The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I

Needless to say, in the eyes of most human people the great Kilauea tsunami was an overpoweringly awful cataclysm. The mere thought of it made human blood run cold. Even the Heechee considered it regrettable.

The disaster had not been unexpected. Human scientists had seen it coming even without the help of the Heechee, though the Heechee helped a lot with the details. They were good at that sort of thing. They knew a lot about tectonic troubles, from their experiences of moving planets around inside the great black hole they lived in, and they had no trouble predicting that at some point the Big Island of Hawaii would split in two and splash that great tsunami all across the Pacific Rim. Even the Heechee didn't have any idea of what to do about it, though.

When it did come, in all its violence and terror, the size of that wave wasn't like that of any other tsunami, ever. Even the very biggest historic tsunamis had been not much more than a hundred meters high. This one was a whole other thing. When it struck the beaches all around the Pacific coasts, the curl at the top of the wave was nearly half a kilometer above the shoreline. When all that irresistible mass of water came battering down on the land tens of millions of human beings were killed at once.

It wasn't just people who died. Their works went with them. Whole cities were erased out of existence by that wave, as though they had never been. The world mourned.

That is, most of the world did. There was one particular human person, a minister by the name of Orbis McClune, who took a quite different view of the incident.

Reverend McClune didn't mourn at all because, in his view, the devastation of the Kilauea tsunami wasn't all that bad. It had its good points. One of the best of them was that the wave had obliterated large chunks of Southern California.

It wasn't merely that McClune didn't think the tsunami was bad. He didn't think it was an accident at all. Quite the contrary. In Reverend McClune's view that annihilating wave was nothing more nor less than the manifestation of God's terrible, pitiless vengeance, smiting sinners where they stood. The great wave struck on a Saturday. On that Sunday morning the Reverend McClune got down on his knees before what was left of his congregation in Rantoul, Illinois, and thanked his God and his Savior for mercifully cleaning out the cesspits that had been Southern California, the purulent home of the so-called entertainment industry with its sinful vids and VRs, the vile font of lewdness and nudeness and blasphemies of all kinds.

Not to mention that he had a personal reason for wishing misfortune to that part of the world.

McClune's sermon didn't mention that personal reason. He didn't have to; the congregation knew all about it. He also didn't mention the obliterated cities of Hilo and Honolulu, Shanghai and Tokyo, Auckland and Papeete and a hundred others, all around the Pacific Rim and on the islands dotting the sea. To the extent that McClune thought about those cities at all, he presumed that they must have been pretty wicked, too. That went without saying as far as McClune was concerned, because why else would God have chosen to destroy them? But McClune didn't take much of an interest in those other places. Godless California had been on his mind for a long time, and, he assumed, therefore on God's mind as well. So he was pretty sure that California had been God's main target. If other communities happened to get themselves obliterated while He was punishing the Californians, well, that was the kind of collateral damage that history was full of.

So, as McClune addressed the tiny remnant of what once had been a flourishing congregation, he tearfully thanked his God for wiping America's Pacific Coast clean again. That was the sermon that finally cost him his job.

On the morning of that unforgettable Sunday there had been fewer than thirty people remaining in McClune's church, the rest of his Hock long driven away by his diatribes against pretty much everything that had happened in the last century. By noontime there were even fewer, because this time he had gone too far even for the loyalest of those few remaining loyalists. The most common word heard among them as they glumly exited the church was, "Nutcase," along with, "All right, we all know he had a tough break, that business with his wife, but for God's sake!" and most of all, "Never mind the business with his wife. He's gone too far this time. We really have to do something." So the leaders of the congregation were on the phone to the bishop before their Sunday dinners were on the table, and by Monday morning Orbis McClune no longer had a church.

That didn't mean that he was defrocked. He kept his status as an ordained minister. He was dehoused, though, because the parsonage went with the church. As an act of charity, the bishop called to offer him thirty days' grace to find another place, but McClune said, "Don't bother. I'll be out of here tomorrow."

The bishop regarded him on the screen. "You know," he said tentatively, "I didn't want to have to take your church away. I don't like to interfere in local matters, but, good heavens, Orbis, you know you didn't give me much of a choice. It was bad enough before, when you went on the comm circuits to call the Heechee demons from Hell—"

"What other name can you call demons by?" McClune asked.

The bishop groaned. "Please, Orbis, we don't want that argument again. I only want to say that when you say things that sound like you're, well, really almost rejoicing in all those terrible deaths from the tsunami, it hurts us all. It certainly doesn't give the right impression of what our faith is all about."

When McClune didn't respond, the bishop sighed in resignation. He hadn't really expected any retraction from McClune, and he certainly didn't want another of those interminable theological arguments—no, diatribes—that had punctuated McClune's tenure in his church. It was only residual politeness, not actual concern for McClune's welfare, that made him ask, "Where will you go, Orbis?"

"Why, I'll go where I'm needed, Bishop." Then McClune smiled. He had a nice smile. You could even call it a heartwarmingly kindly smile. It had deceived many a person who was astonished to find himself moments later labeled a hopelessly hell-bound sinner, since the smile was not at all in keeping with the harsh denunciations that followed. The bishop, who knew McClune well, tensed when he saw the smile, expecting the worst. But all McClune said was, "When you come to think of it, Bishop, that could be pretty nearly anywhere, couldn't it?"

No matter what he had told the bishop, McClune knew perfectly well where he intended to go.

The next morning, first thing, he rented a storage locker for what was worth saving of his household goods. There wasn't much. He put the few remaining necessities in a backpack and caught a railbug for the big airport at Peotone.

Peotone International Airport was a madhouse. Planes were coming in from all over the stricken California coast, landing with scant loads of stunned, scared refugees, and immediately refilling with rescue workers and supplies for the return. The outgoing rescue workers were neatly dressed, the refugees less so. McClune nearly stumbled over a man, woman and child sprawled by a doorway. All were deeply suntanned. The child's face was buried in a VR game simulator; his parents wore the perplexed expression of people who had never been seriously worried before; all three were still wearing pajamas, in the wife's case nearly transparent ones.

Actually, it was just as McClune had expected it would be. As he had counted on its being, in fact, because he had been confident that everybody would be too involved in the task of getting relief to the survivors to be vigilant. He was pretty sure that all he would have to do was display his clerical collar and say, "The survivors are going to need spiritual counseling, too." Say it he did, sufficient it was. The load bosses had more urgent things on their minds than worrying about the credentials of one more volunteer. With hardly a glance, they waved McClune onto the plane that was already loading.

It was a cargo plane, but the kind of goods it was taking to the ruined California coast was a surprise to Orbis McClune. He had supposed the urgent necessities would be such things as food, medical supplies, doctors, nurses. Not so. What was going into the airplane's hold was mostly great earth-moving machines. What's more, most of the score or so of persons, the other so-called rescue workers who were occupying the added-on passenger seats on the upper deck with him, seemed to be news reporters, and the others were all lawyers. At least the ones nearest to him were all one or the other, first a young woman whispering to her machine mind in the seat next to him, then a pair of older, plumper males studying documents together across the aisle. None of the other passengers paid any attention to Orbis McClune.

That was all right with him. He didn't want to talk to anybody just then. He had something more important to do. He closed his eyes, folded his hands on his lap and began a long, imploring, heartfelt, silent prayer to his Maker, because—in an age when members of the human race flew across the galaxy in great faster-than-light spacecraft—Orbis McClune was scared to death of airplanes.

II

What had made Kilauea a mass murderer wasn't just that it was a volcano. There are lots of volcanoes in the world. There are even quite a few of them which, like Kilauea, are in a fairly continuous state of eruption. The thing that made Kilauea special was that it was on an island. This meant that those little lava flows Kilauea kept continually plooping out had nowhere to go on land, because there just wasn't that much land on the island of Hawaii for them to go to. The only thing they could do was to ooze downhill to the beaches, and the only thing they could do after that was to tumble right down off the shoreline into the deeps of the Pacific Ocean.

When the lava got that far, it wasn't molten anymore. As soon as it hit that cold water it froze instantly solid, with a great display of fireworks and superheated steam. Then so did the next overflow out of Kilauea's endlessly recharging cauldron of liquid rock, and the one after that, and the one after that. And so as time went by, those increments of quick-frozen rock just off Hawaii's south beaches turned into a nearly vertical submarine cliff. Then it became an overhanging one. And then it cracked loose, split off from the rest of the Big Island and fell, taking hundreds of square kilometers of the island's surface with it.

Water is not compressible. The volume of water that was shoved out of the way by the collapsing cliff had to go somewhere. What it did was to become the tsunami, a ripple spreading across the Pacific at supersonic jet speed until ultimately it hit the rising slopes of the shelf around some land mass. The ripple then swelled, towered, fell on the land.

For those bits of land, that was just too bad.

The advance warnings helped, a little. Tens of millions of people heeded them and fled inland, and most of those people did succeed at least in saving their lives. But not everybody was able to get out of the way. Even the ones who could run away couldn't take their cities with them.

So Orbis McClune's plane didn't land at the old Los Angeles airport. That wasn't possible. There was nothing left of the airport, or indeed of the city, except for a desert of sand that lay over a waste of featureless, drying mud. The tsunami's first wave had scoured flat everything in that part of the world all the way from Santa Barbara to Tijuana—buildings, roads, railbug lines and everything else made by man. And then the wave that followed that one covered what was left with sand sucked up from the bottom of the sea, leaving nothing visible that could still be recognized as the work of man.

For all practical purposes the obliteration of that principal airport didn't matter. Those kilometers-long runways were heirlooms, designed for a much earlier generation of planes. It was not much of an inconvenience for the pilot of McClune's aircraft to set down on one of the many satellite airstrips in the foothills. The inconveniences started when the plane was actually on the ground. It turned out that each of the scant landing gates was already full, with half a dozen earlier arrivals already waiting on the taxi strips for one to open up. When McClune's aircraft did get to a gate, moments after the gate's previous occupant trundled away to the takeoff strip, he found the terminal crowded past recognition. The airport at Peotone had been busy, sure. But this one was less than a tenth the size of Peotone, and it was doing its inadequate best to handle ten times as much traffic.

As McClune exited the gate, he made the congestion a little worse. He stopped dead in his tracks and closed his eyes for a quick prayer of thanksgiving at having got through the flight alive. He was only a couple of seconds into it when a bump from behind made his eyes fly open.

The bump had come from his former seatmate, lugging a backpack of her own and still talking to her machine mind as she walked. Clearly she had been paying no more attention to the world around than he. "Shit," she said crossly. "Can't you get out of the goddamn way?"

McClune turned to regard her. What he noticed first about the woman was what she intended to be noticed, that is, that she was brown-haired, brown-eyed and all in all, as any normal person would recognize at once, quite pretty. She was in fact so attractive that she clearly had been able to afford plenty of cosmetic surgery. That fact would normally have been more interesting to him than her good looks, but he wasn't trying to raise funds at that moment. Had no church to be raising funds for, for that matter, so he merely gave her his heartwarming smile, the one that meant that the person he was talking to was being an unacceptable pain in the ass. He stepped as far aside as he could, into the airport's crush of people, and said politely, "I'm truly sorry, Miss. I was simply communing with the Lord for a moment."

That was as far as Orbis McClune expected the conversation to go, but it appeared that the woman was getting some other ideas. She was looking at him thoughtfully, taking in his clerical collar. Then she held up her hand toward him, palm out, and asked, "Are you a priest, then, Father, um—?"

McClune's smile, if anything, broadened. "No, I am not a priest of the Roman sect, my dear. I am a simple minister of God." Then, as he caught sight of the tiny glitter she was holding in her palm and realized he was on camera, he added, "I came here to do what I can for the souls of those in distress."

She gave him a microsecond pause before she prompted: "And what is it you can do for them, Reverend?"

The smile became broader still. "Why, I can bring them back to the merciful bosom of the Lord. What else is important in this world?"

"Thanks," she said, closing her fist and turning away, once again whispering to her machine mind and no longer showing any awareness that such a person as Orbis McClune existed.

That was annoying. McClune was accustomed to being scorned and insulted, even now and then to being punched out. However, he was not at all used to being kissed off as a six-second sound bite. He didn't like it, either.

No matter. As he removed himself from the stream of traffic McClune allowed himself a consoling moment to think of the hellfire that awaited the woman, then turned his thoughts toward where he could begin his mission ... and stopped dead once more. There were glowboards hanging below the ceiling that bore once-helpful markings, "Taxis" for the rich and extravagant, and of course "Cellular Transport" for everyone else. They no longer represented any reality. A concourse led down to the rail-bug station, all right, but the entrance to it was blocked by sawhorses bearing signs—hand-painted, of all things!—saying, unbelievably, "No cellular transportation."

That was a shocker. The railbugs were what took you from the place where you were to the place you wanted to be, all over the civilized world. You made your way to the nearest railbug station, never very far, and summoned a bug. No more than a minute or two later one would slide off the main line and onto your siding and open its doors. When you got in you took a seat—it wouldn't have stopped if no seat had been vacant—and chose your destination. The rest was automatic. You read, or drowsed, or watched a vid on the back of the seat ahead of you, or worked on your screen, or whatever. The bug slid back onto the main line, stopping now and then to pick up another passenger or let one off at his own stop. And there you were.

Oddly, Orbis didn't think railbugs were particularly sinful. (It was human beings who had invented them, not the damned—the really damned—Heechee.) He took them all the time.

Not here, though. Not now.

Nor was there much else available. There were no vehicles at the taxi stand, nor did the other passengers seem to expect any. Most of them were being met and led off by some local authority. That was no help to Orbis McClune. There was no one to meet him.

What he did next was easy for him, since he had done it so often before. He chose one of his fellow travelers—an elderly woman whose principal virtue was that she wasn't busy talking to someone else at the moment—and said, "Madam, I am going to ask you the most important question of your life. Will you take a moment of your time to help me save a soul?"

She wouldn't. She wouldn't even answer him, just turned and walked away. The next available person was a dark-skinned young man irritably looking around for someone who clearly wasn't there. He wouldn't either. Nor would the one after that, which made McClune pause to consider a change of plans.

These were all quite irreligious people. Perhaps the place to start delivering his message was right here.

He was looking for a suitable counter to climb onto when he heard himself called. It was the voice of the woman with the palm camera. "Hey, you," she was calling. "You, Reverend! Come here a minute!"

She was beckoning to him with one hand, while the other was doing its best to wave off a couple of raggedy-looking urchins, apparently begging for money. As he hesitated she said impatiently, "Come on, for God's sake. I was talking to my machine mind and I think we might be able to do each other some good. Do you know who I am?"

McClune did not, but before he could say so one of the children at the woman's side spoke up. "I seen you," she said. "You were in the p-vids, telling where to go for food and stuff."

"Why, that's right," she woman said, giving the little girl a small, unencouraging smile. "My name is Cara le Brun, I'm a reporter and, yes, I did do some of those public service announcements. So you see," she said, returning her attention to Orbis McClune, "I'm legit. I'm here to get human interest stories from the victims, and it seems to me you could help me out. Like the religious angle, I mean; Barb says that hasn't been covered much yet."

McClune pursed his lips, considering whether to give up his new plan. "I hear you saying how I'll be helping you," he said, thinking about it. "You didn't say what you can do for me."

"Expenses," she said. "What else? I don't know if you've noticed, but everything's sky-high here. I don't know what kind of financing you have—" She paused inquiringly, got no answer from him, gave him a brisk nod. "That's what I thought. Well, I've got an expense account and Barb cleared it with the higher-ups. That means I can take care of your costs, too—I mean, for a day or two, anyway. Within reason. Well?"

"Who's Barb?"

The woman looked impatient. "What do you need to know that for? Barbara is what they call my machine mind, that's all. So, McClune? What's your answer?"

He hesitated, reminded of something. "You haven't mentioned my name to your machine mind, have you?"

"No. Why would I? And what's the difference if I did? I'm waiting, McClune."

Relieved, McClune gave her his sweet and meaningless smile again. "I accept, of course," he said.

As far as Cara le Brun had a plan, it was to head up into the hills, where most of the survivors had taken refuge.

At first McClune was not attracted to that idea. Down on flattened-out Waveland was where God's wrath had struck its avenging blow, and something in McClune's heart yearned to see the results of that terrible judgment.

On the other hand, it didn't take him long to learn that there wasn't anybody down there who was still alive. His saving word would be better delivered to the survivors, that tiny fraction of former sinners who had been spared a dreadful death. So he held up his hand to stop the little girl, who was going on and on about the advantages of someplace called Barstow. "Fine with me," he said, ignoring the child. "How do we get there?"

The woman looked around irritably. "I could spring for a cab," she said, "but there don't appear to be any." She was looking glumly at the point on the curb marked "Taxi Rank," where a longish line of people was hopelessly sweating in the heat and not moving at all. The only visible motion was far away, beyond the end of the terminal, where some of the earth-moving machines from the plane's cargo hold were already lumbering away in single file to where they were needed.

McClune hesitated, wondering if that were a sign. Perhaps it wasn't God's design for him to go along with this trollop's plans. It wouldn't he hard to talk one of the machine drivers into giving him a ride down into the destroyed area. He closed his eyes, asking for guidance, but he didn't seem to receive any.

Or, it turned out, need to. The little girl who had been standing with her fists on her hips, looking indignant, spoke up. "Jeez, don't you guys listen? You need a guide. I'm it."

Le Brun frowned, then inspected the girl narrowly. So did McClune. The child looked to be no more than twelve. Her hair was cut in a ragged soupbowl and did not appear to have been washed for some time. More offensive to McClune, what she was wearing was the shortest of shorts, with a tank top that had been meant for someone with actual breasts.

Le Brun didn't seem to like what she saw any more than he did. "What we need is a vehicle, not a guide," she said. "Do you know where we can get one?"

"Sure I do. Only the vehicle comes with the guiding. It's a package. You don't get one without you take the other," the girl said. "You want the deal or not? If you don't, there's plenty of others around here that will."

"How much?" le Brun asked practically.

"Two hundred a day," the girl said, watching le Brun's face. When it didn't display immediate shock, she tacked on, "Each, I mean. Plus expenses for, like, fuel and such."

Le Brun gave her an unamused grin. "I'll take it before it gets any higher," she said sourly. "Do you know where we want to go? Someplace up in the hills, where there are thousands of refugees. I'm thinking of heading into the high desert, or maybe—"

But the girl wasn't waiting to hear the older woman's thoughts. "Barstow," she said sagely. "That's the place to go."

Le Brun didn't like being interrupted. "Why Barstow?" she demanded.

The girl was looking around nervously. "It's got everything you want, take my word for it. And I can get you there in an hour. Are we going?"

Le Brun thought for a moment. "Has it got a decent hotel, at least?"

The girl said pityingly, "Lady, there aren't any hotels, not that you could get into anyway. Trust me. I'll give you a place to stay." She wasn't looking at her prospective employer anymore. She was looking at a pair of sweating and harried policemen, shoving their way through the crowd in their general direction. "That's it," she said. "Take it or leave it. Coming?"

Le Brun glanced at McClune, and then shrugged. "I guess so. What's your name?"

"Ella," she said briefly, starting to turn away.

"Nice to meet you, Ella," le Brun said politely. "This man is Reverend—"

Over her shoulder Ella said, "Who asked you? Let's get over to the car before those apes start hassling me."

The girl's "car" wasn't exactly a car. It was an antique, piston-engined vehicle, and, believe it or not, it burned hydrogen. There had still been a few old fuel-burners around when Orbis was a boy, mostly belonging to old farmers too poor to trade up. But now? He suspected it had been looted from some old car museum. Most of it was pale blue, accented with dents and rust spots, and one door was a bright yellow. The vehicle stood almost by itself in a nearly empty parking lot that was a longer hike from the terminal than either le Brun or McClune had planned on. They were both sweating by the time they got to it, and le Brun eyed their transportation with distaste. "Does this damn thing run?" she demanded.

"Get in and find out," Ella ordered, but le Brun hung back. She was looking at the girl behind the wheel, no more than a year or two older than Ella. "Oh, her," said Ella. "That's Judy. She's my driver."

"Cripes," said le Brun. "Judy, have you got a license to drive this thing?"

"I got better than a license, lady. I got a car. Are you getting in or not?"

Le Brun looked even more discontented, but, having no evident other choice, dumped her bag on the floor of the van and climbed in after it. McClune followed, slightly amused. It was apparent to him that this woman was used to all the comforts of an expense account. She wasn't taking the present discomforts easily. McClune, on the other hand, had long since subdued any temptations to ease and comfort, so he followed her to the car door without reluctance.

Then she stopped cold, blocking the entrance, and he saw that she was looking toward the third seat that was in the rear of the vehicle. "Hey, you, Ella," she said, turning angrily on the guide. "What's going on? You didn't say anything about sharing the ride."

Ella shoved her in. "You think you're the only people want to go to Bars tow?"

"Yeah, but what about the microwave radiation from those things? What if it screws up my machine mind?"

"It doesn't do that. Try it yourself," Ella ordered. Orbis McClune tried to peer past her but the doorway was too narrow. But it was only a moment longer before le Brun muttered a grudging assent and went in.

Afterward it seemed to McClune that the talk about microwaves should have tipped him off, but it didn't. The sight of the other passengers was a wholly unwelcome surprise.

There were two of them, hideous-looking creatures, like stomped-on skeletons of human people, sitting uncomfortably on the bottom of their spines so that the pouches they carried between their legs could hang over the side of the ragged plastic seats. They wore smocks of some drab fabric. They rested their feet on hexagonal metal boxes that glowed with a bluish light. Their eyes gazed out at him from wrinkly, squared-off faces. And they smelled faintly of ancient piss.

They were Heechee.

III

The Barstow road took them to the edge of Waveland itself.

That road wasn't where the full force of the tsunami had hit. In the places where it had, now flat and empty under the setting sun, there was nothing left that a person could recognize. On the slopes of the hills at least there was wreckage. Quite a lot of it, actually. Some piles of it could be recognized as the remains of a building. More often it was a scree of Tinker-toy junk that seemed to have parts of two, three or a dozen structures jumbled together. On the hillsides above the freeway men and machines were carefully sorting through the ruins of homes—looking for survivors, perhaps, or for something worth the trouble of carrying away. It appeared to McClune that many of the houses had been ripped from their foundations and then had skidded down the hillside until—crushed, battered, sometimes burned—at last they were caught and held on the shelf formed by the freeway. That was to say, by what was left of the freeway. That wasn't always very much. The lower reaches of the road were pitted and twisted; in some places the paving was scrubbed completely away. More than once little Judy, muttering very grown-up obscenities to herself as she fought the wheel, had to creep off the paved road onto muddy shoulders, none of them level, so that the old van tilted worrisomely before they got back onto the flat. And, oh, yes, there was traffic to worry about, too. There was lots of traffic, mostly induction-driven cars, but a few antiques like their own, and all competing for the same space on the freeway. Sometimes, as their ancient vehicle came to a particularly squeezed stretch of the road, there just wasn't enough space to go around. In those places the traffic stagnated into a jam forty or fifty cars long, as the vehicles crept in single file through the bottleneck.

Reverend McClune took note of all those things, but they were not what was foremost in his mind. That was taken up by the identity of his unexpected fellow passengers.

Orbis McClune's whole life had been spent in the knowledge that he was surrounded by lascivious sin and unGodly corruption. He understood that that was the way of the world. McClune detested that world with all his heart, but in his mind it had one redemptive quality. It was rotten with wickedness, but it was human wickedness. It was in fact nothing more or less than the simple Original Sin that God Himself had invented for the purpose of keeping the people of His world from getting too uppity.

McClune had been dealing with that kind of sin all his life. The Heechee, however, were something else entirely.

Souls were Orbis McClune's job, and he knew all there was to know about them. Well, almost all. As he scowled at the reflection of those unwanted fellow passengers in the windshield, he realized that there was one question concerning souls to which he did not have the answer. That was, did the Heechee have any?

It was an interesting theological point. The beasts of the field had no souls, Scripture was clear on that. However, the beasts of the field didn't speak in human tongues, or wear clothing, or invent spaceships. McClune had no answer, but he had one fervent prayer: Lord, if they have souls that need saving, let that cup pass to someone other than me.

The thing was, Orbis was certain that it was no part of God's design that had put those abominable creatures on the Earth. They were intruders. They came from outside. They did not belong on the world that God Himself had specifically decreed—it was all written out there in black and white, in His very own Book—was dedicated to the exclusive use of the human race. There was nothing there to give domain to any bizarre creatures from other worlds. So to McClune the Heechee were unblessed by God and thus incarnate evil. If there was one single embodiment of concentrated sin that stood out above all others in his mind, that was the Heechee.

The catalogue of their wickedness was plain. It was because of the Heechee that so many human beings had abandoned God's world to flit around in space. It was because of the Heechee that soulless machine minds had come to play so large a part in human affairs. It was because of the Heechee that countless sinners on the point of death had chosen to be reborn as immortal electronic abstractions, instead of rotting beneficially away in God's own soil as they waited for the final call. This last wickedness was particularly repellent to McClune because of the circumstances that ended his former marriage. But worst of all, it was due to the Heechee that those excellent spurs to decent behavior, want and fear, had so nearly disappeared from the world.

McClune could not help himself He groaned aloud, causing the newswoman to turn to him irritably. "What's the matter with you, McClune?" she demanded. "Can't you hold it down? I'm trying to do an interview here."

And she turned her palm camera back to the Heechee, leaving Orbis McClune to stare gloomily out at the passing scene.

It was full dark when they reached Barstow. Hardly even spray from the tsunami had managed to get that far inland, so there were no destroyed buildings lining Barstow's streets. There were refugees, though. They filled the streets, ambling aimlessly or sitting wherever there was a flat place to put a weary bottom on—steps, curbs, flat-topped fire hydrants. They clogged the streets, where panel trucks and flatbeds and buses were inching along as they brought help to the refugees—or brought more refugees. The people swamped the little parkland spaces, a lot of them with sleeping bags or bundles of blankets, jealously guarding a place to stretch out. They lined up before the few open restaurants and motels, not in the hope of food or shelter but simply waiting for a turn at the toilets. They lined up, too, before the trucks that had stopped to dispense flat, heavy packets of CHON-food, flown in from some surviving Food Factory. Some of the people looked despairing, some simply bewildered. But the expression on most of the faces was outrage. The better dressed the refugees, the more furious they were. You could see that they were both stunned and angry. In this world, at this time, for these people, this sort of thing was simply not meant to happen.

McClune looked out at the horde with sober gratification. These were the souls he had come to save. They had been chastised, and it was his duty to tell them why. "Stop the car," he ordered, already beginning to rehearse the catalogue of their sins.

But that didn't happen. "Not a chance," gritted Judy, peering at him through the rearview mirror, and Ella backed her up.

"Can't do it, old-timer," she said firmly. "There's a vehicle curfew here in about twenty minutes, and there's cops here that would take this car right away from us if they caught us breaking it."

"And shut up, too," Judy added, "because I need to concentrate on my driving. Want me to run over one of these creeps?"

The "accommodations" the two girls had provided for them weren't lavish. They amounted to a large and oily smelling shack that apparently had once been some kind of repair shop before suffering some kind of fire. Judy immediately rolled the jalopy inside when they arrived—for fear of its being stolen, she said, although McClune could not imagine who would steal it. The old rustbucket took up a lot of the shed's available space, too. The remaining space was mostly filled by their beds—well, by the canvas cots that were all Ella and Judy had to offer. ("Hey," Judy snarled when le Brun complained, "you can sleep on the sidewalk if you like that better.") At least the cots were brand-new. They had come straight from the trucks that were handing out emergency supplies. So had the blankets.

The two Heechee were having none of either. They chirped and hissed worriedly to each other, and then to Ella, who frowned thoughtfully and then went away for a moment, returning with a huge bag of old rags. That seemed to satisfy the Heechee, sort of, but the space she offered them to sleep in did not. They twittered to each other again, gazing at the walls and roof of the old building, then politely excused themselves. They carried their rags out of doors and patted them into a pair of heaps in the alley, away from the building.

When Judy made an inquiring noise, Cara le Brun was quick with an explanation. "I did a show on it once. That's how they sleep, dug into a mass of stuff."

"Yeah, sure," Judy said, "but why are they out in the alley?"

That le Brun couldn't explain. Nor did she really want to, because her attention was abruptly taken up with the discovery of the lacks in their accommodations. She reacted with displeasure when she found out that they had no running water, then with horror when she realized what that implied. The only available "toilet" was a slit trench just off the driveway, with canvas walls for "privacy." And then, when she discovered what the two girls were offering for a meal, her reaction became simple fury. "That stuff is just goddam CHON-food!" she snapped. "They're giving that crap away downtown! How've you got the nerve to charge us for it?"

Ella gave her a cold shrug. "Rather stand in line? Eat or don't eat. I don't care."

While they were talking, the Heechee pair had put the finishing touches on their bedding and were now placidly unwrapping round patties of something that smelled of raspberries and roasted garlic. That was one provocation too many for Orbis McClune. God might have chosen to punish him by putting him in the company of these foul creatures—unfairly, of course, but McClune believed that being unfair from time to time was one of God's perquisites. However, He surely didn't demand that His servant McClune eat with them. Orbis took an arbitrary handful of the rations and retired with them to the edge of his cot, as far from the Heechee as possible.

The wrappings of the food packets came in a rainbow of color. Although they were textured like silk, they split wide as he ran a thumbnail over them. McClune ate them in alternating bites, unconcerned that one packet was doughy and tediously bland, while another crackled like peanut brittle in his teeth and tasted like some sort of meat broth. After a brief and silent grace he chewed stolidly away. Food had never been important for Orbis McClune. Eating was just something you had to do to keep life going, no more pleasurable than moving your bowels, and worth no more thought.

When he finished eating he visited the slit trench. He paused on the way back, gazing at the great starfield overhead. Then he went back indoors. Cara le Brun was having a desultory conversation with the two girls, apparently mostly to exchange complaints, but as Orbis McClune had no wish to talk to any of them he stretched out on his cot and closed his eyes.

He was no more than halfway through his bedtime prayer when a shuddery, dizzying feeling let him know that something unwelcome was going on. The room seemed to be rocking. He felt an urgent need to sit up, and managed to do it on the second or third try.

It wasn't just him. Noises from across the room let him know that the women shared the experience. When they became articulate, the loudest voice was Cara le Brun's: "Jesus! What was that, an earthquake?" And when Ella confirmed her guess, "Well, I never signed up for any goddam earthquakes. Cripes! Next thing, the goddam wave'll be coming back, only this time it'll take the whole damn state with it!"

That was as far as McClune cared to listen. It had been nothing but an act of God, and he had never feared those. He closed his eyes. The last thing he heard was Ella's complaining voice: "Give it a rest, will you, lady? It's just like leftover shocks after the tidal wave. Happens all the time, for God's sake. Get used to it."

IV

The next morning Orbis McClune was up with the sun and ready to begin the work that had brought him to this place. Even so, the Heechee were up before him and already gone—to do what, McClune had no idea. He left Cara le Brun squabbling with the two young girls about the lack of a shower and their refusal to drive the old wreck downtown in broad daylight, so that she had to walk. It wasn't really far. In less than twenty minutes McClune was where the people who were his targets were stirring.

Barstow's downtown was like every other in the world, with all the same familiar logos over the same storefronts—the same yogurt and icecream shops, last-food restaurants, travel agents, p-vid repairers and tax preparers. He passed a workout gym and a VR total-immersion entertainment center, a Tae Kwan Do studio and half a dozen hair stylists and dental cosmeticians—clearly, the people of Barstow were as interested as those of any other community in looking as good as modern technology could make them. McClune not only passed them all by, he hardly noticed they were there. What he was looking for was a corner with a lot of people—but that described every corner in Barstow—and a convenient bench, porch or picnic table he could stand on to address the throng.

Soon enough the perfect spot appeared. It was a traffic circle with a little park in the middle. It held a couple of flowering bushes and, in the center, a tall statue of someone wearing a hood and a robe. Like everywhere else in Barstow, the park was already crowded with aimlessly moving refugees, and it was rich with stone benches. They were, of course, already all occupied, but that was not a problem for Orbis McClune. All it took was an, "Excuse me, brother, I'm doing God's work," with that great, loving smile, and in a moment the elderly men sharing the bench had, made way for him. As he climbed up he saw that there was a name carved into the base of the statue—Fra Junipero Serra, whoever he was—and he took that as a good omen. That person would have been a papist, of course, but nevertheless a man who had dedicated his life to God—even if it was the wrong God—and thus a colleague. Pleased, McClune turned, raising his arms in benediction to address the bystanders....

Then he saw what was across the street, on the far side of the intersection. It was a storefront with a bright marquee that said Here After.

That omen was not good.

If there was one thing McClune loathed more than the Heechee themselves it was the Here After chain of machine-storage establishments, where the dying, or the merely despondent, could avail themselves of that accursed, Heechee-spawned substitute for actual death. It wasn't simply the blasphemy involved, though blasphemous it certainly was, Orbis McClune had more personally powerful feelings at stake.

But he let them distract him only for a moment. McClune had years of experience at suppressing his personal feelings for his duty. He raised his arms. "Brothers!" he called. One or two passersby paused incuriously to look. Then, more strongly, "Brothers! Sisters!" And the spirit within began to move him. That sweet, empty, enormous smile bathed everyone nearby in its meaningless love as he thundered, "Listen to me, for I bring you salvation and eternal life in the bosom of the Lord!"

Some things are universal. For example, the victims of a great natural disaster—any disaster, any time in the history of the world—share a fixed cocktail of losses. Possessions are irreparably gone: houses, cars, furnishings, the plants that once hung from the ceiling of the family room that doesn't exist anymore, the lamp that was an ancient wedding gift, the thirty-year-old Teddy bear that had once belonged to a now forty-year-old son. Friendships are ruptured as the friends and neighbors are driven apart. Many certain and familiar expectations disappear, with nothing to replace them but worries about what the new future holds. These are universals. It was how it was for the people of Martinique, and the Johnstown flood, and burned-out Dresden and bombed-out Hiroshima, and those things never change.

But there were very large changes of another kind here. Not one single person in Barstow went hungry in the wake of the tsunami. Nor, of course, did almost anyone else in the world; the limitless riches that poured out of the Food Factories could feed any multitudes. Not one person had lost a penny of savings—or of debts, either, for the machine minds that managed the world's banks and credit institutions and tax authorities had instantly, electronically, fled to safer stores. Not one had lost his medical records and list of drug regimes, nor did anyone lack the facilities to get treatment—doctors and mobile treatment centers had been about the first things to be flown in—and many of the survivors still had their own personal machine minds to keep them provided with information. Well, the ones that were well enough off to own them in the first place did, anyway.

But the one thing almost all of them lacked was something to do with their time. That was just fine for Orbis McClune.

So for three hours, without respite in the hot morning sunshine, McClune pleaded, exhorted, warned, threatened, condemned. He put on one of the greatest performances of his life. Sadly, the refugees weren't responding. Most listened apathetically for a while and then moved on. Sometimes some of them tittered. Occasionally a few heckled. But mostly they just moved on.

That never left McClune without a crowd around his bench, however. There was a constant replenishment of aimless strollers, though the next batch was no more interested than the last. Sometimes from his perch McClune could catch sight of Cara le Brun moving about in the crowd, taking pictures of McClune himself as he preached, or trying to get a useful interview from people in the audience. She wasn't the only newsperson doing the same thing, either. There had to be dozens of them, sometimes with palm cameras going, occasionally with elaborate multi-lens setups. He thought this must be the most thoroughly documented catastrophe in the history of the human race.

He even caught an occasional glimpse of the two Heechee doing whatever it was they were doing. It appeared to be no more than simple sightseeing, but with Heechee how could you tell? They didn't seem to be talking to many people, though many gaped at them. Most of the crowd made a space around them. Even when McClune pointed dramatically toward the lingering Heechee and thundered, "Behold the embodiment of evil! Behold the vile tempters who brought death and hellfire down upon your dearest ones!"—even then the Heechee remained impassive. While the human crowds only muttered to each other. And moved on.

It was a real challenge. Here was the biggest audience McClune had ever dreamed of having, and if he had saved one single soul of them, there was no sign of it on their faces.

Perhaps, McClune thought, the problem was in the makeup of the throng. This wasn't only the largest group he had ever faced, it was the youngest and the healthiest. There weren't any tottering oldsters, no cripples, none that showed any sign of wasting disease. In this they were completely unlike McClune's lost Rantoul congregation, where all the younger and healthier members had long since fled to less dismal churches, leaving only those for whom Judgment Day could arrive at any time.

That didn't matter to McClune. He graded the successes and failures of his life not according to how many souls he actually saved, only on how indefatigably he worked at trying to save them. But even he had now and then to bow to more basic needs. When thirst and the need to pee mandated a break, he took it.

In refugee-mobbed Barstow at this time these needs were not easily satisfied. It wasn't until he spotted Cara le Brun standing irritably in a line before the Tae Kwan Do store that he found the solution. There were toilets inside, she told him, and showers, and of course drinking water, all available for a price, and if he chose to wait with her she would pay his way in. So he joined her in the line. She looked him up and down. "Saving plenty of souls, Reverend?" she asked, but the tone showed that it wasn't a serious question, only a sort of social noise. He ignored it. But her need for conversation to take her mind off the indignity of standing in a line was not slaked. "What did you think of our earthquake last night?" she asked. "You know what caused it, don't you?"

He shrugged. Science had never been his favorite subject. "Something about faults, I guess?"

"Not this time," she said, looking superior and sounding that way, too. "It was that damn tsunami. My machine mind explained the whole thing to me. She said all that weight of water squeezed all the, you know, cracks and things that were there all the time in California, and now they're kind of relieving the strain."

"Huh," he said, his thoughts more concentrated on the prospect of a latrine.

"So we're likely to have more of the damn things," she said, somberly gleeful at the opportunity to share her bad news with someone else. "And that's not all. Did you know they're running out of food?"

Even after McClune had relieved himself at the Tae Kwan Do's urinals and slaked his thirst at the taps in their men's room, he was still puzzling over that.

Running out of food! But that was preposterous. People didn't "run out" of food anymore. There was always plenty of food; that was a given. Sure, there had been times when hungering people had even mined coal to grow on it bacteria that could be pressed into horrid little edible lumps that, however textured and flavored, always tasted like used motor oil.

But that was then. That was before the Heechee Food Factories were discovered, orbiting in space in the Oort cloud of comets to suck from them their elemental carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen—what they called CHON—and make them into almost any kind of food you could imagine. And after that it was only a step to redesign the Food Factories for Earthly use, floating in ocean waters and pulling the elements they needed from the sea. Why, there were hundreds of the things, churning out rations day in and day out, everywhere! McClune had seen pictures of them, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Red Sea, off the coasts of Morocco and China, wherever there was enough organic matter to give them the carbon and nitrogen they needed to go with the hydrogen and oxygen from the water itself. Of course he had hated what he saw—more Heechee deviltry!—but they certainly had kept Earth's dozen billion people alive. One of his parishioners had actually worked on one of the things until he retired to Rantoul. His job had been mixing the raw CHON with trace elements enough to provide the consumer with all the vitamins and minerals he needed, in a giant floating factory that was moored off the coast of Baja California, and fed most of the Southwest....

Then enlightenment struck. Baja! Of course! The same tsunami that had planed most Pacific shorelines bare would certainly have demolished the Baja Food Factory—and probably the ones on the Oregon coast and the Aleutians and the shores of Central America, and wherever else in those destroyed parts of the world where a Food Factory could have been put. And so, yes, it was possible that, for the first time in a generation, food might indeed be running out.

When McClune called it a day, he was hungry, tired and, he suspected, probably seriously sunburned as well. He was also as close to being happy as he usually allowed himself to get.

Then, to make his day even better, there was good news waiting for him at home. As he pushed past the creaky old door, he saw Cara le Brun and the two girls gorging themselves from a heap of CHON-food packets. Whatever else might happen, his mission was not endangered by the threat of starving. "Run out?" Ella said scornfully. "Course they're gonna run out. We knew that was coming, so we stocked up days ago."

Le Brun had her news too. "I was hunting for interviews at the Here After and I found out something. It's where the Heechee are hanging out. You know that offer they're making?"

Ella and Judy nodded, but McClune looked blank. "What offer?"

"You didn't know? Oh, hell," she said, remembering, "you don't have a machine mind, do you? It's the immigration thing. Like for people who don't have anywhere to go?" And when he looked even blanker, "To the Core, see? They're offering to take anybody who wants it to the Core. Only thing is, it's only for people who've been machine-stored, so most likely they'll have been dead first."

Then the change in McClune's expression—puzzlement to shock to outright anger—registered with her at last. "Hey," she said, her grin placatory, "don't look like that. The Here After deal's kind of weird, sure, but when you look at the alternatives it's not so bad, is it?"

And then she frowned, puzzled, as McClune's expression softened, the rage draining away, the vast, heart-warming, meaningless smile replacing it. "Bad?" he said, considering. "Why, no, Ms. le Brun, it isn't just bad. It is totally, blasphemously, hopelessly evil in all its parts, and I have prayed a thousand times, on my knees, that those responsible for it should boil in a lake of fire for all eternity in the nethermost reaches of Hell."

The smile broadened still more as he turned and walked away. He knew the value of making a good exit, so he did not stop there but kept on making it, right out the creaky old door.

Outside the twilight was warm and the breeze gentle. He glanced at the Heechees' mound of rags, thought briefly of kicking them to the four winds, decided against it as an interior rumble suggested a more immediately important project. He headed toward the latrine.

A good bowel movement was after all a blessing. He took his time about it. By the time he was returning to the others a couple of stars had begun to peep out overhead. Most of the world thought those first glimmers of evening starlight rather pretty, if they thought of them at all. To Orbis McClune they carried a load of guilt. It was they that had lured the world to spaceflight, and thus to the Heechee and all their wickedness.

But they were far away, and on this world McClune was almost at peace as he pushed the door aside and went in. As much peace as the tormented soul of Orbis McClune ever had, at least.

It didn't last. Cara le Brun was sitting in a corner of the room, whispering to her machine mind but with her eyes on him and her expression absorbed. She stopped talking, got up and walked toward him, looking unexpectedly apologetic. At once McClune's defenses went up. He was wary of surprises, which in his experience seldom portended anything good.

Not this time, either. "Hey, Orbis," she said, reaching out to put her hand on his shoulder. Before he could shake it off she was going on: "Listen, I had Barb check you out. I'm sorry if I said anything wrong. I didn't know you had a wife in Here After storage."

VI

The next morning's sun was no hotter, McClune's unsteady perch on the bench beneath the great, frowning statue no more wearying than before, but Orbis McClune felt them more. His voice was just as commanding, his threats and warnings as plangent as ever. However, the old fire in his heart was quenched by the unwanted, long-suppressed memories of an ancient hurt... the one named Rowena.

Rowena. The beautiful. The decorous. The, well, the loved ... or at least the very nearly loved as nearly as it was in Orbis McClune's power to love anything mortal. Until the decorous became unruly, and paid for it with her life, and then had not the grace to be once and for all truly dead but went on to be a constant hurt in McClune's.

The source of that unmitigatable hurt was there before him, right across the street. It was the technicians of Here After that had made it to Rowena's crashed car almost as soon as the ambulance, in time to get her dying consent and transform her personality—her soul!—into nothing more tangible than a cloud of electrons captured within a machine. As she still was at this moment. And always would be, as far into the future as human life continued to exist on Earth.

McClune's voice cracked, right in the middle of one of his favorite descriptions of the eternities of torture that awaited the damned. A couple of the idlers who made up his audience looked amused, but he caught himself and went right on. That is, his mouth continued to shape words and the words became well-reasoned arguments, but the arguments were merely the ones he had voiced so many times before.

Rowena should not have done it.

Her whole life proved that. Her clergyman-father was almost as strict in his beliefs as McClune himself—strict enough to have named his daughter after one of the purest maidens in Sir Walter Scott's long oeuvre, and to have insisted she model herself after that person. Rowena had been brought up to be a perfect wife for, say, the early eighteenth century. And for the first three years of their marriage those were the qualities she displayed, to her husband and to the world.

It was the fourth year that had been the killer.

All the time he was telling his audience the instructive story of Matthew the tax collector, the one who became the servant of the Lord and changed from taking the worthless coin of Mammon to giving, giving the saving Word of God ... all that time, his gaze was far above the heads of his dwindling company of listeners, and fixed firmly on the despised Here After marquee just across the street. That was the Enemy incarnate. Its presence taunted him. The line of men and women waiting to get into it was an affront. Did they not know that they were damning their souls?

Rowena had known that. He had told her so himself, the moment he learned that—for hours on end, while he was in his study preparing his next installment of God's Truth for his parishioners—she had been furtively talking with heretics and blasphemers on the p-net. The things they had talked about were nearly unforgivable. Women's rights! Abortion! Freedom of thought! Worst of all, the vile physical low between woman and woman, their bodies joined in the filthiest of lusts.

Oh, Rowena had sworn, it was all theoretical, she had never clone any of those things, not even registered to vote. She was just interested. As a matter of curiosity. And when he told her to what those interests and curiosities would lead her—when he threatened to expose her wickedness to the congregation that very next Sunday—that was when she had stormed out of the house, and driven her car into the space that was just about to be occupied by the lead tractor of a high-speed freight caravan. Had that been by accident or by design? It didn't matter. She had sinned. It was people like the ones across he street that had let her avoid the life payment for her sin, by committing a sin greater still.

And there before him, a score of men and women were lined up before the Here After office to repeat that same irremediable sin.

He made a decision. As soon as he finished his present thought—at the latest, as soon as the shadow of the statue behind him reached the little clump of flowers on the other side of the walk—he would dismiss his audience, leave the little park and cross the street to deal with the greater emergency there. Preaching against them to begin with. Maybe a little righteous trashing of the premises, if enough of his audience could be motivated to the deed. It was the right thing to do, he told himself. He was at fault for not doing it sooner....

However, it did not happen.

It didn't happen because, without warning, McClune was suddenly unsteady on his feet, then more than unsteady.

It was one of those little earthquakes, his interior voice was telling him wisely, just as he discovered that he could not stand at all. This particular earthquake wasn't all that little. McClune dropped to his knees and grabbed the back of the bench to keep from falling ... but was falling anyway, falling in a tumbling sprawl that dropped him on his back in the yellowed grass, his skull smacking against the brittle sod, blurring his vision ... but not blurring it so much that he didn't see the grave, granite face of Fra Junipero Serra bending down toward his own, toppled as surely as himself by this latest earthquake ... the face coming closer and closer, as though to give him his kiss of death.

Because death it was going to be. McClune had no doubt of that. The thought terrified him, and it made him exultant, too, because this would be the time when he met his Maker, and got His unfailing reward for a lifetime of faithful service.

Or so, he believed, ho deserved. But there was terror as well, because how could any mortal know the nature of God's awful justice? He voiced an impassioned plea for mercy to his Lord, not so much a prayer as a single begging shout, because that was all the time he had before those adamantine lips touched his own, and then went farther, and brought with them an instant explosion of pain....

And then nothing. Only blackness.

VII

But when Orbis McClune managed to get his eyes open again—it had been curiously hard to make his muscles obey his will—it wasn't the late Fra Junipero Serra who was kissing him. It was an elderly man with a bald head and a ginger-colored beard, and the breath that he was forcing into Orbis McClune's mouth tasted nastily of beer and other, worse things. "Hey!" McClune cried—or intended to cry, but it took three or four attempts to get the words out—"Hey!" And "What." And "You." And "Think." And "You." And "Do?"—a syllable at a time, each produced with its own single great effort.

The man didn't seem to notice anything out of the way. He sat back, looking aggrieved. "You're another one didn't go the briefing, right? Christ's a'mighty, what was the matter with you people? I was just trying to get you started, like they said we should do, you know?"

McClune overlooked the profanity in the worse shame of the physical act. "They ... said ... you ... should ... kiss ... me?"

The man seemed embarrassed. "Well, sure, if you want to call it that. It's the kiss of life, you understand? Making believe like I was trying to get you breathing again. So like at first you'd think that you'd drowned or something, see?" And then, reassuringly, "Don't worry if you're kind of having trouble getting your body to work right. Everybody does, at first. You'll get it after a while."

McClune frowned and licked his lips—then, remembering that nasty kiss, scoured at them with the back of his hand. That, too, took a trial or two before he could get the hand properly turned and positioned. He said hoarsely, "Explain. Please."

Irritated, the man gave him a scowl. "Well, now, what do you think there is to explain, God's sake? They were right across the street when that monument thing fell on you, weren't they? So they got to you right away, before you got too, uh, spoiled."

"Who across the street? Who got to me?"

"Jeez," the man groaned, "you're a real pain. The Here After people, who else? You've been machine-stored. Don't you see their collection agents coming this way?"

McClune saw them all right, pretty young women in perky blue uniforms. He wasn't thinking about them, though. He had something bigger on his mind, something that looked like the biggest, scariest, most important thing in his life.

Orbis McClune had lived his entire life in the glorious certainty that death meant judgment. If you had lived the life God desired for you, then you were rewarded. If not, then you were punished. One way or another, as soon as you died the matter was settled.

But not in this eternal undeath that also wasn't real life.

The thought was crushing. All his life McClune had proclaimed his willingness to accept whatever God handed him. But this? This was unfair!

That was when one of the Here After cashiers, her voice as perky as her pretty blue minidress, spoke to him. "Good morning, Mr.—ah— McClune. As I am sure you have realized by now, your organic body has passed on. In your case, I understand it was by some kind of organic-world accident, and Here After wants to extend its deepest sympathy for your loss. Though, of course, now that you've been vastened, it's not really a loss, is it?" Then, briskly, but with a dimpled smile, she changed the subject. "How would you like to settle your account, Mr. McClune? We accept all major debit or credit cards."

Taken aback, Orbis said, "I don't have any."

"No problem, Mr. McClune! We are glad to arrange direct transfer from your checking, savings or special-purpose bank account"—he was shaking his head—"or you could execute a lien on your home or business property—" Still shaking. She frowned. "An insurance policy, then? No? Well, we're glad to have you pledge jewelry, art objects, anything at all of value, subject of course to valuation by our experts—"

Orbis said, "Sorry. I don't have any of those things. I don't have anything at all. I'm penniless."

The young woman looked crestfallen. "Oh, Mr. McClune," she cried. "What a pity! I'm afraid that, to protect its interests, that means Here After will be forced to entertain offers from third-party bidders."

She wasn't perky anymore. Indeed, the look on her face had become pretty grim, and Orbis didn't like the sound of what she was saying. "What are you talking about?" he demanded. "You think you can sell me to somebody?"

"Oh, no," the young woman conceded. "That would be illegal in nearly all jurisdictions. But that isn't the question, is it? It's the hardware in which your program is stored that is definitely Here After property, and thus, like any other asset, can be sold on the open market." She gave a winsome little shrug. "The fact that your stored mind would follow the hardware is perhaps a little unfortunate for you. But not, of course, the company's problem." She paused, looking him over with an expression of sympathy. "Actually," she confided, "this is the part of the job that I hate, but what can I do?"

"You could turn me off," he said.

She looked shocked. "Oh, no, Mr. McClune! If I did that, then the company's equity would be diminished, and they wouldn't like that." She shook her head. "No, Mr. McClune," she said firmly, "you'll just have to make the best of it. Good heavens! Don't you think you owe Here After a little gratitude? If it wasn't for them you'd be dead."

As time passed—minutes, perhaps, or days or weeks; Orbis McClune had no way of measuring it and nothing to measure it against—McClune began to learn the rules of his new existence. First he learned how to make all his (nonexistent) parts move pretty much as he wanted them to in this nonexistent gigabit space those cursed people at Here After had consigned him to. That meant that when he finished the exercises he could walk and he could talk. He even had people to talk to, or at least people who wanted to talk to him, because it turned out he and the ancient drunk were not the only ones in machine storage. There were scores of others, maybe many more than that. They all had one thing in common, too, he discovered. None of them had the kind of marketable skill that would induce someone to buy up their contracts.

Oh, there were a few inquiries. An elderly man, still organic, had sent a doppel into the eigenspace of Here After's available merchandise to look for a valet. By "valet," it turned out, he meant a body servant whose effectors could bathe, feed and change him, among other duties, because he could no longer do any of those things for himself—and concluded quite soon that Orbis McClune wasn't temperamentally suited for the position. Then there was the woman who never said exactly what she was looking for, but gave Orbis one quick glance, snapped, "Not him," and left.

The one who said he represented a Mr. Santos-Smith didn't seem any more promising. He didn't care to tell anything about who Mr. Santos-Smith was, either. He looked disdainfully around the bare room that was all Orbis had been able to generate for himself—those who lived on the bounty of Here Afters stockholders weren't allowed much profligacy — and rattled off his questions. Did Orbis know how to operate a spacecraft? Could he run a black-hole penetrator? Did he have any technical skills at all? And when all the answers were "no," he snapped his little black briefcast shut and left without another word.

Which made it all the more surprising when, soon after, Mr. Santos-Smith himself showed up. He was slight, sallow and of no particular age at all in appearance, and he said, "Call me Wan. I have one question for you. What do you think of the Heechee?"

That one came out of left field for Orbis. It had been a long time since anyone had encouraged him to say how he felt on that subject. He took a deep breath. "The Heechee," he said, "are the worst thing that ever happened to the human race. They should burn in hell forever. I hate them! I wish every last one of them were dead, and—"

Wan raised his hand. "Enough," he said. "You've got the job."

Orbis frowned. "Doing what?"

"Helping me get back some things that they stole from me. Only for now," he added, his fingers stealing toward a touchpad at his belt, "we don't want to waste energy, do we? So I'm going to turn you off for a while if you don't mind. Or even if you do."