Starrigger

7

We made it.

We coasted down the other side of the range. Beyond the headbeams the land looked very different, rocky and wild. Short, wide-trunked trees hung in dark foliage bordered the road. We drove across wide plateaus, hugged the rim of gaping dark areas that seemed to be canyons. The rain stopped, and the outside temperature plunged. Stars appeared, and the spectacular frozen explosion of a gas nebula was painted across a broad arc of sky. There were no recognizable constellations, for we were eight hundred light-years or so down from Terra on the Orion arm, antispinward. Goliath's primary was not even a catalog number.

These were the boonies, all right.

We even lost the Skyway. It ended abruptly under a massive rockslide, but not before we were warned off by flashing road barriers and shunted onto a crisp, new Colonial Transportation Department highway. The road took us into Maxwellville in half an hour.

The hospital was surprisingly well-equipped. The seriously injured man was semicomatose and in shock, but they shoved enough tubes into his body to wake a corpse, and brought his blood count up with plasma and iso-PRBCs. They even managed to save his foot. The rest of us they treated and released, after re-dressing and spot-welding our wounds and shooting us full of broad-spectrum antixenobiotics. To be extra sure, we all spent time under a "password" beam, which fried any foreign organism in our bodies that couldn't produce genetic identification proving Terran origin.

Then we got the bill. I swallowed hard and pulled out my Guild Hospitalization Plan card, which had lapsed. They took the agreement number, but didn't like it. Sukuma-Tayler insisted that he take care of it. So I let him, telling him I would pay him back.

I went back to the cab.

"John's asked us to come out to their ranch," I told Sam. "What do you think?"

"Fine for you. I'll be in the garage."

I scowled. "I forgot. I hate to be so far away from you. But motels are out. And when the mail rig gets into town, the local constable might be looking for us."

"Better find out when the next mail is due."

"Right." I took a deep breath. "Sam, we keep piling up questions with no answers."

"For instance?"

I went back to get a few things in the aft cabin. I packed my duffel and zipped it up. "Well, for instance, what was that hoo-hah at Sonny's all about, anyway? If Wilkes wants me dead, why doesn't he make his move? Why all that mummery about a merger? What does the Rikkitikki have to do with all this, if anything?" I grabbed Darla's pack, went forward, and sat in the driver's seat. "And why in God's name, if they wanted to surprise us at the motel, did they drive up like Colonial Militia on a drug raid? They've never heard of sneaking? They could have had us easily. But no, they bust in there with rollers crackling and guns drawn. And how did they know we were there?"

"The manager could have been on Wilkes' payroll. The word may have been out for us."

"Yeah, maybe. But it still doesn't make any sense. None of it does, including the wild stories ― which everybody but us seems to have heard." I shook my head wearily. "What a weird couple of days." I remembered the lost key, and took the spare out of the box. I loaded up the squib with fresh charges. I undraped my leather jacket from the seat and put it on. The night was cool, but sunrise was not far off. We had spent most of the night in the hospital. I slipped the spare key into my jacket pocket.

"Where is everybody?" Sam asked.

"Waiting in the hospital lobby. I'll go tell John we're coming with him, after we bring you to the doctor."

Dawn came and Maxwellville came alive.

We drove to a nearby vehicle dealership, where Sukuma-Tayler rented a Gadabout, hydrogen-burning, for the trip to the ranch which was supposed to be about fifty kilometers south of town. He and his troupe followed us as we drove around looking for a garage. We found one; and the name of the place had a familiar ring to it.

The garage was a pop-up dome with an adjacent trailer serving as both home and office. No one was home (the place was a mess). The dome was deserted, or so I thought. A lone roadster was up on jacks near the far end. As I drew closer, a pair of boots came out from under it, then legs, then the rest of Stinky Gonzales.

"Jake?" He squinted at me. "Jake! What the punk are you doin' here? How the punk are you, anyway?"

Stinky spoke Intersystem better than anyone I knew; in fact, he was the only person I knew who could speak it idiomatically. His use of the billingsgate was nothing less than masterly. He had been born and raised on a world where Intersystem was the lingua franca as well as the official tongue. There are a few of those. The last time I'd seen him, though, had been on Oberon, an Inglo-speaking world.

"What the punk are you doing here?" I answered in English, though keeping to his favorite vocabulary. "You finally get run off Oberon?"

He laughed. "You son of a punkin' bitch. What the punk do you think I'm doin' here? Tryin' to earn a punkin' living! Hey, how you been, anyway? You gettin' any?"

"My share, and no more. Busy?"

He gestured around expansively at the empty garage. "Oh, yeah, I'm so punkin' busy I ain't got time to wank it. They're piled up like stack-cats around here." The reference was to a multi-gendered animal native to his home planet; the species is noted for its acrobatic mating rituals. "What the hell you talking about? I just got set up here not two weeks ago. Gotta give it some time to―" He suddenly looked at me, his eyes narrowed. "Hey… what's all this crazy merte I been hearin' about you?"

"What crazy merte is that, Stinky?"

"I don't know. All this punkin' roadbuzz about you havin' a Roadmap or somethin'. Goofy stuff."

"That's exactly what it is." I slapped him on the shoulder. "Got some business for you. Sam's ailing."

"Well, let's throw him against the wall and see if he sticks. Bring him in."

I went outside and told John to take everybody to breakfast. There was a little diner not two blocks away. Then I eased Sam into the garage. It was a tight fit.

Twenty minutes later Sam was in pieces all over the dome. The engine was stripped of shielding and laid bare to the torus. During the process, I discovered to my nasal discomfort that Stinky was still worthy of the nickname only his friends could call him with impunity.

Stinky tapped the engine with his flex-torque wrench, a clinical scowl clouding his features. "I don't know, Jake. This punkin' thing might have to go."

"The torus?" I yelped. "Christ, you're talking big money, Stinky."

"Hey, do you want me to tell you punkin' fairy tales or do you want the truth? The punkin' confinement tubing is hotter than a [reference here to the sexual habits of the human inhabitants of a planet called Free] during Ecstasy Week." He crossed his arms and looked the rig over distastefully. "Hey, Jake. How come you don't get an alien rig? This thing's a piece of merte." He shook his head. "What do you want with this punkin' Terran merte anyway? Look at this thing." He reached and tapped a cylindrical component. "An ohmic preheater." He snorted. "I mean, that's a punkin' joke. Nobody uses them anymore, even on Terran models." He crossed his arms and clucked disapprovingly. "I don't know how you get around in this pile of scrap." He looked at me, then hastened to add, "Hey, I don't mean no offense to Sam."

I was impatient. "Right. What do you think's wrong with it?"

He threw up his arms. "How the punk should I know? I gotta hook up the sensors and look at the thing. Okay, so you

got a kink-instability. That's only a symptom. What if it's this preheater? They don't make parts like that any more. I'll have to rig up something. Or it could be the vacuum pump. Or the current pickup, or the RF breakdown transformer. Punkin' hell, it could be anything." He shrugged, giving in. "Oh, hell, Jake, I'll do my best. Should be able to do something with it. After I get her fixed, I'll degauss it for you."

I thumped his back. "Knew I could count on you. Stinky."

"I know, I'm such a punkin' genius." He glanced at the exposure tab on his filthy shirt front. "Hey! I better get my rad-suit on and you better get outta here before we both get our sferos cooked off."

"Okay. Sam'll keep in touch with me. Let him know, okay?"

"Okay, Jake."

I tumedtb go.

"Jake!" Stinky called after me.

"What?"

"You're walkin' kind of fanny. You all right?"

"We met up with some bugs out on the plains. Things about this long, with―"

"Oh, hoplite crabs. I don't know why they call 'em that, but that's what they call 'em."

"Right, hoplite crabs. They told us at the hospital."

"You gotta watch out for those things."

"Uh, we… Yeah. See you."

The gang was waiting for me outside in the Gadabout. I climbed in, and in doing so, I got the itchy, antsy feeling that something was crawling on me. I gave myself the once-over, but found nothing. Too many small, nasty things lately. Nerves.

After running some errands in town, mainly to pick up groceries and sundries, we drove out of town. The mail question was settled when we drove by the Maxwellville post office and saw the mail rig unloading at a side dock. Doubtless it contained a communique about us.

Also before leaving, we dropped off two of the group, the Abo man and a Hindu woman, at a motel. They'd been having a low-key argument with Sukuma-Tayler. The two did not care for the way things had been going. They wanted time to think things over―"get in touch with the Plan," is the way they put it. The implied meaning of the phrase struck me as rather diffuse. Sukuma-Tayler didn't say good-bye to them, but he didn't appear to be overly distressed at their leaving.

A short stretch of Colonial highway ended in a dirt road that conveyed us bouncingly along for what seemed like hours, winding around high buttes and towering sheer cliffs, until it split into a Y.

Sukuma-Tayler stopped the Gaddy and threw up his hands. "As usual," he said sardonically, "directions given barely approximate directions taken. Anybody care to guess which way we should go?" He turned to the Oriental man in the front seat. "Roland?"

Roland poked his head out the window, trying to find the sun. "Hard to get your bearings on a new planet… especially when you don't know the axial inclination. Do you have the Guidebook, John?"

"The what inclination?"

"Let's see," Roland said, shielding his eyes, "the sun's there. So, that means… uh―" He scratched his head.

"Well," I put in, "Maxwellville's in the opposite direction of where we want to go, and so is the Skyway." Without knowing why, I turned to Winnie, "Where's the Skyway, honey?"

"That way!" she piped, pointing to our right.

Eyes turned rearward. After a moment's hesitation, John started the Gaddy forward again, and took the left fork.

By now we had a depopulated crew: me, Darla, Winnie, the Oriental, and a Caucasian woman, to whom we were introduced for the first time ― Roland Yee and Susan D'Archangelo ― plus our Afro leader. The man in the hospital, we learned, was named Sten Hansen.

Susan was light-haired, thin, had hazel eyes and a pixie nose that crinkled when she smiled ― a young face, but I put her on the downhill side of thirty, probably having forgone her first series of antigeronic treatments for financial, religious, or ethical reasons. I still had only a shell of an idea as to what Teleological Pantheism might mean or contain. Yee was younger, had short, straight black hair that stuck out in spikes toward the top of his head. He was very easygoing and pleasant, as they all were.

Winnie was right, and eventually we got to the "ranch," which Sukuma-Tayler recognized from pictures. There was only one structure, the house, plopped in the middle of a wide expanse of tableland landscaped in low brush and some very odd-looking trees. The place was partially completed, a free-form Duraform shell with only half the windows in, and those on the leeward side. A lot of weather had claimed squatters rights inside, along with local fauna. Boors and ceilings were etched with watermarks; dust dunes graced the comers; animal droppings added that homey touch. (If you are taking notes, dung is bright yellow on Goliath.) People had been here too. A hole chopped into the apex of the dome in the main living area had drawn smoke from campfires on the floor below, where blackened rocks ringed a pile of ash. Empty food cartons lay all over.

There was a kitchen, or rather a space for. one, but no appliances had ever been installed.

"The people who owned the place ran out of construction funds," Sukuma-Tayler told me. "Victims of the last credit drought, about two Standards ago. SystemBank foreclosed, and, well, the price was right, to coin a phrase."

"What kind of temperatures do you get at night around here?"

"A little under ten degrees. Rarely gets below freezing."

"Still, not exactly balmy."

"I agree. Interested in leading a firewood-gathering squad?"

"No, but I'll do it."

The local version of burnable stuff was a reasonable facsimile of wood obtained from what I dubbed a "Wurlitzer tree." Nobody got the joke, since no one had ever heard the name of the most famous make of theater organs of the early twentieth century. From my childhood, I remembered that an eccentric neighbor of ours had reconstructed an ancient Wurlitzer in his basement. The tree looked like the diapason array of that old thing, vertically bunched hollow pipes of different lengths and diameters, from tiny piccolos to big roof-shaking pedal notes, all shooting up from a horseshoe-shaped trunk that reminded me of the keyboard console. There were hundreds of them out in the mesa. The smaller pipes made good kindling, and the big ones, split in half, made passable logs.

We spent the rest of the day cleaning out the house and making it more or less habitable. We even found an old push-broom in a closet, which proved to be indispensable. The Teleologists had lost all their gear, and what they had bought in town didn't go very far. They had replaced some personal effects, self-inflating sleeping eggs and such, but were short of useful implements. The place needed a lot of work, and they were nowhere near tooled-up for the job. But for now, all anyone was interested in was making things tolerable enough to bed down for the night.

I was cleaning out a small back bedroom when I heard someone squeal. I went out to the living area and found Susan standing over something on the floor, prodding it cautiously with the broom. It looked like something between a snake and a caterpillar, decorated in bright green-and-yellow stripes, about twenty-five centimeters long. Centipedelike pairs of legs ran along its unsegmented body. On the ends of the legs were tiny suckers. There was something strange about the head. Above a very nonreptilian face ― the eyes were large and looked intelligent ― a small pink bud protruded through an opening in the cranium. It was convoluted and looked like part of the brain. The animal was quivering convulsively, in its death throes. Part of its body was squashed just behind the head.

"Yik," Susan gagged, poking the thing with morbid fascination.

"Where'd it come from?" I asked.

"I don't know. I thought I felf something go squish when I was sweeping over there. I must've stepped on it." She crinkled her face in disgust. "Ooo, its brains are coming out."

"Was it on my jacket?" I said, pointing nearby to where it had apparently fallen from a wall hook. There was a footprint across the sleeve.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, I must have done mat. But I can't understand why I didn't see the thing when it happened."

The animal stopped quivering, dead.

"Yik" Susan said again.

I picked the thing up with a stick, went outside, and threw it into the brush.

Toward evening, Darla and I took a walk out on the mesa. By then the extra gravity seemed almost normal. We walked among the Wurlitzer trees while Goliath's big yellow sun cranked down to become a dull red semicircle resting atop a low butte far out on the range. The sky turned cobalt blue, cloudless and virginal. No sounds walked with us except the wind that came up at dusk. Soon, a few sparkling stars came out, the thick atmosphere giving their light an added shimmer, and then the nebula made its appearance, grand and majestic as before.

We didn't talk much, both bone-tired from a lost night's sleep, mind-numb still from our recent escapades. But something was on my mind.

"Darla, something's been puzzling me, among several dozen things. It's about Winnie again."

Darla yawned elaborately, then apologized. "I'm done in," she said. "What's the problem?"

"No problem, really. I was just thinking about how she happened to pick the right direction today ― and about how she knew her way through the jungle back on Hothouse."

Darla stilled another yawn. "Inborn sense of direction, I guess." She lost the fight and gave in to another one. Recovered, she said, "Maybe she'd been that way before… through the jungle, I mean."

"And today?"

"Lucky guess?" she ventured.

"Simple enough, but again I remind you of what you said about her people's reluctance to leave their territory."

"Again I'm reminded. But that doesn't mean Winnie herself hasn't traveled. After all, she did come with us. Who knows? She may have worked for a jungle-clearing crew before signing on at the motel."

"She helped destroy her home?"

Darla conceded the point with a tilt of her head. "You have me there." She looked at the sky and stopped walking. "You know, your question is valid. We must have covered eighty klicks before we reached the Skyway."

"Which is what led me to ask it."

Darla was about to say something, then keeled over in a mock swoon and rested her head on my shoulder. "I'm so tired, Jake," she said.

I put my arms around her and found a nesting place for my face in her hair. It smelled of hayfields, those I played in as a kid, a memory contained in an odor, like so many. She pressed her body close and put her arms around my neck as the wind reared up a chilly gust, making a sound like a moan over the mesa. We hugged; I kissed her neck, and a little ripple of pleasure went through her. I kissed it again. She raised her head, her eyes heavy-lidded, gave me a sleepy smile of contentment, and kissed me tenderly. Then she kissed me again, this time with a probing intensity. With my fingers I found the deep groove of her spine and followed its course under her jacket down to the beginning of the rift of her buttocks, stopping there teasingly. She answered with a thrust of her hips against mine, and I caressed her behind, came back up by way of the curve of her hip, all the way up to interpose a cupped hand between my chest and hers. Her breasts were small and firm.

But the wind got steadily colder, and it was time to get back to the house. We started walking back.

When we got there we found the Teleologists in the backyard, sitting in a circle on the ground in silent meditation. We stood and watched them. Nobody spoke for a long while, then suddenly Susan did.

"Sometimes I didn't get along with Kirsti." It sounded like part of a conversation, but nobody responded.

After a long interval Roland said, "Zev was a good man. I'll miss him."

Then it was John's turn. "Silvia knew I had to follow my conscience. It was part of my Plan, and she could see that…." He trailed off.

This went on for a rime. Eventually John looked up at us.

"I suppose you two are hungry. Well, so are we."

They all rose and came toward us. "We were having a Remembrance," John explained. I started to apologize, but John cut me short. "No, no. We were done," he said. "Let's eat."

Supper involved little in the way of preparation, since the main course came out of hotpaks, but Roland had unhinged the useless back door (the front one was missing) and made a dining table out of it by shoring it up with rocks. Places for everyone were set with plates and utensils from a mess kit John had bought. A biolume lantern stood in for a centerpiece, the fire was crackling cheerily, and we settled down to a good meal.

I tore off the top of my hotpak and watched until the contents started to steam and bubble, then dumped the glop onto my plate. The stuff looked more like beef Romanov, after the executions, then beef Stroganoff as advertised, but it tasted surprisingly good.

Conversation was upbeat for a change. The Teleologists talked about Teleologist stuff, but John was kind enough to include us in the chitchat, explaining things as we went along. It turned out that John and his crew were a sect that had splintered off from the main church in Khadija, although terms like "sect" and "church" didn't quite seem to apply. Teleological

Pantheism sounded more and more like a framework within which one engaged in a freewheeling brand of theology rather than a body of dogma, and I gathered that the schism between John's group and the parent body was more personal than doctrinal.

I asked John to give me a definition of Teleological Pantheism in twenty-five words or less, fully granting that such an encapsulation would be grossly oversimplified and unfair.

"Well, I think I can," John answered, "and it wouldn't be too far off the mark." He paused to compose, as if he were about to give birth to a rhyming couplet. 'Teleological Pantheists hold as an act of faith, unsupported by reason, that the universe has a purpose, and that there is a Plan to it all. I mean by 'act of faith' that it's a Kierkegaardian sort of leap, since there certainly is no empirical evidence to support such a belief."

"Then, why believe it?" I asked. "Sorry. Go on."

"No, the question is valid, but I couldn't answer it in a paragraph, or even fifty. I'll certainly talk about it later, if you like. But anyway, that's the teleological part of it. The theistic part of it involves the notion that the universe is greater than the sum of its parts, that the totality of that which is ― reality, if you will ― is a manifestation of something beyond the plenum of sensory data we perceive it to be." He stopped to regard the design of his rhetoric, and shook his head. "No, that doesn't quite do it. All that does is allude to a fuzzy metaphysics. Shall we say this?" he went on, drumming the table with spidery fingers: "We also accept on faith that there is some Unifying Principle to reality, of which natural laws are only signposts pointing in the direction of the heart of things." He shifted his weight on the hardened foam floor. "That's more or less it, but I think I should point out that the chief difference between us and almost any other religion that involves a deity is that we impose no structure on this Unifying Principle. We don't refer to it as God, or use any identifying tag, and we reject all anthropomorphic notions entirely. We hold that there is little we can know about the nature of this Principle, since it is always in a dynamic state, in a constant process of becoming, if you will, as the Universal Plan unfolds. We differ from classical deists in'that we can't imagine a state of affairs in which a creator slaps together a clockwork cosmos and then abandons it." He took a sip of coffee. "I think I went over twenty-five words."

"John," Roland said, "you can't fart in less than twenty-five words."

John led the laughter. "I stand accused, and plead guilty, m'lord." And with a furtive smile he added, "But after all, to air is human."

Groans.

"You could at least be original, John," Roland chastised him. "That was terrible, and I'd never forgive you, if it weren't for this flat you lent me," he added, indicating the house.

Shudders.

"Besides punning," Susan told us, by way of an apology for the punishment her compatriots were inflicting on us, 'Teelies love to talk. A good thing, too, because there's not much else to this religion."

"Susan's right," Roland said. "We don't worship in the conventional sense. We have few ceremonies, nothing approaching a liturgy, and precious little in the way of doctrine. We believe that there must be a flux in these matters as well."

"Thinking is worship," John put in. "So's talking about what you're thinking about. But not everybody thinks alike."

"Yes, exactly," Roland agreed. "We want a religion stripped of every kind of dogmatic rigidity, hidebound orthodoxy, papal bulls, infallible preachings.. everything."

"We reject revelation as a source of truth," Susan said. "More blood has been spilled over questions of whose holy book is, holier than over anything else in history."

"People write books," Roland said pointedly. "Not gods."

"Of course," John said, "there's much more. There are ethical currents flowing from the theological spring. We believe in cooperative living, for example. Granted, that's nothing new―"

"One thing we don't do is proselytize," Susan broke in. "We want to convert, if at all, by example or by a kind of osmotic process. Not by handing out pamphlets on street corners."

"Sounds like my kind of religion," I said finally. Actually, to me it sounded like Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel run through a protein synthesizer, spiked with a bit of mid-twentieth-century radical theology. "Where do I sign up?"

"Right here," John said, gesturing around us, "and you do it by asking that question."

I eased back against Darla's pack, uncrossed my legs, and put them under the table. "Well, now, I don't think I'd take to communal living too well. I'm nasty in the morning and I raid the cooler at night. Generally, I'm an uncooperative son of a bitch."

John gave me a sugary smile. "But lovable in your own way, I'm sure. However, you don't have to live with other Teelies to be one."

"Just as long as I drop my weekly tithe into the collection plate, eh?"

"No. Add to that list of 'don'ts' the fact that we don't tithe our membership."

"Or take contributions from anybody," Roland said, "or solicit them."

"Who pays the rent?" I asked, shocked. Maybe this was my kind of old-time religion.

"Our support mainly comes from the Schuyler Foundation, set up by an Australian multi-billionaire who was an early convert to TP. He read and was impressed with the writings of its originator, Ariel MacKenzie-Davies." John stretched out on the floor, propping a head up on an elbow. "She's an interesting figure. I'd give you a copy of her seminal work ― that is," he said, his voice suddenly going hollow, "if I hadn't been so careless as to leave my kit behind."

That brought it all back, and the conversation died. I tried to resuscitate it.

"Besides," I said, "I'm not one for leaping, faithwise. I mean, I've tried to read Kierkegaard, but I usually wind up Soren logs."

Only Susan, an American, got the joke. Her face brightened enough to register great pain. "Really, Jake," she scolded.

Roland was suspicious. "Did I miss something?"

"Oh, my God," John said. "I just got it. Of course, sawing logs."

Roland was mystified until John explained. Roland shook his head. "Jake, sometimes your cultural allusions and a great deal of your vocabulary are very obscure. To me, at least. You're Nor'merican, of course, but what part?"

"Western Pennsylvania, old US of A. It's pretty isolated, and there's about a one-hundred-year culture-lag. Linguistic atrophy, too. Most of the colloquialisms are out of the mid-twentieth century, even earlier. It was my milk-tongue, and I'll probably never outgrow it."

"But you seem an educated man."

"That was out here, later on."

"I see. Darla, you seem to have an accent I can't place. It sounds… well, mid-Colonial, for want of a better term."

"My mother worked for the Colonial Authority for years," Darla said, "and dragged me around from planet to planet. She was Canadian, my father Dutch. So, it was alternately Dutch and English at home, Intersystem in school, and Portuguese, Tagalog, Bengali, Swedish, Afrikaans, Finnish―"

We all laughed. The usual language salad.

"Thank God for Intersystem and English," John said. "Otherwise we'd have Babel out here." His face split into a yawn. "And speaking of sawing logs…"

Everyone agreed. We cleaned up the supper mess quickly and made preparations for spending a cold night in a shell of a rundown shack in the middle of East Jesus. (There's one for Roland.)

But before we turned in, a talk with John was necessary.

"John, I should have said something before… but there's a price on my head. You and your people could be in danger."

"I thought as much. The Colonial Authority?"

"Yes, them too, but that's the least of it."

"I see."

"How did you know?" I asked wonderingly.

"Those rumors we mentioned. They have it that everyone is after you."

Again, this mysterious shadow following us. I was getting fed up. "Everyone?" I tugged at my lower lip. "Perhaps we should leave."

"I am not about to drive to town at this hour. I'd never find my way back at night."

"We could walk it."

"What? Hike across this wilderness? A strange planet?" He slapped me on the shoulder. "Jake, we owe you our lives. Roland will take the first watch. We would have stood watches anyway, you know. Skywaymen about."

"Right. And, John…" He turned around. "Thanks."

"It's not often one gets a legend for a house guest." He looked around. "Or shed guest, I should say."

Darla and I watched her sleeping egg inflate. It grew and grew until it looked like a giant, fat green worm. I said so.

"Big enough to eat us both," she said.

We crawled inside. Chemical heat had already made the interior a warm, pillowy green womb, delightfully snug, lit softly by bioluminescence panels. Undressing was a little difficult, though. I felt the cold barrel of Darla's Walther against my back.

"I give up."

"Sorry."

"Darla, keep that thing handy."

"I will," she said.

"What about Winnie?"

"I gave her an extra blanket. She said she's not sleepy."

"Are you?"

"I was, but not now, love. Come here."

Music…

Music, not loud…

Music, not loud but omnipresent and overpowering, a single towering, shifting chord stacked with notes from the lower end of the keyboard to the top, covering octave after octave. It sounded over the mesa like a choir of lost souls bewailing then-damnation, drear and haunting. Violins sang with them, flutes, oboes, bassoons, more strings ― lilting violas, threatening double basses… a harp, a celeste tinkling contrapuntally. The structure changed, harmonies rearranged, and now it was God playing the church organ of the universe, beatific sonorities flowing from his hands, reverberating from the roof of Creation.

Darla awoke with a start, clutched at me.

"Jake!"

"The Wurlitzer trees," I said. "It's all right, lovely one."

She melted in my arms, sudden fear dissolving like frost before a flame. "I was dreaming…" she said in a lost little sleep-voice. The egg was dark. I passed a thumb gently over both her closed eyelids, kissed her warm, moist cheek. She exhaled, all tension flowing out. I drank in her breath, held her close.

Outside, the chord modulated from minor to major, back to minor again, then shifted once more and droned in a modal harmony as the wind passed its airy fingers among the pipes. There were solo passages, virtuoso performances. A concerto. Then the wind blew it all away and left an atonal chaos that resonated with the indeterminacy of existence… muddled, mysterious, in the end incomprehensible….

A great sinewy hand poised over the starless dark… waiting? Watching? The Hand of the Conductor. Or the Composer. Both? Neither? The void was formless and embraced all that was to be, would never be… infinite possibilities. Skeins of chromatic tones unspooled in the black, the raw stuff of being. Then structures began to build themselves as a diatonic order was imposed. (By what? By whom?) Fugues wove out of the deep, classic symphonies in sonata form drew together. The Hand withdrew, and a ponderous hymn resounded throughout the firmament, praising Oneness, Fullness, Positivity, the Plan, the Organizing Principle….

Strange light, a bundle of softness in my arms, the momentary, odd sensation of not knowing exactly where you are, when you are. The egg was dark, but tissue-thin walls leaked a shifting light.

The Hand… the Hand among the waste and void, at the heart of things, the womb of time…,

"Dawla! Jake!"

There in the secret center, the impenetrable core…

"Dawla-Jake! Dawla-Jake!"

… of nothingness… nothing.!.no thingness…

"Jake! Dawla! Up! Up!"

I jerked awake, groped for one of the biolume panels. I wiped one with a palm and saw in its glow a double-thumbed hand in front of my face.

The music had stopped.

I poked Darla.

Her eyes opened wide instantly. "What is it?"

"Winnie, 'sat you?" I whispered hoarsely, widening the birth-canal entrance to the egg. Winnie's face showed alarm.

"Big machines! Big machines! Get up! Get up!"

Darla swiped at the quick-exit seam with two stiffened fingers and the egg cracked us naked into a freezing night.

The fire was a huddle of glowing embers. Roland lay near it, asleep, swaddled in blankets. I went over and kicked him Sharply once, then grabbed folds of the other egg and flipped it. There were two bodies in there; good.

"Darla!" I said. "Get out the door, take your pack and gun!"

Moaning and mumbling inside the egg.

"Jake, I'm not going without you."

"Get!" I commanded. "Run that way." I pointed toward the rear of the house. "I'll find you."

Darla grabbed some things, threw me my squib, and ran.

"Get up!" I shouted. "John! Susan!"

Roland was struggling to his feet, bleary-eyed, disoriented. Outside, probing beams of light played over the ground near the house, and the darkness hissed with the exhaust of flitter-jets.

Roland straightened up. "I was just―" He saw the lights, heard the sound of approaching aircraft. "My God! Who is it?"

"Want to stay and find out?"

"Jake?" It was Sukuma-Tayler, head protruding from the end of the egg.

"Trouble, John," I told him.

The egg sprang open and Susan stood up, naked, arms wrapped around her ribcage, grimacing from the sudden cold.

"Everybody out and into the bush. Now! Scatter!"

John got to his feet unsteadily. Susan stooped to find clothes ― I rushed at them both, grabbed a blanket and flung it over Susan, and shoved both of them forward. Susan grunted, stumbled, and I caught her.

"Sorry, no time for that, Suzie. Run! Both of you!"

They ran.

On the way to the rear of the house I made a pass at the egg, came up empty, but happened to snag my jacket with a foot. I scooped it up and ran, struggling into it.

I ran into Roland at the back door, shoved him out, and aimed him in a direction ninety degrees off my course. A searchbeam hit the house, throwing stark shadows along the ground.

The brush had been cleared in a ten-meter strip about the house, and I sprinted for the edge. I was just about into it when a disk of light zagged crazily in from my right and swooped over me. I dove for cover behind a Wurlitzer, but knew I'd been spotted. An exciter beam raised flame and smoke from the ground very near. The light wasn't on me, but they knew my approximate position. I waited three heartbeats and dashed to the left, feeling tiny sharp things in the soil prick my soles. I ducked behind another tree and waited, watching the hard circle of light sweep the ground. The breath of the flitter was warm on my skin, conjuring dust devils around me. There was more than one craft. Constellations of red and green running lights plied the night sky, hovering, darting, pouncing. Spotlight beams waved through the brush on all sides of the house.

Another bolt crackled near me, exploding a barrel-shaped plant into a plume of steaming pulp.

A flickering thought: They have night-sight equipment. Why the searchlights?

Sam's key was in my pocket. I took it out and called. I hadn't tried it before because I thought we were well out of range, but it was worth a try.

"Jake?… [crackle]… that you?"

"Sam? Can you copy?"

"[sputter].. Jake? Come in… [pop!]"

"Sam, if you can copy me, I'm about to be nabbed by the Colonial Authority. Colonial Authority. Copy? I'll be at the Militia station in town. Acknowledge, Sam."

The key spat static and not much else.

Another bolt sizzled to my rear. I ran again, this time doubling back toward the house, but as I got into the open a bolt touched down not a meter in front of me. I slid to a stop in the dirt. They had me. Obviously the shots had been deliberate misses. I got to my feet and the searchlight hit me full.

"Jake!" Darla's voice from behind.

"Darla! Stay there!"

"Hey! Over here!" She hadn't heard me over the whoosh of the flitter.

"Darla, stay where you are! They have me covered."

Out in the mesa, shafts of light converged on the others. I could see John waving surrender, Susan huddling near. I looked to my left. Roland, the only one fully clothed, was shuffling back toward the house with his arms raised, spotlighted like a headline act on New Vegas.

A loudspeaker growled. "JACOB MCGRAW?"

"Me! Over here!" I waved. "I'm the one you want!"

"COLONIAL MILITIA. YOU'RE UNDER ARREST."

"I gathered as much," I said, addressing the dead shards of Wurlitzer pipe at my feet. The flitter swooped to land. I raised my hands and dropped my gun.

From behind, Darla opened up on the descending craft, the bolt hitting the left front impeller. Sparks rose from the metal and static discharges played over the surface like furious dancing fingers.

Answering fire was swift and accurate. A gout of flame and wispy smoke roiled from the spot where Darla's shot had come from. The Walther did not answer. Sailing flinders of brush fell at my feet.

Frozen in body and spirit, I gaped at the dwindling flames

where Darla's body surely lay, and remembered my dream just then, strangely, fragments of it, wishing the Hand would appear again to take me by the collar and yank me out of this metadream I knew as life.