWISH! TWANG!”

And after dinner they all asked, “What are you doing, Billy?”

Billy didn’t say anything. He ducked down inside the box where no one could see him. Then he stood up and twanged and zipped them all.

Dad smiled. “Why, that’s a castle, of course!” he declared. “Are you a knight?”

“No,” answered Billy. “I’m the king. And if you come any closer, I’ll get you with my bow and arrow.” And then Billy pulled back on the string with all his might to make a huge twang. But the string didn’t twang at all. Instead, the yardstick broke right in half.

“Oops,” said Billy, “I’m sorry.”

Billy’s brother and sisters were about to say, “I told you this would happen,” but just in time Mom said, “Well, looks like without a bow you’re not a king anymore, are you?”

Billy looked at the broken bow. “Nope,” he agreed.

“Now it’s just a yardstick,” Dad said.

Billy looked at the two pieces in his hand. “I think it’s two half-yardsticks,” he said.

“Well then,” Dad said, “it looks like that box isn’t a castle anymore. What can it be now?”

Billy thought and thought. Then he got an idea, “it’s a repair shop!”

“Good idea,” said Dad. Billy, Dad and Mom hunted through the house. Mom found glue and tape, and Dad found two straight sticks. Then Billy set the yardstick on top of the box, and he put glue on the broken place and pushed the two pieces together. Dad helped Billy tape on the two straight sticks so the yardstick would dry straight.

“And now,” said Dad, “let’s leave the yardstick in the repair shop overnight.”

That’s what they did. Mom turned on the television set and Billy sat down between Mom and Dad and watched the show with the rest of the family. “I’m sorry I broke the yardstick,” he whispered.

“You didn’t mean to,” Dad said.

“And tomorrow it will be good as new, thanks to your repair shop,” added Mom.

Billy smiled. “I like my box,” he said.

When he went to bed, he thought for a long time about what his box would be the next day.

Maybe a zoo—if I can find a tiger, he decided at last—just before he went to sleep.

THE BEST FAMILY HOME EVENING EVER

“Next week,” said Dad at the end of family home evening, “the lesson will be about why family members shouldn’t say unkind things to each other when they’re angry.”

“Yippee!” shouted nine-year-old Alan. He was glad the lesson was on family members not getting angry with each other. Alan’s brothers and sister always seemed to be angry with him.

He remembered borrowing Ryan’s electric shaver to practice shaving and Ryan had yelled at him. At Christmastime he tied red bows on Alice’s geranium to surprise her and she became really upset.

Even Dad and Mom had become irritated with him—like the time when he taped the two halves of the dining room table together underneath so that they couldn’t be pulled apart to put extra leaves in. Alan thought it was funny. Dad and Mother didn’t.

I can’t wait for next Monday to come, Alan thought.

Then Father continued, “And I’m going to assign Alan to give the lesson.”

“Uh-oh,” Alan said.

“You can do it,” encouraged Mother. “You were so enthusiastic a moment ago.”

Alan thought for a minute. “I guess since I’m an expert on making people angry, I probably could give a lesson on how to keep all of you from being cross with me.”

Everybody laughed. But Alan really meant what he said.

He had never given a lesson in family home evening before—at least not all by himself—and he wanted to do a good job. And so he thought about it all week.

Every now and then Mom would say, “Alan, how’s the family home evening lesson coming? Want any help?”

“It’s coming great, Mom,” Alan would say. “I’ve decided to do it all by myself, but thanks anyway.”

On the Sunday night before family home evening, Alan spent a lot of the evening downstairs in his room, writing.

“What are you writing?” Dad asked.

“Things,” Alan answered, “for the family home evening lesson.” As soon as he got home from school on Monday afternoon, Alan put a sign on the basement door. It said, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER! FAMILY HOME EVENING LESSON UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

His second oldest brother Harry knocked on the basement door. “Alan,” he said. “I want to watch television.”

“Sorry,” Alan called. “You can’t come down right now.”

Harry became upset. “I’m warning you, Alan, this better be a mighty good family home evening!”

“Don’t worry,” Alan said.

After a while his sister Alice knocked on the door. “Alan,” she said, “all my sewing stuff is in the basement. Can I come down?”

“I’m sorry, sis, not now,” Alan replied. “Can’t you crochet for a while instead?”

“I want to sew, Alan,” she said, sounding cross.

“Sorry,” Alan repeated. “But if I let you come down it would ruin my family home evening lesson.”

“It better be good,” Alice threatened.

“It’ll be one of the most interesting family home evenings we’ve had,” Alan promised.

Finally it was dinnertime and Alan came upstairs, closing the basement door carefully behind him. When dinner was over, the family gathered together in the living room for family home evening.

After the song and the prayer, Alan stood up and said, “Tonight the lesson is on how family members shouldn’t yell or talk unkindly to each other even when they’re upset. When someone yells at another person it makes that person feel bad, and that isn’t the way we’re supposed to make people feel.”

Everyone agreed that Alan was right. Then he passed out pieces of paper to everyone. Dad read his first: “If you came home from work and you set down your briefcase and then some of us got into it and made paper airplanes out of the papers, what would you do?”

Dad thought for a minute. “I would probably get angry.”

“But what would you do about it?” Alan asked.

Dad smiled. “I’d call in the ones who made the paper airplanes and explain to them that these were important papers that other people were depending on, and I would ask them to unfold the paper airplanes and flatten out the pages as best they could.”

“You wouldn’t yell?” Alan asked.

“I wouldn’t yell,” Dad promised.

Mom read, “If you were making a cake and one of your children came in and jumped real hard in front of the oven and the cake fell, what would you do?”

“Well, I would feel just awful,” said Mom. “I’d explain to that child how his jumping made the cake fall and ruined the family’s dessert and that I felt really bad about it.”

“But you wouldn’t say anything mean?” Alan asked.

“Not if I were acting the way I should,” said Mom, smiling.

Soon all the family promised that they would not be cross or unkind to other family members anymore even when they had cause to be angry.

“Is that the whole lesson?” asked Ryan.

“No,” Alan said. “Now we’ll go downstairs to the family room.”

Everyone went downstairs, Alan first. He watched them very carefully as they saw what the family room looked like.

Everything was in the wrong place. All the books were out of the bookshelves. Alice’s sewing things were scattered everywhere. The boxes from the storage room were piled up around the bottom of the stairs. There were little pieces of wadded up newspaper on the floor. And facedown on the Ping-Pong table was what looked like an expensive picture that Mom was going to frame, ripped right in half. It was the worst sight any of them had ever seen.

“What a terrible mess!” said his mother, irritably.

“I know it, Mom,” said Alan. “But you can’t yell at me. All of you promised you wouldn’t be cross no matter how upset you got.”

Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at Ryan. Ryan looked at Harry. Harry looked at Alice. Alice looked at Alan.

“Alan,” Alice said, “if we can’t yell, can we at least whisper that we want to knock somebody’s block off?”

“No,” Alan said.

Alan gave them all a little time to think. Then he asked, “Is anybody here going to be cross at anyone else, namely me?”

After a while they all said, “No, we won’t.”

Then Alan smiled. “All right, you passed the test. Now I’ll tell you about this mess. Actually I didn’t just scatter these things around even though it looks that way. I set them all very carefully where they are so that nothing would be damaged. And see, Mom, I cut out some paper the same size as your picture and you just thought I’d ripped up the original one. I’ll have everything back in place in a couple of hours.”

Then everybody laughed, because Alan had really made them realize how they had been behaving toward each other. They decided that Alan shouldn’t have to put everything back alone, so they all worked together, and soon everything was back in place.

When it was all cleaned up, Alan said, “Well, I guess my lesson’s over. Thanks for helping.”

“It was a good lesson, son,” Dad said. “And if we could keep from yelling about the way this family room looked a few minutes ago, I think we can keep from being upset about anything.”

“It was a good lesson,” Ryan said, “but I hope you never make the family room look like that again.”

“You must be kidding!” Alan replied. “I’ll never make a mess like that again in my whole life. It took hours! You guys may think being a messy kid is easy, but I can tell you it is really hard work!”

BICICLETA

Amauri pushed the bicycle up the long hill. At the top was a small Catholic church with a little building behind where the padres lived. In back of this building was a little shack that Amauri’s family called home. “Mamae (Mother)!” he called out when he neared his house, and his mother appeared at the door.

“Where have you been, Amauri?” she asked, her back still bent from the day’s work of cleaning in the tall office building downtown. Then she saw the bicycle. “What do you have there, Amauri?” she asked, and her eyes looked worried.

“A bicicleta (bicycle), Mamae,” Amauri answered.

“Where did you get it?” his mother questioned again, and Amauri knew that she was afraid he had stolen it, because many of the poor people in their neighborhood sometimes stole things to get money to buy food. Amauri’s mother was grateful that her five children didn’t steal.

“A man gave it to me, Mother,” Amauri answered proudly. “I’m going to be a delivery boy! I’ll ride the bicycle from place to place, delivering lunches to the businessmen and groceries to the ladies in fine houses!”

“You mean you have a job?” And Amauri’s mother smiled with joy.

Amauri told her about how he had walked up to a man and said, “Do you need a boy to work for you?” The man had thought for a few moments and then invited him inside his store. They talked for a while, and he told Amauri that he would pay him fifty centavos an hour.

“How many hours will you work?” his mother asked.

“Eight hours every day,” Amauri answered. “That means I will get four cruzeiros a day or more than twenty cruzeiros a week. I can buy food for the family!”

Amauri hugged his mother and she hugged him back. “What a good nine-year-old son I have,” she said gratefully. “Now you are truly the man of the family. Ever since your father died I have been the only one earning money. Now you will help me buy beans and rice for our breakfast and dinner. Enough talking for now, son. Remember, the elders are coming tonight, and we must get the house ready.”

Amauri got water from the well, and his little sister Cecilia cooked the beans and rice for dinner. The other children made the two beds they all slept on, while Mother carefully swept the cold, hard-packed dirt floor.

When the missionaries came, they stood outside the door and clapped their hands together, because that is the way people announce themselves in Brazil. Cecilia ran to open the door.

“Boa noite, elderes (Good evening, elders),” she said. “Come in.”

The tall elders shook hands with everybody. Elder Samson was blond and showed many teeth when he smiled. Elder Bonner had red hair and freckles all over, even on his arms. Although they were Americans, they spoke Portuguese, but sometimes it was hard to understand them.

The elders and Amauri and his family sat on boxes around the table, and then the elders told them all about the commandments of God, including one that asked them to give the Church one-tenth of all the money they earned. Mother was thoughtful when the elders told her this, because she barely made enough money to feed the family. But then she smiled. “Of course,” she said. “That is why little Amauri got a job today. We can pay tithing to the Lord and still have enough to eat.”

Amauri felt very proud to tell the missionaries about his job. “Who knows?” Amauri said, “maybe someday I will deliver a lunch right to the building where my mother works.”

“But what about school?” asked Elder Samson.

“School is not for poor people,” said Amauri’s mother sadly. “We do not have the money to buy books.”

And then Amauri remembered something awful. His face turned white. “What’s wrong, Amauri?” the elders asked.

“I just remembered,” Amauri said. “I only have three days to learn how to ride the bicycle.”

“What?” asked Elder Bonner, surprised. “Nine years old and you don’t know how to ride a bicycle?”

Amauri shook his head. “We are too poor to have a bicycle. Now I will have to learn before Thursday. How can I learn that fast?”

Everyone looked worried now. Learning to ride a bicycle wasn’t easy.

Then Elder Bonner said he had an idea. “We will teach you how to ride!” he shouted, and Elder Samson nodded in agreement.

The next morning the missionaries came back. They could hardly wait to get Amauri out of bed and onto his bicycle.

It was harder than Amauri had thought it would be. He fell down again and again. Even on a grassy field it hurt to fall, but he kept thinking: The Lord got me this job so that my family can pay tithing. And I’m going to get back on that bicycle.

The next day Amauri rode for ten meters all by himself before the bicycle started to tip over, then he stopped it from falling by sticking out his foot. At the end of the riding lesson he told the elders, “It’s time for me to go home. And you’ll have to hurry—I’m going to ride this bicycle all the way back home. And I’m going to ride it very fast.”

Amauri got on the bicycle and pedaled as fast as his legs would go, the elders behind him shouting and cheering him on. When he arrived home, Cecilia and the other children ran out of the house laughing and clapping their hands.

“Como Deus me abencoe (How God is blessing me)!” he shouted to the elders when they came into the house. “First a job, and now you have helped me learn to ride a bicycle so I can do it well!”

The elders just laughed and shook his hand. And then the children hugged him in their excitement.

The next day was Thursday, and Amauri rode the bicycle all alone downtown to the store. He took the lunches and delivered them, and later took fresh meat to housewives and cabbages to restaurants. He was exhausted when nighttime came.

When he got home he tied the bicycle to a tree. Then he knelt beside it and said a prayer, thanking Heavenly Father for his help. When he was through he patted the bicycle seat.

“Oi, bicicleta (Hey, bicycle), que amigo voce e (you and I are going to be good friends)!”

I THINK MOM AND DAD ARE GOING CRAZY, JERRY

I was only forty-five minutes late getting home with the Ford, and that was only because Darrell, who is my best friend, wanted to be dropped off at his girlfriend’s house in Cupertino. If I had known what was going on at home, I would have hurried. What was going on at home was the end of my peace and happiness.

“Shhh,” said Anne, my younger sister who is sixteen and had been driving for three wonderful months of parking tickets and running out of gas in odd places.

“What’s up? Somebody having a surprise party?” I asked.

“No,” said my brother Todd. “At least, we’re not. But Mom and Dad seem to be having some kind of party.”

“What’s wrong? Everybody looks so serious.”

“What’s wrong?” asked my older sister Val in tones of righteous indignation. “What’s wrong?”

“Yeah. I mean, what’s wrong?”

And then they told me. All at once, in loud whispers. When I had finally sorted out all the different stories, this is what I got:

When Anne got home with the Pinto, it had a new dent in the door from opening it hard into a light pole in a parking lot. But Mom and Dad weren’t angry—they just smiled and took the car keys from her and went into the bedroom and locked the door. When Todd got home with the car, it was nearly out of gas, and he didn’t have enough money to fill it up; but Mom and Dad didn’t complain, just took the keys and went back to their bedroom and locked the door. And when Val came home four hours late from a “quick trip to the store to get more shampoo,” Mom and Dad didn’t complain about the Volkswagen being gone so long—just took the car keys, and you know what happened then.

And no sooner had they finished telling me their stories than out of their bedroom came Mom and Dad, chortling and smiling. “Hi, Jerry,” said Dad.

“Hi,” I said, “Sorry I was late getting back, but I had to take Darrell to his girlfriend’s house in Cupertino.”

“That’s fine,” said Mom.

“Is the car nearly out of gas?” asked Dad.

“I didn’t have any money to fill it up,” I said.

“Oh, fine, fine,” Mom said, giggling a little. “Could I have your car keys?”

“How come?” I asked.

Father just grinned a little broader. “We want to press them and put them in your baby book.”

I handed over the keys.

“Come into the living room, children, my loves,” sang Mother, and I swear it looked like they were prancing as they led the way.

As we followed them, Anne looked at me with a frightened expression on her face. “I think Mom and Dad are going crazy, Jerry,” she said. Her voice was trembling.

When we got into the living room, Mom and Dad were playing catch with the car keys.

“Definitely,” I told Anne. “Bonkers. Bananas. Out, so to speak, of their minds.”

When we had all settled down, looking at our once-stable parents with expressions that ranged from concern to near panic, Father began a little speech.

“Perhaps you children have never counted, but we, a middle income family, have four cars. Four cars is an unusually large number of automobiles for a middle income family, but then we have an unusually large number of drivers at home. Six, to be exact. Six drivers and four cars. One could reasonably suppose that this would be enough cars to go around, but not so. Today your mother had an appointment at the dentist’s. The appointment was at 2:00, but at 2:00, even though there were supposed to be three cars at home, there were none. Mother missed her dental appointment. Does your tooth hurt, Mother?”

Mother nodded, holding her jaw. “My tooth hurts, Father.” She laughed, “And I today received three pieces of mail. One was the insurance bill. One was the bill from our gasoline credit card. And one was the monthly statement from the bank on the two cars we are still paying for. I added them up and reached a sobering conclusion.”

He did not look particularly somber.

“My dear children, I believe we are the largest single mainstay for the automobile and insurance and oil businesses in America today. If we did not use our cars for one week, Ford Motor Company stock would drop three points and there would be a coup in Saudi Arabia. If we did not use our cars for a year, our country would be plunged into a major depression. We are supporting the economy of the United States of America.

“We are honored. This is a privilege for us, and we don’t plan to shirk our responsibilities. However, some of this privilege ought to be shared. Mother, will you get the documents?”

Mother left the room. While she was gone, Father asked each of us in turn how much we made at our jobs. None of us was making a fortune, but we were doing surprisingly well. Even Anne, who worked in a hamburger drive-in after school, pulled down about a hundred a month. No wonder she always looked like she stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine.

And then Mother came back and handed each of us a piece of paper with the words LEASE AGREEMENT at the top of the page. I won’t give you the legal language. Boiled down, it went this way:

Each of us who planned to drive any car at all during a given month had to pay a basic fee of eight dollars to cover part of the insurance costs. If our grades fell below a B average, we had to pay twenty dollars a month.

“That’s quite a jump,” said Anne, who often did not have a B average.

“So is the jump in insurance rates when your grades go down,” answered Mom.

The agreement also called for us to pay all traffic fines, the deductible on the insurance in case of collision, and all the gas we used.

“What?” asked Val, turning white. “All the gas?”

“The car is to be returned home with the tank full, every time,” Dad said.

There was also a mileage fee. For the LTD, ten cents per mile. For the Pinto, eight cents per mile. For the Volkswagen, because it was old, six cents per mile, and for the Galaxy, commonly known around the house as “the Ford,” twelve cents a mile.

“Twelve cents a mile!” I shouted. That was the car I preferred to drive.

“It’s the newest car. It has the greatest depreciation,” said my father, smiling.

“You will keep track of the mileage,” said Mother, “on these handy little Automobile Record sheets, which we will have printed up and placed in the glove compartment of every car. After every use of the car, you will write down your mileage and the number on the odometer. When you come home, you will give your Automobile Record sheet to the leasing company—your father or myself.”

And the final clause of the contract was the stinger. “Permission for use of the cars will automatically be suspended until all dues and remunerations are paid in full.”

“You mean we can’t even be late?”

“Not even by a day,” Father said, smiling.

Anne was outraged. “I thought we were a family, not a business!”

Mother only smiled her if-you-get-upset-it-will-only-make-it-worse smile. “Every family is a business, dear. There are income and expenses and cash flow. We just think it’s time that your father stopped supplying all the income and you stopped monopolizing the expenses. There’s the contract. You will all please sign.”

“And if we don’t?” asked Todd, already cringing because he knew the answer before he asked.

Father held up all the car keys—quite a bundle of them—and said, “The cars will no doubt miss you, and you will probably wear out your shoes faster, but the walking will be good for your health.”

Anne didn’t get it. “You mean if we don’t sign, we don’t drive?”

“That’s what he means,” said Val.

“Here are the pens,” said Mother.

“Sign or walk,” said Father.

We signed.

“After all these years,” I said, “I never knew that my parents were so greedy.”

“Think of it this way,” Dad said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “By saving money on the cars, we can go on putting food on the table. It’s a fringe benefit that isn’t written into the contract. Your parents won’t go broke.”

As we left the room, Val whispered to me, “They go through these phases—it’s part of being parents. They’ll forget about it in a week.”

They didn’t forget about it in a week. They didn’t forget about it in a month.

“Mom, can I take the car tonight?” Anne asked. “Debbie and I want to see Superman,”

“Again?” Mother asked. “How many times have you seen it?”

“Only three,” Anne said. “Star Wars still holds the record.”

“I hardly dare ask how often.”

“Six times.”

“You may take the car,” said Mother. •

“Thanks!” Anne said.

“As soon,” Mother added, “as you settle up your car leasing bill.”

Anne looked horrified. “You didn’t say anything about it.”

“Why should I have? It’s your bill, not mine.”

“But I’ve spent almost all my money.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe Debbie can drive.”

They went over the accounts. “Your total bill is now $38.56,” Mother said.

Anne gulped. “But, Mom, that’s more than a new top.”

“And just think,” Mother said with a smile, “we’re only charging you half what it costs us!”

Anne went to her bedroom and got the money and paid Mother. “Take it,” Anne said. “Take it all. I don’t like money anyway. I hate money. I never want to see money again. Money is filthy and disgusting. Take all of it.”

“Aren’t you going to the movie?” Mother asked.

“I have forty-two cents left. That wouldn’t pay for the gas to get the car out of the driveway. Let alone the movie.”

“I’m sorry, dear,” said Mother. “Perhaps if you walked to Debbie’s house more often—it isn’t even a mile.”

“What am I supposed to be, a pioneer?”

“But haven’t you heard, dear?” asked Mother. “The sidewalks are paved all the way there.”

“Would you really thrust your own youngest daughter out in the snow and the sleet—”

“This is California, dear. If it starts snowing, I’ll let you take the car for half price.”

I was in the kitchen helping Mom make tuna sandwiches for fourteen billion of Todd’s friends who had just happened to come over on a Saturday. We couldn’t help but overhear their conversation in the living room.

“How will we all get home after the game?” asked one of his friends. They were seniors in high school and didn’t have anything better to do than worry about getting home from the game.

“Maybe I could take you,” Todd said.

“That’d be great,” said another friend.

“Wait a minute,” Todd said. “We’d have to share the costs.”

“Costs?”

“The only car big enough is the LTD. That’s ten cents a mile. I figure that with the eight of you that’s got to be around fifty miles. Plus a pro rata share of my monthly insurance bill and the cost of gasoline, which at sixty-nine cents a gallon and eleven miles to the gallon comes to $3.13, plus the mileage and share—that’s $9.13. And there are eight of us so it’s $1.14 each, with a penny left over. I’ll treat you to the penny.”

They were astounded. They were appalled. “A dollar each just to get home from the game?”

“A dollar and fourteen cents. And don’t forget the free penny.”

“I think my parents can take me.” Pretty soon all of them decided their parents could take them home.

“Too bad,” Todd said. “It probably costs your parents more than a buck to make a special trip there and back. You guys just don’t know how much it costs to keep cars running these days.”

I spread tuna on the last sandwich as Mother ran water in the bowl. “Do you hear what I hear?” I asked.

“I think my son Todd is beginning to get some sense about money,” she answered.

I didn’t say anything. I thought it sounded like my brother Todd wasn’t pulling a full train.

I don’t make much money at my job. Not when I have to support my driving habit and my taste in clothes and all my records and tapes and a minor addiction to buying four science fiction novels a week. I began to discover the joys of walking.

Do you have any idea how many barking, savage dogs there are on an average residential block in a California suburban community? (Seven—one with rabies.)

Do you know how many steps it takes to go a mile and a half to school on foot? (Exactly 3,168, unless you have a blister and take shorter steps.)

Do you know how hot it gets when you walk outside in the summer in California? And they don’t even air-condition the street.

I also discovered that rain is wet, wind is cold, passing cars like to go fast through puddles to splash you, and you meet the strangest people waiting for the WALK signal at a busy intersection.

And even with all that walking, my automobile leasing bill was still horrendous. I had given up on the LTD except for dates, but even with the Volkswagen I was paying thirty or forty dollars a month.

“I give up,” I said. “I won’t do any more business with this rip-off car leasing business.”

“Really?” asked Father, looking up from his copy of the San Jose Mercury.

“Really,” I said. “I will not pay your fees. I will not drive your cars.”

“Mother!” Father called. “Jerry has decided to become a pedestrian!”

“I have not,” I said. “I have decided to take my patronage elsewhere.”

“Where?” he asked.

“If Hertz is good enough for O. J. Simpson, it’s good enough for me.”

As I left the room Dad called after me, “But, Jerry! We try harder!”

I came back three hours later. Whipped. Beaten. Defeated.

“Do you know what they charge?” I asked.

“A lot?” Father guessed helpfully.

“I couldn’t rent a pair of roller skates from them for less than fifty dollars a month.”

“Ah.”

“You and Mom may be a rip-off leasing company, but at least you’re competitive.”

“Oh, come off it,” Father said, laughing. “We have the best rates in town.”

“I want to buy a horse,” I said.

“I can get you a good price on hay,” Father answered. He laughed and laughed. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I managed to keep a smile off my face until my bedroom door was closed behind me. Then I laughed.

And then Miriam finally agreed to go on a date with me. She was the best-looking girl in the ward (also in the state; probably in the Church), and she had finally broken up with Alvin Hopper, which was no great loss to her and a tremendous gain to a college freshman like myself with excellent taste in girls. On my fourth try she agreed to go out with me. I shot the works. The LTD, complete with car wash, a thirty dollar dinner in San Francisco, a drive through beautiful scenery on the way up, Bayshore Freeway on the way back, and charming, delightful conversation all the way. The conversation was the only thing free on the whole date.

And she was worth it. She could discuss at least thirteen different topics intelligently and got a B- on all the others, which means she was more than just a pretty face. She let me open doors for her and took my arm without my even having to hint. She looked me right in the eye and never let her gaze linger for a moment on the slight complexion problem that had appeared mysteriously on my chin the day before. She was perfect.

On the way home, after we left the freeway, she asked, “You don’t happen to have a throat lozenge or anything like that? I have kind of a sore throat.”

“In the glove compartment,” I said. Mom kept the glove compartment like a medicine chest—aspirin, throat lozenges, cough drops, breath mints, Kleenex, eye drops, bandages, and disinfectant. She figured that if we all had the flu and got into a traffic accident, she could make everybody feel better in minutes. Miriam reached into the glove compartment, found the lozenges, and also found the pad of Automobile Record sheets.

“What’s this?” she asked.

So I told her. All about the lease agreement. How much it cost and everything. I was just about to tell her how terrible it all was when she interrupted me.

“That’s terrible,” she said. “I can’t believe parents doing anything like that! Who do they think they are?”

“Parents,” I said.

“Well, I’m glad my parents are more generous than that. It sounds like your father must be Ebenezer Scrooge and your mother must be Shylock.”

“Shylock was a man.”

“Stingy, anyway. How much do they charge you for lunch and dinner?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m surprised. Do they have a coin box and water meter on the shower? Do they make you pay for clean sheets?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“A car is a necessity of life,” she said. “Parents have a responsibility to provide them for their children.”

Now, you have to understand. I’m not an argumentative person. I’m quite easy to get along with. But she was talking about my parents, judging them just by the fact that they ran a rip-off car leasing business with a captive clientele. I couldn’t let her go unanswered. So I answered.

“Listen, Miriam, a car is different from showers and food and bedding. It’s a lot more expensive. And I eat three meals a day and sleep once a night and take a shower every morning. It’s regular and predictable and it doesn’t go up and down. But the car I use as often as I like, and we kids used to use the cars all the time. It cost the folks hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month. And so it was perfectly fair for them to decide we should help pay.”

“You can’t live in the modern world without a car. They might as well charge you for air.” She sounded upset.

“You can live without a car,” I said. “You can walk, for example. I’ve walked to school a lot the last few months.”

“I can imagine,” she said darkly.

“I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve discovered there are things you can’t see from a car.”

“Like bubble gum on a sidewalk,” she said, sounding rather snide.

“I think it’s a good idea for us to help our parents pay for the cars.”

“And I think anybody who thinks that is crazy.”

“You do?” I asked, and I think by now I also sounded upset.

“I do. If word of this gets around, other people’s parents will try it, too, and pretty soon an entire generation of young people will be trapped at home with their families night after night.”

It shows you how angry I was. I said, “That doesn’t sound like a bad idea. And furthermore, I think that it’s perfectly possible for people to have a good time together without having a car at all. I think it would be a wonderful date just to walk over to a girl’s house and take her out walking and talking and maybe looking in store windows or maybe just seeing a little bit of the neighborhood and just getting to know each other without spending any money at all.”

“That sounds hideous.”

“Then,” I said, “I won’t ask you out on such a date.”

I took her home and neither of us said another word except for a perfunctory good-night-and-thanks-for-a-wonderful-evening at the door.

When I got home, after filling the gas tank, I wrote down the mileage on the odometer, figured out my total car costs for the evening, and went inside, got the money from my room, and went into Mom and Dad’s bedroom, where they were reading the Old Testament out loud to each other the way they do every night.

“Did you have a nice time?” asked Mother.

“Wonderful,” I said. “I want to settle up for tonight.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that until the first of the month,” Dad said.

“I want to do it now.” I showed them how much I owed them, counted out the money, and handed it to them. Then I carefully placed a five dollar bill on top of the rest.

“What’s that for?” asked Mother.

“It’s a tip,” I said. “For service above and beyond the call of duty.

“I think you’re wonderful. I’m glad you laid it on the line with us. I’m glad you shared the responsibility of paying for the entire U.S. automobile industry with us kids. It’s the most adult thing I’ve ever had to do in my life.”

Mother got tears in her eyes. Father said, “I think Jerry’s grown up, don’t you, Mother?”

“Yes,” Mother agreed.

“Well, you’re both wrong,” I said. “I’m just completely out of my mind.”

I kissed them both good-night and went straight to bed feeling pretty doggone good. Also pretty doggone poor, since I had about six bucks to last me through the rest of the month. But as my sister Anne pointed out, money isn’t everything. In fact, it’s hardly anything.

GERT FRAM

Susan Parker decided to make a list. She sat down at her writing desk, the one her father had given her two years ago on her eleventh birthday and which she was already outgrowing. On the left side of a piece of paper she wrote, “People who hate me.”

On the right side of the piece of paper she wrote, “People who like me.”

The first name she put on the left side was Todd Slover. He was definitely a hater. She had accidentally jabbed him in the arm with a pencil and now he would probably die of lead poisoning.

Mrs. Gray was on the “People who hate me” side, too. She had brought a fishbowl to school for the lesson on lizards. The class was supposed to catch a lizard and put it in the fishbowl. Susan broke the fishbowl.

It hadn’t been a good day at school.

The list of haters kept growing. In big letters she wrote, “MOTHER.”

Mother had sent her to the store for eggs. Susan had been absolutely positive Mother had sent her for eggs. She got home with the eggs. Mother thanked her for the eggs and then asked about the butter, which is what she sent her to the store for.

“Eggs are nice, I can always use them,” Mother said. “But what I need to finish the cookies for the party tonight is butter.”

“Oh, yeah, butter,” Susan had answered. Mother had gotten that tight little look she always got when she was trying not to get mad. Susan had decided that was a good time to head for the bedroom.

Susan held up the list and looked at it. So far, it said:

It was a depressing list. She had already made three people very angry today. And the night was still young.

And so Susan decided that it was about time for Gert Fram to write another novel. Gert Fram was a world-famous thirteen-year-old novelist who preferred to avoid publicity and therefore never published more than one copy of her work. So far, she had written five novels. They were arranged in a neat stack on the desk: Samy Davis Worm, by Gert Fram. Little Purple Pears, by Gert Fram. A Decent Book about Nothing, by Gert Fram. Water Warts, by Gert Fram. And her favorite: Chapy Nukls. Also by Gert Fram.

Susan picked up her pen and reached for an empty book. She had made a batch of about five books the last time. They consisted of pieces of paper about two inches by four inches, stapled together along one edge. Making the empty book first was a good idea. That way she always knew when to end her novel, because she would run out of paper.

She thought for a moment, and then wrote, “RASIN MOON, by Gert Fram.” Then she smiled, and began to write:

All of a sudden what? Susan Parker pursed her lips. Susan always pursed her lips when Gert Fram was stuck for an idea. Finally Gert Fram got the idea and Susan unpursed her lips and wrote some more:

Susan Parker laughed. Gert Fram really had a funny way with words.

Uh-oh. Last page. Two-inch by four-inch pages filled up fast. Gert Fram decided to wrap things up fast.

On the back of the book Gert Fram drew a picture of a wrinkled up lumpy moon with little wrinkled lumps rising up to it and a man at the bottom. She labeled it, “The little man riding up to the rasin moon.”

Actually, both Susan and Gert Fram knew how to spell raisin. But leaving out the first i gave the word a little more class.

Susan reread the novel. Gert Fram was OK.

“It’s dinner time, Susan and Annabelle and Vanessa and Jonathan!” her mother called from downstairs. Susan leaned back in her chair and wondered whether her agent would like Rasin Moon. Probably not. Her agent wasn’t really very happy because nobody had ever bought any of Gert Fram’s novels yet and a ten percent commission of nothing doesn’t add up to much.

“Susan, everybody’s here except you!”

Susan proudly added Rasin Moon to her library.

Downstairs Father was mumbling something to Mother. Then Father called out, “Gert Fram! It’s suppertime!”

Susan got up carefully from her chair and walked with dignity to the door of her study/library/den/bedroom. Then she ran down the stairs and scurried into the dining room and dove into her chair and said, “Gert Fram just finished a novel and it’s the greatest yet.”

No one paid much attention to what she said, however, because in diving for her chair she had jostled the table and two glasses of lemonade had spilled.

“Can’t you be careful for even a minute!” her mother said, crossly wiping up the mess.

“Gert Fram writes a novel and Susan has to drown us to celebrate,” Jonathan said in his funny voice that he reserved for making jokes about Susan.

Susan got up from the table and ran back upstairs. She heard them talking downstairs. “You didn’t need to talk like that, Jonathan.”

“Dad, she’s so dumb, she’s always knocking things around—”

“She’s not dumb, and now she’s upset and gone upstairs—”

“Careful, Annabelle, the lemonade’s about to drip off the table on you.”

Susan shut the bedroom door. She walked to the desk and added a name to the list: “Creepy Jonathan,” she wrote, because he hated to be called that. Then she heard her father calling. “Gert Fram or Susan Parker, whichever of you is hungrier, come downstairs and eat dinner.”

Susan didn’t want to go back down. Everybody would watch her walk in and sit down. Jonathan would be thinking she was dumb. So would everybody else. On the other hand she was hungry.

Well, if Susan didn’t have any nerve, Gert Fram did. Gert Fram walked with dignity out the door of the bedroom and down the stairs. She paused at the bottom of the steps (all great and famous writers pause at the bottoms of stairways), and then turned and walked with dignity to the table.

She heard Jonathan laugh and only looked down her nose at him. Susan would have been humiliated. But Gert Fram could put such riff-raff in their place.

But during dinner she forgot to be Gert Fram and almost cried once when she knocked over the salt and Annabelle sighed and set it back up. Annabelle could afford to sigh. She was sixteen and smart and wore makeup and never spilled anything.

After dinner everything went okay for about two minutes. Then she heard her father say, “All right, who did it?”

He sounded angry.

“Who did what, dear?” Mother asked in her don’t-be-angry-dear voice.

Susan looked up at her mother and said, “If it’s something bad, I did it.”

Father came into the dining room holding the Herald.

“I did it, all right,” Susan said.

“Somebody cut something out of the other side of the newspaper and now all I’ve got is half a crossword puzzle,” Father said. Father always did the crossword puzzle.

“Well, dear,” said Mother in her please-don’t-get-upset-at-anyone voice, “you never do more than half of it anyway.”

Father didn’t think it was funny. “I thought I told everybody in the family not to cut anything out of a newspaper until it was a day old!”

Susan jumped up from the table, where she had been sitting pulling petals off the flowers in the vase. “Well I thought it was the old newspaper and it was a picture of a bride who’s getting married in the temple and I cut it out because I wanted a picture of her and I’m sorry I didn’t know it was today’s paper.”

Father and Mother looked at Susan. They really weren’t sure what to say to this outburst.

“I’ll go get the picture and I’ll glue it back in!” Susan shouted. “I’ll glue it back in with my own blood if you want, I’m sorry I cut out the crossword puzzle!”

Then Father noticed the little pile of petals on the table.

“Susan, you have pulled every single petal off the flowers.”

Susan looked at the petals. She looked at her father. She decided not to cry in front of them. She ran out of the room.

As she left, she heard Mother saying to Father, “I really don’t think that was the best time to say that, dear.”

When Susan got to the front door, which she had to pass in order to go up the stairs, Vanessa was standing there with her boyfriend Raymond. They looked very surprised to see her. They looked like it was not a pleasant surprise. Because Susan didn’t know what else to do, she stopped and looked at them and said, “Hi.” Raymond let go of Vanessa’s hand.

Raymond made a face and looked away and Vanessa said, “Honestly, there isn’t a place in the entire house where a person can find any privacy.”

Susan tried to defend herself. “There isn’t another stairway. When I’m going to my room I have to pass through here.”

Vanessa looked up at the ceiling in disgust. “When you are coming, you could at least have the courtesy to announce your presence.”

“All right, all right,” Susan said. She walked up the stairs, shouting at the top of her voice, “I’m coming, I’m coming! Unclean, unclean! Beware, beware! Susan’s presence is coming!”

From downstairs somewhere three voices shouted at once, “Susan will you stop that shouting! For heaven’s sake!” Jonathan’s voice added, “What a jerk.” Mother’s voice said, “Jonathan, that doesn’t help a thing.”

Susan slammed her door and didn’t hear anything else from downstairs.

I will not cry I will not cry I will not cry.

She didn’t cry. Instead, she sat down at the desk and wrote on the list. When she was finished, it looked like this:

Then, to be fair, she thought for a while about whether anybody liked her. Under “People who like me” she finally wrote, “The dog because he’s too dumb to know how dumb I am and because whenever I spill something which is alot he gets to lick it up.”

Then she thought for a while more and under “People who like me” she wrote in big letters, “GERT FRAM.”

Then Gert Fram started writing another novel. It was called Susan the Jerk. It went like this:

Susan stopped and reread what Gert Fram had just written. Boy, wasn’t it the truth!

Gert Fram was beginning to warm up to this.

Gert Fram was running out of paper. It was time to wrap up the novel with a bang. Gert Fram always liked to end her novels with a bang.

Gert Fram had some space left, so she drew a picture of Susan’s rocket ship crashing into the sun.

Then she got up (with dignity) from the desk and walked to her dresser, where there were a lot of things stacked. There was the china elephant with the broken trunk because she had dropped it. There was the library book that Mother had had to buy because Susan had dropped it in the gutter and the pages had gotten all thick and wrinkly even after they dried. There was the watch with the broken glass because Susan had accidentally scraped it against a cement wall during class break at junior high. There was a ripped picture of Jesus from Sunday School that the teacher had given her because after she ripped it Susan had felt so bad she had cried. This was when she was seven and sometimes let herself cry.

Susan remembered that the Sunday School teacher had hugged her and said, “Hey, Susan, don’t cry like that. You’re sorry you ripped the picture, aren’t you?”

Susan had nodded and said in her squeaky trying-not-to-cry voice, “I didn’t even mean to.”

“I know you didn’t mean to,” said the Sunday School teacher. “And when you say you’re sorry about something, Jesus said that people are supposed to forgive you.”

“I’m sorry,” Susan had said, and cried again, even louder.

The Sunday School teacher gave her an even bigger hug. “That’s all right. I forgive you.”

But Susan had cried even louder.

“Why are you still crying?” asked the Sunday School teacher.

“Because I ripped Jesus’s picture and he’ll be mad at me.”

Susan remembered that the teacher had gotten tears in her eyes. “Jesus is never mad at you,” Susan remembered hearing the teacher tell her. “And to show you, I want you to keep this picture, and every time you see it, you remember that even when you make mistakes Jesus still loves you and forgives you.”

Susan set down the picture on her dresser. If I say I’m sorry maybe they’ll forgive me, she thought.

So she opened the door and started down the stairs. Then she remembered Vanessa and Raymond by the front door and she coughed. She kept coughing all the way down the stairs.

“What is it, you got pneumonia?” said Jonathan, who was sitting in the living room. Vanessa and Raymond were gone. Susan chose to ignore Jonathan’s comment.

Mother was in the kitchen. Father was in the den. Susan decided to go in and say she was sorry to Mother. Then if it went OK she’d go in and say it to Father.

Mother was finishing up the refreshments for the party. She didn’t look up when Susan came into the kitchen, but that never stopped Mother, she always knew when somebody came into the kitchen. “Are you feeling better now, Susan, dear?” Mother asked.

Mother sounded so kind that Susan ran right over and leaned on the counter and said, “Mother, I’m sorry I’ve been acting like such a creep and doing everything wrong and I’m sorry I pulled the stupid petals off the stupid flowers and spilled the lemonade and bought eggs and cut out the crossword puzzle and didn’t announce I was coming and everything.”

Mother looked at her with horror in her eyes. “Susan, for heaven’s sake, look where you’re leaning!”

Susan looked where she was leaning. Her elbows were crushing the jello and whipped cream and pineapple dessert that Mother had all ready for the party. Her elbows were covered with jello. The dessert was completely smashed. Susan looked up at her mother.

“What in the world am I going to do now!” her mother said, wringing her hands. “They’ll all be here in half an hour and there’s not a hope in the world of making anything else! Susan, sometimes I think we ought to build a bomb shelter for all of us to hide in whenever you’re around!” Mother had meant that last sentence to be a kind of joke, but Susan didn’t notice that. She just stood there, deciding not to cry, and then deciding that she couldn’t help it, and then with tears running down her cheeks and her face all crinkled up she ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs and slammed the door.

In the living room Jonathan said, “Well, that’s two slammed doors tonight, tying the world’s record. If we make three slammed doors it’ll be a new champion!”

Mother said, “Jonathan, I’m getting very cross with you.” Then she went upstairs and tapped on Susan’s door.

“Susan,” Mother said.

“Go away and leave me alone,” Susan’s voice said. Susan’s voice sounded like there was a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes and a pillow in front of her face. Mother thought about going in anyway, and then she decided that it was not a good idea. Instead she went to the den and asked Father to go to the store and buy something for dessert for the party tonight.

The party was fun and noisy and all the adults played games and talked and ate the store-bought dessert and said thank you for the wonderful evening and went home.

Then Mother and Father talked quietly for a few minutes and they decided that Father would go up and talk to Susan.

Father knocked on the door. “May I come in?” he asked.

“Certainly,” answered a voice.

Father came in.

“Susan, I want to talk to you for a couple of minutes.”

Susan turned around on her chair and looked at him in dignified surprise. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but you must have the wrong address. There is no Susan here.”

Father looked at her for a moment and said, “I’m afraid I must have been given the wrong address. Who does live here?”

“No one lives here. This is the office and studio and den of Gert Fram, the world-famous author.”

Father smiled. “I’ve never been in the office and studio and den of a world-famous author before.”

“Well, you needn’t ask for an autograph,” Gert Fram replied. “I gave up signing autographs years ago. It was such a bother.”

“I don’t want an autograph,” Father said. “I think I want an exclusive interview.”

Gert Fram tilted her head. “For that, I’m afraid you’ll need to consult my agent. I never grant interviews on the spur of the moment.”

Father looked at the floor. “You’re not making this very easy for me,” he said.

A funny look passed across Susan’s face, but it was Gert Fram who answered him.

“That’s because it shouldn’t be any easier for you than it is for me,” she said disdainfully. “Fair is fair and right is right. Besides, I know what you’re really here for.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. You’re like all the others. You want a sneak preview of my latest novel.”

“I don’t really think that’s why I came up here, Susan,” Father said.

“Oh, you’ll definitely want to read it when you hear the title. It’s called Susan the Jerk.”

This time it was Father’s face that got the funny look. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I really do want to read it.”

Susan handed him the book with a shaking hand. Gert Fram’s voice was steady, however, when she said, “I knew it would work. My titles are irresistible.”

Father sat on the bed and read Susan the Jerk from the beginning to the end. He looked at the picture of the rocket ship crashing into the sun for a long time.

When he looked up at Susan, he saw Gert Fram watching him carefully, one eyebrow raised. Father sighed.

“Gert Fram, you’re a fine author and I’m very impressed with your book. But there’s been a terrible mistake made here. I really came to this address to see somebody else. You see, I respect you and admire you but you’re just not in my class, Miss Fram. I was looking for a woman named Susan Parker. I wanted to tell her that I’m sorry that I’ve been cross with her. I wanted to tell Susan Parker that her father and her mother love her so much that when they know she’s unhappy and it’s their fault, they feel terrible until they can make it right. Can you pass that message along for us?”

“I hardly run a messenger service here,” Gert Fram answered. But then her voice cracked and she said, “But I’ll try to let her know. I don’t think she’ll believe that message, though.”

Father bowed his head. “I hope she believes it. Because Susan just might be thinking right now that she’s a jerk. And it just isn’t true. She’s a wonderful person. It’s just that her parents and her brother and sisters are so used to having her around that they forget how wonderful she is. They forget to treat her like a wonderful person. But oh, Miss Fram, if they ever lost Susan they’d miss her so much—”

And suddenly Susan realized that the reason that Father had stopped talking was because he was crying. She had never seen her father cry before. And he was crying because he loved Susan Parker so much and right then Gert Fram disappeared and Susan Parker was back and she was crying and hugging her father but mostly letting him hug her. He was saying, “My little girl, my little girl.”

Finally Susan said, very softly, “I’m not a little girl, Father.”

Father took her by the shoulders and held her away from him a little and looked into her eyes. He looked a long time into her eyes and then he smiled, even though he still had tears, and he said, “You’re absolutely right. And to think I didn’t realize it until this moment.”

Then they both said a lot of things and didn’t say other things and went downstairs for family prayer. Then Mother and Father kissed Susan good-night and she went back upstairs. She undressed for bed and said her prayers and got under the covers and turned off the light.

A few minutes later she turned the light back on and got up and went to the desk. She picked up the book Susan the Jerk and turned it over and on the last page, in little letters where there was still some space left, right after where it said, “boy that Susan is sure a jerk,” she wrote:

That was a better ending to the novel. Susan turned off the light and went to sleep. In the morning she would realize that she had never washed the jello dessert off her elbows and it was now all over her bedroom, but tonight it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter in the morning.

AFTERWORD