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Lacing up for Murder...... 4 Irene Radford...... 4 Chapter 1...... 5 Chapter 2...... 12 Chapter 3...... 18 Revise the World...... 24 Brenda W. Clough...... 24 Epigraph...... 25 Part 1...... 26 Fool’s War...... 37 Sarah Zettel...... 37 Chapter One — Preparations...... 38 Camelot’s Blood...... 94 Sarah Zettel...... 94 Prologue...... 95 Chapter One...... 99 Taco Del And The Fabled Tree Of Destiny...... 104 A novel by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff...... 104 First: Something’s Up...... 105 Imago...... 116 Amy Sterling Casil...... 116 Dedication...... 116 Chapter One...... 117 Chapter Two...... 139 Chapter Three...... 147 Everran’s Bane...... 155 Sylvia Kelso...... 155 I...... 156 Short Story Sampler...... 182 “Inferno,” by Laura Anne Gilman...... 182 Publication information...... 183

3 Lacing up for Murder

Whistling River Lodge Mystery #1

Irene Radford

Purchase Lacing up for Murder

from Book View Cafe Chapter 1

The wind whistled eerily around my aging resort hotel. I listened to the wind as if an old friend whispered secrets to me. “The tea leaves reveal a strong heart that leads your head,” Lady Anya intoned with ominous portent. “But you do not trust your heart. There is trouble coming soon. You must listen to your heart. The heart knows the truth and will lead you away from this trouble. The heart understands when the head sees only puzzles.” Lady Anya closed her eyes and dropped her hands as if exhausted. More likely her rings weighed her down. I shivered just a little as I watched the scene play out in the secluded alcove of the Whistling River Lodge dining room. The lowered ceiling and log beams gave the nook coziness in sunshine. This was late afternoon in early September on Mt. Hood in Oregon. About the only time of year we could plan on bright dry days. Today a thin layer of smoke from wildfires east of the mountain cast a pall over the light. Lady Anya, the psychic tea leaf reader I’d hired just for these cozy afternoon teas, made the most of those reaching shadows. Creepiness prevailed. Just the right touch of theater. A brunette in the audience of six golf widows gasped; the only local woman in the crowd, wife of one of my Board of Directors. She had carefully drawn eyebrows and that wide, strained look about the eyes, sure sign of a recent facelift. The silver streaks at her temples appeared just as artificial as her eyebrows. She

5 Irene Radford | Lacing up for Murder held her hand flat against the middle of her skinny chest, splaying her fingers to protect her manicure. “That was my cup,” she whispered. “I do hope that doesn’t mean my Edgar is going to have another heart attack out on the seventh fairway.” I hoped so too. Edgar Hooten offered a note of sanity and logic to my Board of Directors and co- owners of Whistling River Lodge. If Donna Hooten, suddenly became a widow, she might cease bringing her friends here to the lodge and these teas. If I had the money these women had used just to buy their designer purses, let alone what they put in them, I could afford to fix the roof over the east wing of my hotel. The guests shifted uneasily, tugging at their Roberto Cavelli slacks and sweaters. Two of them fingered their pearls, sliding them around and around their necks. I wondered how Donna had managed to find black pearls, each the size of my thumbnail, with a greenish cast that perfectly matched her knit shell. My elbow in the waitress’s ribs reminded her to bring another pot of tea and tray of custard tarts and watercress sandwiches before our guests nervously shifted their feet out the door. “Si, Miz McLain,” Maria whispered and bobbed away. Her hand reached for her pocket and the rosary I knew she kept there. I tried to catch Lady Anya’s gaze and signal her that the next reading should be more upbeat. The gaudily clad Gypsy woman ignored me, as if the cedar pillar carved with playful bear cubs that stood between us actually hid me.

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Lady Anya raised her hands again. A hush fell over the women before the arrival of new treats could disrupt the mood. A blonde, younger than the others, but not so young as to be labeled a trophy wife, slid her empty tea cup in front of the reader. Donna snatched her cup out of the way rather than have it pushed aside. She clung to it as my friend Joy Dancer would protect an amulet. The Gypsy closed her eyes in preparation. I checked my watch. Twenty minutes to the Board Meeting. Time enough to listen to the next reading. I had to attend that meeting. We had scheduled a final interview with Craig Knudsen, the most promising candidate for Resort Security Chief. I’d found discrepancies in his resume and wanted to make certain my fellow board members addressed those issue before hiring him. The wind raised its pitch a notch as it ripped through the narrow canyon just upriver from the Lodge. The whistling wind unnerved the unwary. That peculiar high-pitched tone gave the river, the lodge, and the Oregon resort town its name--Aloysius Whistler, the town’s founder probably took his name from it too but that was just legend. An east wind. That meant more smoke, trouble for asthmatics and the elderly. A bit of chill wrapped around my ankles. It should be a hot wind. I frowned and scanned the log beams and pillars for clues to its source. The mountain stream continued to chuckle along its rocky bed through the center of the restaurant. Maybe the chill traveled along it.

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Maybe. I’d heard other stories and legends about this building that explained every eerie feeling. Ghosts. “Yieeeek!” A scream made the hairs on my nape stand on end. The golf widows jumped and started. They all stared at each other rather than risk catching Lady Anya’s disapproving gaze. I signaled Janice, the restaurant manager, to keep an eye on Lady Anya. I’d hired the woman on a whim to entertain the guests from two to four every afternoon. Something to keep the bored wives of the golf players from leaving the lodge to go shopping elsewhere. I wanted those ladies happy, not scared out of their wits. In the lobby, two college interns behind the registration desk wrapped their arms around themselves and looked to me, wide-eyed, for guidance. Their forest green blazers over mint green dress shirts and khaki slacks or skirts weren’t warm enough to guard them against the unearthly chill descending on my resort. Three women bent over the glass display cases frantically stretched to keep fragile pieces of handmade lace from blowing about. I smiled at them nervously as I marched for the elevator to the south wing. Only one place in the lodge could evoke that kind of scream. I punched the button three times before the brass doors slid open. Silently I thanked George Ramstead, the previous owner, for updating this most essential amenity. He hadn’t done much else for the historic lodge--like fix the roof--other than stash empty liquor

8 Irene Radford | Lacing up for Murder bottles in odd corners and between walls and get into trouble with the IRS, Immigration Service, and the mob. His demise had allowed a few of the employees, myself included, along with some local investors, to buy the place just before it went on the auction block for back taxes. In the past six months, I’d cursed George Ramstead often, but never regretted sinking every penny I’d inherited and saved into this money pit. Too many agonizing moments later the silent elevator slowly settled at the third floor. I tapped my toe anxiously until two sets of doors opened at their leisure. The rich dark wood paneling had started to feel claustrophobic in my hurry. Three sets of wide, dark eyes and trembling chins greeted me. “Consuelo, what happened?” I addressed my head housekeeper. The middle-aged matriarch had trained me as a maid when I first started working at the hotel. I was all of fifteen. She’d mothered me as well after my mother died of breast cancer the following year. The two younger maids, her oldest daughters, crowded close to Consuelo as if for protection. “I quit, Miz Glenna,” Consuelo replied angrily. “We all quit.” Her two daughters, Lilia and Rosario aged sixteen and seventeen respectively, nodded their agreement. “We no work in this ungodly place no more,” she insisted. Her daughters continued to nod like bobble- head dolls.

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I watched Consuelo’s tense shoulders and wringing hands for signs that she might really mean to quit this time. “What happened?” I asked as I stepped free of the now beeping elevator. The doors closed behind me with a sigh and the lift headed off to a summons from another of the four floors on this wing. “La Llorona.” The ghost. Consuelo crossed herself and looked around anxiously. Her daughters mimicked her, half a heart beat behind. I noticed that all three of them wore their crucifixes prominently on the outside of their green and white uniforms. The two teenage girls fingered the red beads of their rosaries anxiously. “It’s just the wind, Consuelo,” I reassured her without much hope. Demands that I hire her nephew Hector as a maintenance man, or that I upgrade the quality of the bath towels I could do something about. This was something else. “When there’s a high pressure to the east and a storm building to the west the wind funnels through the canyon and makes that weird whistling sound...” “Not the wind.” She frowned so hard the fine dark hairs on her upper lip quivered. “We saw. We all saw La Llorona. We quit.” “There is no such thing as ghosts. Aloysius Whistler does not haunt this place.” The man who had built the lodge had died tragically in the large suite at the end of this wing right after Black Monday in 1929. Some say he hanged himself; others that his creditors murdered him. Either way, the third floor of this wing had earned a reputation over the years.

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“Not Him,” Rosario whispered. “La Llorona, who cries for her dead children. She assumed the body of Mr. George. My grandmother says that La Llorona takes the form of our most recent dead one.”

11 Chapter 2

La Llorona. “Now that’s a new one.” I had to lean against the wainscoting. Old George Ramstead had mentored me when I first started working here, promoting me through the ranks until I had worked nearly every job in the hotel and finally ran the front desk summers and between terms during my college years. Then when my marriage ended in disaster and I’d returned to Whistling River broke and broken hearted, he’d hired me again as his assistant. Which meant I’d been running the hotel for four years before I became part owner and manager. I thought of the rambling old building and extensive grounds as more my home than the house my dad left me last year. “Consuelo, I have to have the three suites at the end of this wing clean and ready for guests in...” I consulted my watch and cursed. “In fifteen minutes! If they aren’t here already. Then I’ve got three hundred lacemakers filling the east wing and ballroom. A lot of those ladies demand early cleaning and fresh towels so they can spend the afternoons working in their rooms. Is that done?” “Clean them yourself, Miz Glenna. We quit.” She shoved her cart full of cleaning supplies and fresh linens at me. Then she stabbed at the elevator button, not bothering to trudge down the cross corridor to the creaking service elevator at the end.

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“Consuelo, please don’t quit,” I pleaded, mentally calculating who in town I could draft to fill in for this very busy weekend. The week after Labor Day brought out empty-nesters and Elder Hostel travelers in droves. Most of my student temporaries had gone back to school. Except for the two interns down at the front desk. Was cleaning rooms and soothing hysterical guests in the tea room part of their contract? “Please just do those three suites for the Sakata party. Then we’ll talk.” Cautiously, I edged away from the wall, easing the cart so that I herded Consuelo and the girls back toward the three suites in question. “I mean it this time, Miz Glenna. I no work with that ghost around.” Consuelo stood firm, the cart pressed against her chest. Lilia and Rosario though inched backward, in the direction I wanted them to go. “What if I asked Father Tomas to come in and do an exorcism.” Consuelo snorted. “Better you ask la bruja, Miss Joy, to come in and cleanse the place.” “Will that help?” Lilia and Rosario nodded in unison. Consuelo took a moment to think about it. “Miss Joy, she know more about these things than Father Tomas.” I whipped out my cell phone and speed dialed Joy Dancer, my best friend from High School and the town’s resident witch. “Joy, I need help,” I barked into the phone the moment my friend picked up. “Help with a ghost.” Not that I believed in ghosts. Not really.

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“Is Grandpa Al acting up again?” she asked. Joy had abandoned her family name so long ago most people had forgotten that she was originally a Whistler. The perpetual chuckle in her voice soothed the anxiety that had built in my shoulders. “Not Aloysius Whistler. It’s George,” I whispered. “And he’s scared my maids so badly they won’t clean the south wing. How fast can you get over here?” “Packing my kit as we speak. You sure you want to cleanse the place of ghosts? Not just move them temporarily? The Cascade Mountain Paranormal Investigators Convention in two weeks will be sorely disappointed if they can’t find any ghosts.” “Good. I’ve dealt with that particular group before. They barge into any room they want with their obnoxiously beeping equipment without regard to manners, etiquette, or privacy. If they didn’t pay double the room rate I’d refuse to book them. I’ve had to put severe restrictions into their contract.” “Not all ghost hunters are that bad.” “Not all of them. But this group is. How long ‘til you get here? I need these rooms pronto.” “Give me ten minutes.” Whistling River is a small town in permanent population but spread out along a river valley north of the canyon, up the slopes of Mt. Hood, along gravel roads and twisted lanes. Distances are deceptive in travel time. I checked my watch again and cursed. The party of very well connected Japanese businessmen were due to check in within minutes. Just once I hoped the airport shuttle was late.

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“Break the speed limit, Joy.” Closing the phone, I forced myself to breathe deeply. “Joy is on the way, Consuelo. Will you finish the rooms now?” “For you, Miz Glenna.” She nodded and fingered her own rosary that spilled from her skirt pocket. “You help my ‘Tonio get High School so he can get a good job as cook and not just kitchen helper. You help us both learn English and study to become citizens. You help us with banks. Soon we open our own restaurant. For you I do this. But Miss Joy Dancer should hurry.” With only a hint of hesitation in her step, Consuelo took possession of the cart, spun it around and aimed for the three suites at the end of the corridor.

oOo

The moment she entered the largest suite in the hotel, three bedrooms, each with an ensuite bath, a sitting room with another half bath, and a mini kitchen with a long dining/conference table, I turned sharply left and took the fire stairs upward. Ten minutes to my board meeting. I dared not be late. But somethings have to come first. Panting from my sprint up two flights of stairs to the attic apartment, I slapped the light switch to my right. A single bare bulb shed a diffuse and dusty light upon the iron bedstead made up with homemade quilts, a threadbare wingback chair set before the fireplace that shared a chimney with the lobby--both converted to propane. A scattering of rag rugs covered the otherwise bare floorboards.

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The scents of candle wax, old rose potpourri, and dust filled me with warmth and nostalgia. It smelled of home. I’d lived in this cozy little space for two years after I came back to Whistling River. George kept me sheltered here until I could afford a place of my own. We spent many long winter nights sitting before the fire talking about our dreams for the hotel, the day to day management, gossiping about the movers and shakers in our small resort town. He helped me find and hire a lawyer with enough guts to stand up to my ex and out maneuver him on settlements. Even now I kept a change of clothes and a toothbrush here for those times when life became too hectic to go back to my condo. So did George Ramstead. He’d come back to haunt our hotel, in the flesh. He hid up here, letting the world--meaning some debt collectors with mob connections--believe him dead. He’d poured his heart and soul into this hotel. Even if he did cook the books and tend to hire illegal immigrants at less than minimum wage. Then he pocketed the difference. He’d also made a lot of lousy decisions when he drank too much. Which was most of the time. Like selling off sixty acres of prime woodland. He could have just sold the timber and kept the land, but no, he had to sell it all. Now I was trying to buy it back to expand the golf course to tournament level. A top ranked fairway designer was available next year and then not again for another ten years. His prestigious work could put Whistling River Lodge on the map for professional golfers. “George,” I whispered into the still, stale air. No trace of the ghostly wind dared penetrate the bare

16 Irene Radford | Lacing up for Murder walls or circular oriel window at the end, where it overlooked the porte cochere. Silence hung heavily around me. George knew better than to prowl the hotel during daylight hours. He should have retreated here when Consuelo spotted him. “George, leave my maids alone, please. They work hard. Please don’t scare them anymore.” I turned on my low heel and retreated to reality. “Sorry, love, didn’t mean to scare Consuelo and the girls, but I needed to check out whoever rented those suites. I’ve heard rumors that the Sakata group might be a front for the Yakusa. And my enemies have connections there.” George poked his head out from the inglenook on the other side of the fireplace. His bushy grey eyebrows waggled humorously. I was not amused. “You’re paranoid, George. Mike Conditti gave up trying to collect that debt when probate declared your estate bankrupt.” “You didn’t think I was paranoid when you helped me fake my own death.” “I’ve changed my mind. Now either behave yourself, or go haunt your widow. I’ve got enough people booked for this week I may need this room.” This time I really did leave him to stew.

17 Chapter 3

At the top of the stairs, I slipped off my semi- sensible, wedge-heeled loafers and raced downward. The railing steadied me on my reckless progress. I knew every creak and splinter in each tread. This route saved me both time and distance returning to the lobby. Two minutes to the Board Meeting. Narrowly confined wooden risers gave way to metal safety grids. I pelted down without pause for the mesh digging through my nylons. At the final doorway I paused long enough to brush a cobweb off my shoulder, straighten my a-line skirt, and replace my beige shoes, dressier than loafers, more comfortable than pumps with heels. Professional and composed, I emerged into the lobby. The three lacemakers waved me over. I sighed, then gave them a genuine smile. Gabrielle Zobokov, the convention organizer, held an armful of frothy lace samples--the same weight and texture as the cobweb I’d so casually brushed off a minute ago. “Is there any way we can get another display case?” She looked from the numerous pieces in her hands to the tasteful arrangements in the four feet by six feet case beneath the north window. “Let me see what we have in storage. Possibly we can arrange another case between the registration desk and the gift shop.” A quick call on my walkie-talkie sent Drew, the maintenance chief, in search of something suitable.

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“I envy you all the time and patience to work such exquisite pieces,” I said, peering at an ecru collar in the display. The neat label called in Milanese. “The object is the process, not the finished product,” Gabrielle chuckled. “Think of it as a metaphor for your life’s journey.” “Sort of like me and this hotel,” I returned the laugh. “Excellent comparison. Did you know that the need to embellish with lace dates all the way back to ancient Egypt?” She fingered her black vest festooned with fragments of lace, each a different pattern and shape. “Archeologists have found mummy shrouds with the ends deliberately frayed and then the dangling threads knotted into geometric patterns.” Gabrielle’s gaze strayed to the lovely Milanese piece. The she lifted the lid and tweaked the placement a millimeter. I excused myself and made a bee line for the boardroom next to the Canyons Restaurant where Lady Anya still held court. I ignored the bustle and crowd at the front desk. A bevy of Asian men in custom tailored suits chattered to a sole tall blond man. My heart skipped a beat and my breath caught in my throat. No. He wouldn’t dare come here. Would he? He had his back to me and a bulky sweater draped over his shoulders. No way to determine if the set of his shoulders really was familiar or not. A leggy woman with an impressive shelf of a bosom and bright auburn hair clung to his arm as if she needed him to hold her up. I definitely had never seen her before.

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My interns and one experienced clerk would holler if they needed me. As I passed Janice, the restaurant manager still hovered near the alcove, I signaled her to send coffee into the Board Meeting. She looked a little puzzled. I didn’t have time to find out why. An empty Board Room greeted me. A half-full carafe and stained coffee cups littered six places at the long oval table. “What?” “They told me to tell you they’re finishing the interview on the Cascade Nine,” Janice said at my shoulder. The Cascade Nine, the most challenging section of our golf course that bordered the Whistling River and climbed a couple of hills. Knowing my Board of Directors, they’d decide to hire Craig Knudsen based on his golf swing without regard to his credentials. “Did I ever tell you, Janice, how much I hate golfers?”

oOo

“Miz McLain,” a voice crackled over my walkie- talkie. “Yes, Hector.” I had hired Consuelo’s nephew as chief groundskeeper. Smartest thing I’ve done in a long time. “Miz Mclain, we got a problem on Cascade Seven.” I mentally calculated where on the long golf course number seven was. The longest fairway of all nine holes on that course, number seven squeezed between a cliff on one side and a band of forest on the other. It curved slightly at the big water hazard that

20 Irene Radford | Lacing up for Murder divided it nearly in half. Standing at the tee, a golfer could not see the hole flag at the other end. The creek that fed the pond, poured down a waterfall one hundred yards back a steep and narrow defile in the cliff. “What kind of problem?” I asked retreating into the meeting room so that no one could overhear. “Ducks.” “What about the ducks?” We always had ducks swimming in and nesting near the two water hazards, one on Seven and another on Five. “Dead ducks.” “What?” I hoped I’d heard wrong. With this much static on the line maybe he said something else. Almost anything else. “Two mallards and a merganser. Dead. Savaged. Feathers and guts all over the grass.” I swore picturing a swath of bright feathers, bloodied and tarnished. “Can you clean it up before a guest stumbles on them?” “Too late.” In the background, above all the static, or maybe the cause of the static, I heard a high pitched keening that made the wind sound mellow. I gulped. “On my way.” “Not to worry. The new guy is handling it.” “What new guy?” My brain spun. “The one playing golf with the Board.” “Craig Knudsen?” “Guess so.” “I’m on my way.” Time to see for myself what this Security hot shot was really about. Not everything on his resume added up. Still he had more credentials than any other applicant for the job. The board might

21 Irene Radford | Lacing up for Murder like the way he played golf, but I needed him to work Security, not play golf with the board. I cruised back through the lobby just as the big party of Asian businessmen wandered toward the elevator. “Consuelo, are the rooms ready?” I whispered into the walkie-talkie on another channel. “Not to worry,” Joy’s voice came through the crackle of static. “We’re just finishing up here?” Relief washed through me. “I suppose the rooms smell of sage?” “Right on.” “Did you clean up any ashes of other...um...substances you might have burned.” “Not to worry,” Joy dismissed my worries. “I’m headed out to Cascade Seven. Meet you in the coffee shop shortly,” I said more brightly. “Rain check. I’ve got a Golden Retriever in desperate need of a bath and some TLC on his coat.” Joy made her living grooming and training dogs. She’d worked wonders with Salt and Pepper, the hotel mascots. The two poodles were yapping in my office. I decided to take them with me out to the Cascade course. They needed to burn off some energy. “Rain check,” I agreed. Then the tall blond man with a black sweater slung across his shoulder turned to say something to his shorter Japanese companions. I got a good look at him for the first time. Jared Rynelli. My ex. No wonder the set of his shoulders looked familiar. And the leggy auburn-haired debutante

22 Irene Radford | Lacing up for Murder clinging to him wasn’t the woman he’d gotten pregnant and left me for. This one sported a wedding band with a diamond the size of Mt. Hood on her left hand. For the cost of that rock he could have paid off all of his back alimony and our divorce settlement. Twice over. Anger boiled in my stomach, threatening to bring up my lunch. I swallowed deeply and clung to the shadows. Now was not the time for a confrontation. Now was not the time to allow my emotions to get in the way of professional behavior. His Japanese companions paid very good money to rent expensive suites and play golf every spring. They also conducted a number of business deals on the golf course. They liked our hotel. I liked having them as guests. I couldn’t afford to alienate them with my anger. Boiling rage better described it. Jared Rynelli had made millions since I married and divorced him. What was a lousy three hundred grand to him? Three hundred thousand dollars would go a long way toward fixing the roof and making a down payment on sixty acres of clear cut. It would also give me a bigger chunk of ownership in the hotel corporation. A chance to out-vote some of the local investors who bought into the resort just so they could play golf for free whenever they wanted. A service corridor took me to my office and a back exit to the golf course. I jogged with Salt and Pepper, the black and white poodles, down to the Cascade course as fast as my shoes and skirt allowed.

23 Revise the World

Brenda W. Clough

Purchase Revise the World Epigraph

Ah Love! Could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits — and then Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, 1879.

Friday, March 16, or Saturday, 17 [1912]. Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all down the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn’t go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come. Should this be found I want these facts recorded... We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not — would not — give up hope till the very end... He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning — yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since... We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.

From Scott’s Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott, 1913.

25 Part 1

It’s said that death from exposure is like slipping into warm sleep. Briefly, Titus Oates wondered what totty-headed thick had first told that whisker. He no longer remembered what warmth was. He had endured too many futile hopes and broken dreams to look for an easy end now. Every step was like treading on razors, calling for a grim effort of will. Nevertheless without hesitating he hobbled on into the teeth of the Antarctic storm. He did not look back. He knew the Polar Expedition’s tent was already invisible behind him. Finer than sand, the wind-driven snow scoured over his clenched eyelids, clogging nose and mouth. The cold drove ferocious spikes deep into his temples and gnawed at the raw frostbite wounds on brow and nose and lip. Surely it was folly to continue to huddle into his threadbare windproof. What if he flung all resistance aside, and surrendered himself to the wailing blizzard? Suddenly he yearned to dance, free of the weighty mitts and clothing. To embrace death and waltz away! He had left his finnesko behind. Gangrene had swollen his frozen feet to the size of melons, the ominous black streaks stealing up past the ankles to his knees. Yesterday it had taken hours to coax the fur boots on. Today he had not bothered. Now his woolen sock caught on something. Excruciating pain jolted his frozen foot, suppurating from the stinking black wounds where the toes used to be. Too weak to help himself, he stumbled forward. His crippled hands,

26 Brenda Clough | Revise the World bundled in their dogskin mitts, groped to break his fall. They touched nothing. He seemed to fall and fall, a slow endless drop into blank whiteness. And it was true! A delicious warmth lapped him round like a blanket. Tears of relief and joy crept down his starveling cheeks and burnt in the frost fissures. He was being carried, warm and safe. Rock of Ages, cleft for me! For a very long time he lay resting, not moving a muscle. Stillness is the very stuff of Heaven, when a man has marched thirteen hundred miles, hauling a half-tonne load miles a day for months, across the Barrier ice, up the Beardmore Glacier, to the South Pole and back. He slept, and when he wasn’t asleep he was inert. But after some unknowable span Titus slowly came to awareness again. He felt obscurely indignant, cheated of a just due. Wasn’t Heaven supposed to be a place of eternal rest? He’d write a letter to the Times about it... “Maybe just a touch more?” one of the celestial host suggested, in distinctly American accents. Silly on the face of it, his unanalyzed assumption that all the denizens of Heaven must be British... “No, let’s see how he does on four cc. How’s the urine output?” Shocked, Titus opened his eyes and looked down at himself. He was lying down, clothed in a pure white robe, all correct and as advertised. But were those a pair of angels lifting the hem? He used the drill- sergeant rasp he had picked up in the Army. “What the hell are you at!”

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Both angels startled horribly. Something metallic slipped from a heavenly hand and landed with a clatter on the shiny-clean floor. A beautiful angel with long black hair stared down at him, eyes blue as the Aegean and wide as saucers. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Shell! Look at this — he’s conscious! Piotr will be like a dog with two tails!” “Damn it, now the meter’s gone.” As the other angel stooped nearer to pick up her tool Titus stared at her face. It was tanned but flushed with irritation. The nose had freckles. She wore huge coppery hoop earrings, and her short curly hair was dull blonde, almost mousy. “You,” Titus stated with conviction, “are not an angel.” The happy angel — no, blister it, a woman! — exclaimed, “An angel, Shell, did you hear that? He called you an angel.” “He did not! Don’t you ever listen, Sabrina? He just said I was not an angel.” “This isn’t the afterlife,” Titus pursued doggedly. “Am I even dead?” “Shell, this what we have you for. Hit it, quick!” The irritable angel elbowed her companion into silence and spoke, clear and slow. “No, Captain Oates, you are not dead. We are doctors. I am Dr. Shell Gedeon, and this is Dr. Sabrina Trask. You are safe here, under our care.” Titus could hardly take her words in. His mind hared off after irrelevancies. He wanted to retort, “Stuff and nonsense! Women can’t be doctors. They don’t have the intellect!” But he clung to the important questions: “What about my team? Bowers, Wilson, Scott: Are they safe too?”

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Dr. Trask drew in a breath, glancing at her colleague. Dr. Gedeon’s voice was calm. “Let’s stop the drip now, why don’t we?” “Excellent idea. If you’ll pass me that swab...” “They are all right, aren’t they?” Titus demanded. “You rescued me, and you rescued them.” The doctors didn’t look round, fiddling with their mysterious instruments. “Aren’t they?” He wanted to leap up and search for his friends, or shake the truth out of these bogus ministering angels, these impossible doctors. But a wave of warm melting sleep poured over him, soft as feathers, inexorable as winter, and he floated away on its downy tide.

oOo

Again when he woke he was met with pleasure: smooth sheets and a cool clean pillow. No reindeer- skin sleeping bag, no stink of horsemeat hoosh and unwashed men! He lay tasting the delicious sleek linen with every nerve and pore. How very strange to be so comfortable. His gangrened feet no longer hurt even where the covers rested on them. Double amputation above the knee, probably — the only treatment that could have saved his life. He was reconciled to the idea of footlessness. Lazily he reached down the length of his left leg with one hand to explore the stump. The shock of touching his foot went all through his body, a galvanic impulse that jerked him upright. He flung back the covers and stared. His feet down to the toes were all present and accounted for, pink and clean and healthy. Even the toenails were just as they

29 Brenda Clough | Revise the World used to be, horn-yellow, thick and curved like vestigial hooves, instead of rotten-black and squelching to the touch. He wiggled the toes and flexed each foot with both hands, not trusting the evidence of eyes alone. It was undeniable. He had been restored, completely healed. He examined the rest of himself. At the end in spite of the dogskin mitts his fingers had been blistered with frostbite to the colour and size of rotten bananas. Then the fluid in the blisters had frozen hard, until the least motion made the tormented joints crunch and grate as if they were stuffed with pebbles. Now his fingers were right as ninepence, flexing with painless ease: long, strong and sensitive, a horseman’s hands. The constant stab from the old wound in his thigh, grown unbearable from so much sledging, was gone. He leaped to his feet, staggering as the blood rushed dizzily away from his head. He sat for a moment until the vertigo passed, and then rose again to put his full weight on his left leg. Not so much as a twinge! He was clad in ordinary pyjamas, white and brown striped, and he slid the pants down. The ugly twisted scar on his thigh had opened up under the stress of malnutrition and overwork, until one would think the Boers shot him last week instead of in 1901. Now there was not a mark to be seen or felt, however closely he peered at the skin. Most wondrous of all, both legs were now the same length. The Army doctors had promised that, with the left thighbone set an inch shorter than the right, he would limp for the rest of his life. He had to nerve himself before running a hand down his face. Such a natural action, but the last time

30 Brenda Clough | Revise the World he’d tried it the conjunction of blistered fingers and frozen dead-yellow nose had been a double agony so intense the sparks had swum in his eyes. Now it didn’t hurt at all. His nose felt normal, the strong straight Roman bridge no longer swollen like a beet-root. No black oozy frostbite sores, but only a rasp of bristle on his cheek. Even the earlobes — he was certain he’d left those behind on the Polar plateau! Incredulous, he looked round the room for a glass. It was a small plain chamber, furnished with nothing but the bed and a chair. But there was a narrow window. He leaned on the sill, angling to glimpse his ghostly reflection in the pane. He ran his tongue over his teeth, firmly fixed again and no longer bleeding at the gums. The brown eyes were melancholy under the deep straight arch of brow bone, and his dark hair was shorn in an ordinary short-back- and-sides. Suddenly he saw not the glass but through it, beyond and down. He leaned his forehead on the cool pane, smearing it with a sudden sweat. He was high, high up. Below was a city the like of which he had never seen, spread from horizon to horizon in the golden slanted light of either dawn or sunset. Buildings spangled with lights, gleaming in sheaths of glass, reared mountain-high. His own little window was thousands of feet up, higher far than the dome of St. Paul’s even. Far below, vastly foreshortened, people scurried along the pavements. Shiny metal bugs teemed the ways and flitted through the skies. “This isn’t London.” His voice had a shameful quaver. He forced himself to go on, to prove he could master it. “Nor Cairo. Nor Bombay...”

31 Brenda Clough | Revise the World

“You are in New York City, Captain Oates. As you will have observed, you have traveled in both space and time. This is the year of our Lord 2045. How do you feel?” Titus turned slowly. Though every word was plain English, he could hardly take in what the man was saying. With difficulty he said the first thing that came into his head: “Who the devil are you?” Unoffended, the slim fair man smiled, revealing large perfect teeth. “I am Dr. Kevin Lash. And I’m here to help you adjust to life in the 21st century. We’re connected, in a distant sort of way. My three-times great-grandmother was Mabel Beardsley, sister of the artist, Aubrey Beardsley. You may know her as a friend of Kathleen Scott.” “The Owner’s wife.” Titus grasped at this tenuous connection to the familiar. “Then — you’re an Englishman!” Dr. Lash continued to smile. “I was born in America, but yes, I’m of English extraction. Insofar as several generations of the melting pot have left me with any claim to...” Titus crossed the room in a bound. He wrung Dr. Lash’s slender hand as if he were his best friend in the world. In a sense this was true. The doctor was his only friend. Such was his inner turmoil that Titus only belatedly realized the doctor was continuing to talk. “Sorry — it’s all quite a lot to take in.” “Absolutely, I don’t doubt it.” With an amiable nod Dr. Lash sat down in the chair and waved Titus towards the bed. “A very natural reaction, given the tremendous change in your circumstances. I was outlining your schedule for the next day or so...”

32 Brenda Clough | Revise the World

And Titus was off and away again, sucked into an interlocking series of irrelevancies. It was stress, the alien environment all around, that made it so hard to concentrate. But recognizing why didn’t help him focus any better. This time it was Dr. Lash’s pronunciation that set Titus off: ‘schedule.’ Titus himself would have said ‘shed-jool.’ But Dr. Lash used ‘sked-jool,’ the American pronunciation. Indeed every word, his every tone and posture and gesture, spoke of the United States. So it must be true. “Damn it! Sorry — I’m trying to attend, believe me. But I keep going blah. My head’s full of cotton wool.” Dr. Lash smiled. “Not at all, Captain. I’d be happy to repeat or amplify anything you haven’t quite grasped. I was giving you a quick outline of time as our theories suggest it applies in temporal travel. No man is an island, you know...” Complete unto himself, Titus finished silently. So Lash was a man of education — must be, if he was a doctor. A doctor of what? Those two women, the sham angels, had obviously been doctors of the medical sort. But curse it, he had to listen! Lash was saying, “... the tiniest change can have an incalculable impact. The death or life of an insect, a microbe even, may not be inconsiderable. Nothing can be plucked casually from the past, for fear of...” The past? But of course. If this was the year 2045, then 1912 was long ago. “Is it possible to go back?” he interrupted. “What, you, you mean? Return to the place and time you left? I believe it is impossible, Captain. But you would not wish it — to return and freeze to death in Antarctica? That was another subject of debate: the

33 Brenda Clough | Revise the World moral dimension of what we were attempting. It would be surely wrong to wrench away some poor fellow with a life ahead of him, family and friends...” My family, Titus thought. Mother, Lilian, Violet, Bryan. My friends. I will never see them again. They might as well be dead. No — they are dead. Died years ago. “... an ideal subject,” Dr. Lash was saying. “Not only are you a person rescued from a tragic death, but your removal is supremely unlikely to trigger any change in the time-stream, since your body was lost: presumed frozen solid, entombed in a glacier for eons...” Titus stared down in silence at his pale bare feet. They were a little chilly now from resting so long on the uncarpeted floor, but that was all. Impossible to think of them frozen rock-hard, embalmed in eternal ice. Yet only a short time ago (or was it 133 years?) they were nearly so. “My team.” Interrupted in mid-discourse, Dr. Lash said, “I beg your pardon?” “The others. Scott, Wilson, Bowers. Did you rescue them too?” “Ah... no.” “Then they made it. They got back to the depot, back home!” Dr. Lash’s copious flow of words seemed to be suffering a momentary blockage. “No.” Titus sat silent, his shoulders bowed. So his companions too had died. Had it all been for nothing then, all their work and sacrifice and heroism? “Why did you save only me, then?”

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“Remember, Captain,” Dr. Lash said patiently. “You are unique. Your body was never found.” “Just as well, since it was here. I’m here.” He grappled with slippery verb tenses. “This is the future. You must have histories, newspapers. Records of Scott’s Polar Expedition.” “And you shall see them. But, if I may make a suggestion, not today. You should recover your strength a little. The doctors have further tests — “ Titus growled in disgust. “No more doctors! Now!” “Tomorrow,” Dr. Lash promised. “Tomorrow I’ll get the books. As you can see, it’s already evening. Not the time to start a new project.” Titus stood to look out the window. Only the closest observation revealed that night had fallen. The city outside glowed and throbbed like a gala ballroom, its lights smearing the dark sky, blotting out stars and moon. So beautiful and strange! “... a good night’s sleep.” Dr. Lash rose to his feet. “And breakfast. I’ve tried to have food that isn’t too strange for you...” Titus hardly noticed the doctor’s departure. The moving lights outside held him. The soaring or darting small sparks must be the metal bugs of before, lit for night work. Presumably behind every glowing window were people working and living. There must be thousands, millions of them. By night or by day the city was alive. He leaned his ear to the cold glass and heard its murmur, a dull continuous roar. He wanted nothing to do with it. This strange monstrous city was far more foreign than the Antarctic ice. The thought came to him that this was all delirium,

35 Brenda Clough | Revise the World the final flicker of phantasy in the brain of a dying man already half-buried in blizzard-drift. It wasn’t even a delusion he enjoyed! A tremendous hollow longing for home filled him, for England, his family and friends, anything familiar. And there was nothing left to him now, except perhaps his own renewed body. At least this was as it had always been. He climbed back into bed and hugged himself, curled under the covers, diving into sleep’s reprieve.

36 Fool’s War

Sarah Zettel

Purchase Fool’s War from Book View Cafe Chapter One — Preparations

Curran watched the man whose life he required settle onto one of the dozen faux leather couches that were scattered around the station’s reception module. The monitors showed him Amory Dane, spruce, tall, and fair. Dane made the perfect picture of someone prepared to wait patiently for an appointment. He was a radically different creature from the furtive Freers in the corner dickering over the delivery price for the wafer case that sat on the floor between them, or the gaggle of haggard mechanics who had put in one shift too many at the bar. Curran wondered idly what they would do if he spoke up and announced what he was. Would they laugh, thinking it was a crazy engineer’s joke? Would they scramble for the wall and try to get at the computer system? Or would they just start running for the hatches? He ran through each of the scenarios and decided that any would be amusing, but that the risk of being recorded on a hard medium was not worth it. From his position of safety, Curran calmly overrode the inspection commands for the module’s automatic systems. Then, he ordered the hatches to cycle shut. One of the mechanics, more sober than the others, jerked his head up as he heard the hatch seal. Before anyone could make another move, Curran sent a single command to each of the three explosive charges his talent had laid against the module’s hull. As the wind ripped through the room and the screams began in earnest, Curran slid away.

38 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War

“How dieth the wise man?” He murmured as he hurried toward his next task. “As the fool.”

oOo

Al Shei got the distinct feeling that Donnelly was trying to stare her down out of the desk’s video screen. “In that case,” Donnelly said, “the answer is no.” Al Shei refrained from letting her shoulders sag. The talent agent was playing havoc with her worn temper. She was very glad of her opaque, black hijab, the veil that covered her hair and hid the lower half of her face. She didn’t want Donnelly to see her jaw move as she ground her teeth together. “You aren’t even going to do me the courtesy of pretending to consult with your client, are you ‘Ster Donnelly?” For the hundredth time Al Shei mentally cursed her pilot for picking this run to sell out and leave. First class pilots who would work for the shares Al Shei offered were as scarce as water ice on Venus. Donnelly held up his manicured hands and made an exaggerated shrug. “Jemina Yerusha is one of the best pilots I’ve ever represented. I know her. She’s not going sign on a ship that’s only got a Lennox rating of D for a twentieth share, which, according to your stats, doesn’t amount to all that much.” Al Shei looked away for a moment to watch the clients at the other rented desks that filled the station’s bank. The noise of a dozen different languages was deadened by panels of jewel-toned, wired plastics that covered the walls. The only quiet person in the room seemed to be Resit, who sat next to Al Shei’s desk. Resit shook her head at Al Shei and mouthed “I told you so.”

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Al Shei tapped the edge of the desk heavily with her index finger and looked back towards Donnelly. “Yerusha is a highly skilled child who’s been out of work for three weeks and must be getting pretty sick of this station.” “She’s a Freer, ‘Dama Al Shei.” Donnelly folded his arms across his chest, making his black satin shirt wrinkle and bag. “She doesn’t have a problem with stations. She does have a problem with anything under a C rating.” Al Shei shuffled her boots against the bristly, brown carpet. She briefly considered telling Donnelly he was an unprofessional little weasel and that when Yerusha found out he was billing her at twice her worth, thus making it next to impossible for her to find employment, she was going to take him to pieces with the thoroughness that Freers were noted for. “Thank you for your time, ‘Ster Donnelly.” Al Shei pressed her thumb against the corner of the screen, cutting the connection. “I’m very glad you didn’t.” Resit tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her beaded, white kijab. Unlike her cousin Al Shei’s, Resit’s veil left her whole face bare. Lawyers who covered their faces, she said, were even less trusted than the ordinary kind, if that was possible. “Didn’t what?” Al Shei pushed the screen down until it was level with the top of the desk. “Say what you were thinking.” Resit drew aside her full-hemmed skirt to let a man in maintenance coveralls squeeze past the desk. “I didn’t fancy spending the next two weeks trying to keep you out of the brig for slander of a fellow station client. The wire- work alone would have used up most of my retainer.”

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“You’re not on retainer,” Al Shei reminded her. “Ah, you noticed that too, did you?” Resit gave her a cheeky smile. Al Shei grimaced under her hijab. “Don’t try to cheer me up, Resit, I’m brooding.” She fiddled with the hem of her black tunic sleeve, a terrible habit she had never even tried to break. “Yerusha would have been a good catch. We’d’ve been halfway to that C rating just having her at the boards.” Resit drummed her fingers on her burgundy-clad knee and rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. “Jemina Yerusha is not the only available pilot in the whole of Port Oberon,” she pointed out with a touch of exasperation. “Pick one with an agent who’s a little less cagey.” She looked towards the bank’s hatchway and mumbled something Al Shei couldn’t catch. “What was that last bit?” she asked, although she had a feeling she knew what was coming. Resit sighed. “And you might try to find one that’s not a Freer.” Al Shei felt her eyebrows draw together. In response, Resit stiffened her shoulders. “Before you say it, I am not being bigoted. Having a Freer on board is going to create strain on the crew, starting with Lipinski and working its way out.” “All the way to you?” Al Shei did not feel in the mood to let her cousin off the hook. “Yes,” said Resit flatly. “All the way to me. I do not like revolutionaries.” She paused. “I also don’t like people who have been sent into exile by their justice systems.” Al Shei rubbed her forehead. “Push come to shove, Lipinski is a rational human being, as is my

41 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War honored-and-educated cousin,” she drew the last phrase out for emphasis. “I trust you both to behave yourselves. I also trust you to recognize that we do not have the time or the money to be overly fussy.” It was an old battle, and there wasn’t much Al Shei could do but continue to fight it. The Pasadena was a good ship. When she had charge of it, she generally ran it at a decent profit, but acquiring that profit too often involved a miserly attitude and constant juggling between the need for skilled hands and the need for frugality. “And yes,” Al Shei sighed. “She is an exile. That’s why I thought she’d be willing to work cheap. I’ve already had Schyler check with his Freer contacts. He says there’s a lot of suspicion that the charges against her were trumped up.” She eyed Resit carefully. “Schyler says he’ll fly with her. If you have any comments regarding the competency of my Watch Commander’s judgement, I’d love to hear them.” The depressurization alarm sounded overhead. Reflexes jerked Al Shei halfway to her feet. Logically, she knew that if the leak was in the section she was currently occupying, she would have heard the whistle of the wind and felt it tugging at her clothes before the alarm even had time to cut loose, but she had half a lifetime’s training in responding to any unusual sound produced by her environment. She sank slowly back into her chair. “Do you ever get used to that noise?” Resit wrapped her arms around herself. “I’ve been coming out here five years and it still gives me the shakes.” “It’s supposed to.” Al Shei forced her hands back onto the desk top. “Somebody on this station is in

42 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War danger of losing the means to breathe. If this does not upset you, you need a balance check very quickly.” Port Oberon separated its ground-side tourists carefully from its professional crews, so no information was forthcoming from the station’s intercom. The landlords assumed that all the shippers wanted to know was that they weren’t the ones in danger, and silence was enough for that. If it became important, she could get the information about what happened from the station’s artificial intelligence. Al Shei gave herself and Resit a moment to recover from the alarm before she reached for the desk screen again. “All right, let’s try... ” “‘Dama Al Shei?” said a woman’s voice. “I’m your fool.” Al Shei blew out a sigh that ruffled her hijab and looked up. “I beg your pardon?” she said, not bothering to put patience into her tone. The woman’s Arabic was heavily accented. It was possible she didn’t know what she was saying, but it had already been a long morning. Al Shei came from a family of small women, but the woman in front of the desk was not merely small, she was minuscule. She stood barely a hundred and thirty centimeters tall and probably weighed all of thirty kilograms, if you added the loose cobalt-blue tunic, baggy trousers and soft boots into the calculation. Her skin was a clear brown, two or three shades lighter than Al Shei’s earth tones. That and the angles in her eyes and her face said a good chunk of her ancestry was European. “I’m Evelyn Dobbs,” said the woman. “Fool’s Guild rating, Master of Craft, reporting for duty to the

43 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War engineer-manager of the mail packet ship Pasadena. I’ve a two year contract as part of your crew.” Al Shei stared at her. For the first time she noticed that a necklace of red and gold gems encircled the other woman’s throat, representing the motley of the Intersystem Guild of Professional Fools. Al Shei sighed again. It was turning out to be one of those days. Fools, like expert pilots, were required for a first class operation. They were entertainers, confidants, clowns who could say or do anything. They functioned as pressure valves for long trips and cramped quarters. As such, they were in high demand and short supply. That placed them even farther out of the Pasadena Corporation’s budget than Jemina Yerusha. If the currently unreachable Yerusha was half of the Pasadena’s Lennox C, the other half was standing in front of Al Shei’s desk, looking across at her with summer brown eyes. “I’m sorry,” Al Shei switched over to English. “There’s been a mistake. I haven’t contracted a... a ... Fool.” It felt strange saying the word to the woman’s face, but as far as Al Shei knew, the Fool’s Guild had never adopted another name for their members. In answer, Dobbs unclipped a light pen from her belt, touched the download stud and pressed the point against one of the blank films piled on Al Shei’s desk. The film’s chip read the transmission and printed a text file across the slick surface. Al Shei scanned the black print as it flowed across the grey film. It was a contract, complete with confirmation and certification information, between the Intersystem Guild of Professional Fools and the Pasadena Corporation for the services of one Master of Craft for a period of two

44 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War years, measured by contiguous hours of active service. It was signed, confirmed and pre-paid by Ahmet Tey. The sight of her uncle’s name sent a spasm of anger through Al Shei. Would the man never, ever let up? She and Asil had done quite well, thank you very much, and they hadn’t had to beg one penny from the family. Why did Uncle Ahmet keep treating her like... Resit must have seen her shoulders tense. With a lawyer’s practiced eye, Resit had already scanned the contract and filtered the implications through her mind. “It’ll make us Class C Lennox,” she said calmly to Al Shei in Arabic. “Pick it up, Katmer, tell Schyler to get a spot inspection done, and we’ll be able to afford Yerusha.” She did not, of course, mention the increase in profits the C rating could mean for this run. She knew well enough that a part of Al Shei’s mind had involuntarily worked the percentages out already. Her anger did not cool, but Al Shei made herself swallow her pride in one, large lump. “I beg your pardon, Master Dobbs. My uncle neglected to inform me that he had acted on my behalf.” She held out her hand. “Welcome aboard the Pasadena.” “Thank you.” Dobbs beamed as she reached for Al Shei’s hand, but then her forehead wrinkled and she looked down at the desk top. Al Shei’s gaze followed automatically. The Fool’s pen was still pressed to the film. “I’m sorry, I... um... ” Dobbs tugged at her light pen, but it didn’t come away from the film like it should have. “There’s a... ah... ” She frowned and

45 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War tugged again. No good. The point of the pen stayed firmly stuck to the film. She grabbed it with both hands and pulled harder. “Must be a... sorry... ” She grabbed her own wrist and strained backwards with all her might. Al Shei felt herself smile. Resit snorted out loud. Heads turned all around the room to stare coolly or curiously at the strange scene. Dobbs blushed heavily, put one foot against the desk to brace herself, grabbed the pen in both hands, grit her teeth and hauled backwards. The pen came free with such force, Dobbs flipped tail over teacup across the carpet, coming up on her backside, brandishing the pen triumphantly. Al Shei whooped with laughter and Resit applauded briskly. Dobbs smiled, leapt to her feet and bowed deeply to her audience. “When do we start launch prep, Boss?” Dobbs asked, clipping her pen back onto her belt. “Nine hundred tomorrow.” Al Shei knew Dobbs could hear the smile in her voice. “Check in with Watch Commander Schyler to get your weight allotment and cabin assignment and don’t be late.” Dobbs grinned all across her round face. “I’m not that kind of Fool, Boss. I’ll be there.” She bowed one more time and turned on her heel, too fast. She wobbled precariously, windmilling with both arms before she found her balance again and set off jauntily through the oval doorway in the narrow end of the room. Resit giggled audibly. Al Shei turned and gave her a dramatically sour gaze. “Go ahead, laugh,” she said,

46 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War dropping back into Arabic. “You’re not the one who has to thank Uncle Ahmet.” “No. I’m just the one who has to try to get Yerusha’s agent to stick to his terms.” She grimaced. “Freers. What you want with a jacked-up kid... ” “Look who’s talking.” Al Shei laughed. “Grit your teeth and think about bonus pay. That’s what I’m doing.” And money in the bank and the plans for the Mirror of Fate which’ll have a B rating before we even get it crewed, and quarters for Asil and the kids... She shuffled Dobbs’ contract into the stack of films in front of her that held Pasadena’s current certifications, crew contracts and share commitments. “What’s left?” “Good thing I certified as a secretary as well as a lawyer,” grumbled Resit, like she always did, but she pulled her schedule pad out of her bag and checked the display. “We’re supposed to meet with Dr. Amory Dane about the packet he wants to send to The Farther Kingdom. Medical updates, he says. It’s a big load but it shouldn’t take long to iron out.” “Okay.” Al Shei ran her finger along the edge of the pile of film, sealing the sheets together to form a thick book. “You meet with Dr. Dane and get the contract settled. Then, get into Donnelly’s office and sign up our new pilot. The Watch Commander and I should be able to burn through the red tape on the inspection. I want us re-registered before we start launch prep tomorrow.” Resit lowered her eyes in mock humility. “Your pardon, oh-my-mistress, but if ‘Ster Inspector should desire, Allah forbid, to create difficulty about the fact that you haven’t actually signed the pilot you are no doubt going to list... ”

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“I shall threaten him with the keen and ready wit of my lawyer.” Al Shei stood up. “Who is going to get her share halved if she doesn’t... ” “I’m going, I’m going.” Resit shoveled her films and her schedule pad into one stack. “See me go... Boss.” She made her way between the desks, imitating Dobbs’ swinging stride and making the hem of her skirt swirl. “Kolay gelsin,” Al Shei called after her. May it go easily. Al Shei chuckled and shook her head. No one who faced Resit from the other side of a negotiation, over a contract or a court proceeding would recognize the easy-going woman who was taking her leave. Having seen both sides of her across the years, Al Shei was forever glad that the woman was her friend as well as her cousin. Al Shei took out her pen. The heat of her hand and the pattern of her fingerprints activated it. Using it as a pointer, she touched the active surface of the desk, flicking through the menus until she called up her private account for this trip and funnelled enough cash into the desk for a transmission to Ankara. She could have used the Intersystem Bank Network to set up a fast-time link. Uncle Ahmet would have gladly paid the exorbitant fee that the banks charged for access to their crowded channels, but that would have been one more thing she would have had to thank him for. One more favor he could trot out at the next family dinner she attended. She had heard of tribes from the Amer-Indians who had the custom of the “potslatch,” where a person showed how rich they were by giving gifts. Uncle Ahmet practiced this method of displaying wealth

48 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War almost constantly. Al Shei couldn’t help wishing, though, that he could make his gifts easier to accept. The desk accepted the transfer, channeled credit back into the bank’s lines and raised the transmission screen. The blank, grey screen turned robin’s egg blue to indicate that record mode was on. Al Shei saw her own eyes framed by the hijab reflected on the blue background. She automatically straightened her shoulders and smoothed her brow. “Selamunalekum, Uncle Ahmet,” she said. Peace be with you. “I am sending this to thank you for your gift of a Fool’s contract. Because of your generous present, the Pasadena will be able to upgrade its rating and will pull down at least a ten percent increase in our profits this trip out. With luck, and the help of Allah,” she added piously, “this will mean it will be only three more years before I can commission a ship that will allow Asil and our children to travel with me.” I am not repaying you by grounding myself in Ankara. “So, again I say thank you, Uncle. I shall see you in eight months.” She clicked her pen against the desk top to shut the recording off a split second before the desk beeped at her to indicate that she had used up her deposit. Why do I act like this? she wondered as she authorized the transmission with a stroke of her pen. He’s really just trying to help. Because his way of helping has a way of reminding me that he thinks I should have become a banker rather than an engineer with a time-share ship who’s spending her life, and her husband’s, trying to create a new family business when there’s a perfectly good one that goes back two hundred years just waiting for her.

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She sighed again and reached up under her veil to rub her neck. Oh well, he loves the kids, and he did just get me my C rating. She glanced at the desk clock. Fifteen-fifteen. A little over three hours until evening prayers. It might be possible to get the inspection over with before then. What was it Schyler was always saying? God willing and the creeks don’t rise? She smiled. Schyler had told her it was a saying from back before The Fast Burn and the Management Union, when Earth’s rivers could still go into unscheduled floods. Al Shei found it a nicely quirky expression for the omnipresence of unpredictability. Al Shei activated her pen again and sorted through the menus until she found the on-call roster of station personnel. The Lennox office had three inspectors checked in. Al Shei wrote a request for a Lennox inspector to meet her at the Pasadena berth for the purpose of a ratings upgrade. The AI that ran the station had her handwriting, with most of its eccentricities, on file, so it didn’t ask for a rewrite. The desk just absorbed her words and replaced them with a much tidier line of text that said TRANSMISSION COMPLETED. Al Shei wrote SECURE over the top of the ship’s book. The text on the top film blanked and the pages sealed themselves together. It would take her handwriting, Watch Commander Schyler’s, or Resit’s to open them again. She touched the CLOSE icon on the desk. The desk inventoried the remaining supplies and funneled the change from her deposit back into her account, automatically forwarding a record of the transaction to

50 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War the accounting program on board Pasadena. Once the financial transactions were taken care of, the desk shut itself down to wait for the next customer. Al Shei tucked her pen back into her tunic pocket and stood up carefully so that the spin-gravity wouldn’t disorient her. The business module was in the outermost ring of Port Oberon, which meant it had nearly a full one gee gravity, but the speed of the station’s rotation was still detectable to her inner ear. If she moved too quickly, it would remind her that she was aboard a rapidly spinning conglomeration of tin cans, not firmly on the ground of some planet. How Dobbs made all those quick shifts of weight without really losing her balance was beyond Al Shei, but then, Al Shei was a groundhugger at heart. The problem was that in spirit and in skill, she was a starbird. Al Shei tucked the Pasadena’s book under her arm and followed Resit’s path out the door and into the curving corridor. She joined the steady stream of men and women from across a hundred cultures as they made their way around the module to the door that would let them into either their elevator, or their appointment room. Port Oberon took its name from the fact that it hung over the lagrange point of Oberon, Uranus’ largest moon. It was the departure point for most of the fast-time traffic from the Solar system. Consequently, it was always full to capacity and its owners able to milk the patrons for all they were worth. Al Shei noted smugly that they were at least a little less obvious about it now that they had to glance over their shoulders at the Titania Freers. The Freers had been indicating that they’d be more than willing to set up

51 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War their own commercial station, should the market open up for it. Resit’s comments about revolutionaries and jacked-up kids echoed in her mind. Al Shei pressed her lips together. She would readily admit there were aspects of their philosophy she didn’t like, and some others that she regarded as flatly ridiculous, but she had worked with Freer contractors in the past. Certainly some of them had the arrogance that belonged to the self-righteous, but their engineers and pilots were the best in Settled Space. Even by the standards of corporately owned space stations, Port Oberon was huge. It usually had two hundred modules, each the size of a fifteen story office building, operating at once. That did not count the tethered cargo pods, the tankers off-loading helium and methane from the mining operations in low orbit above Uranus, or the ships that were docked but still pressurized and crewed. Oberon was the major fueling station, traffic control, trade depot and all around place of business for all of the Solar System between the asteroid belt and Pluto, which, in the time since Al Shei’s great-great-grandparents had first helped set up the Intersystem Banking Network, had become a very busy place. The Henry V Business Center was one of the twenty-five modules permanently maintained by Oberon Inc., collectively known to the shippers, starbirds, miners and canned gerbils who put into the port as “the Landlords.” Like most of the other twenty- four permanent modules, it was cylindrical, with a bundle of elevator shafts running straight down the middle. Its wedge-shaped rooms, spiral staircases and

52 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War circular corridors were lined with bristly carpet that could double as velcro when the module was in free fall, and covered in the bright, but unimaginative, panel decor. The only loose things in the module were the occupants and their possessions. Everything else was glued, bolted, sealed or simply extruded from the hull or the decks. The walls had ears, and eyes, but between the garish panels, they also had arms so they could reach inside the tiles and work on their own repairs, or grab anything that actually came loose in an emergency. Al Shei frowned at the automated hands that were retracted back into the panelling as she skirted the wall to get passed a knot of broad-shouldered miners. In her opinion, Port Oberon relied too much on AIs and waldos and didn’t have half enough real engineers and maintainers. She knew the technical reasons. Like Pasadena, Oberon was a profit-making concern, and real people cost real money. Still, AIs could do worse than any human being ever did. If a human went stir- crazy and decided to run away, it was almost nobody’s concern. But if an AI did the same thing, it could mean the life of the station, or the colony. Could and had. Al Shei ducked through a doorway that was relatively clear of other people and into the elevator bay. There were six lifts, any of which could have gotten her to the core in under four minutes, but Al Shei preferred to use the stairs. Every eight months she lived her life in confined spaces with varying gravity. She needed every second of exercise she could get. Even if she walked, the Lennox inspector wouldn’t get there that much ahead of her.

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The stairs spiraled around the bundle of elevator shafts. Since only standard-measure cans were allowed to link up with Port Oberon, the stairs fit together even between the bulkheads that indicated she had passed from one module to the next. The core was forty stories up, or three rings inward, depending on how you thought about such things, with gravity getting lighter the whole way. She shifted her stride and the swing of her arms to compensate without even thinking about it. Every motion became smaller and gentler. Abrupt, expansive movements in .5 gee were not a good idea. Even so, she all but flew up the last fifteen stories. Al Shei reached the hub landing. The door’s surface registered her palm print as belonging to a crew member for a docked ship and let her in, opening just the hatchways that would take her to the Pasadena, since no one had invited her to visit anywhere else. The Pasadena’s Watch Commander, Thomas Paine Schyler was already in the little lobby that held the airlock to the Pasadena in its far wall. Schyler was the only full-term crewman on the ship, working under both her and her partner, Marcus Tully. Most shippers signed on for a single tour and then took themselves a break ground or port side. On low-rated ships, some signed on for only one run, working to reach their destination, taking their share and walking off to whatever it was that was waiting for them. To Schyler though, the Pasadena was home. Every time they docked at Oberon, he, Al Shei and Tully went through the formality of renewing his contract and reviewing his share. It was required to keep their

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Lennox rating, but they all knew Schyler would have worked for free if they had asked him to as long as they let him stay aboard and do his job. Next to Schyler stood a little man with the pinched expression of the perpetually fussy. Half of Al Shei’s family wore the same expression during business hours. He had his pen out and was waving it towards the ship. Around his ankles waited a small flock of rovers: squared off centipedes with waldos that looked more like mandibles and tentacles than hands and fingers. Schyler looked at Al Shei over the top of the strange man’s thatch of dust brown hair, and rubbed the end of his roman nose. Al Shei smiled behind her hijab. “Watch Commander Schyler.” She touched her forehead in brief salute. “And Inspector... ” she held out her hand. “Davies, ‘Dama Al Shei, and... ” “And thank you for coming on such short notice, Inspector,” said Al Shei before the inspector could finish his sentence. “I’m extremely sorry to have had to put in a short-notice call and I assure you and the Lennox station that it will not happen again.” “Well, yes.” The little man fumbled with his pen and managed to tuck it into his pocket so he could shake her hand. “Thank you, ‘Dama Al Shei. Let’s see if we can get this business over with.” Schyler was rubbing his nose again. Al Shei grinned, extremely glad of her hijab. “Of course, Inspector. We won’t take up any more of your time than necessary.” She retrieved the ship’s book from under her arm and wrote OPEN across the cover with her own pen. The memory chip registered

55 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War her handwriting and unsealed the book. “This is my crew roster and ship specifications,” she said, handing the stack of appropriate films to Davies. “You’ll find it in order, I’m sure.” He took the pile and sniffed. “What I find is not the real issue, ‘Dama Al Shei.” Davies nodded towards his rovers. “It’s what they find.” He flipped through the films and extracted the ship’s specifications. He slid the stack into the chief rover’s scanner slot. “Specification recorded,” it said in the bland, neuter voice that belonged to the vast majority of automated systems. “Proceeding with verification.” The rovers lifted themselves up off the deck and marched in single-file into the Pasadena. They’d go over the ship, checking, measuring, scanning. Davies would do a walk-through and spot check when they were finished, but that was mostly a formality. Al Shei felt her neck muscles tense up. Maybe she should have checked things over first. Tully, for all his scheming, was generally a truthful partner and if he said the ship was in prime working order, it would be. “The pilot you’re hiring.” Davies looked up from the open book that he held balanced on the palm of his hand. “‘Dama Yerusha, she is from Free Home Titania?” “That is what her bio file says.” Al Shei realized she’d been staring at the airlock and fiddling with her sleeve. “She’s a Freer then?” Davies put all of his facial muscles into the frown. “I didn’t know hiring a Freer disqualified a Lennox rating,” Al Shei kept her voice casual.

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Davies shrugged. “Not technically, no, but it can prejudice your security marks.” Al Shei bit her tongue. It was Davies’ job to be skeptical. If she said anything, she’d just be giving him additional ammunition. From the recess of her pocket, Al Shei’s pen beeped. She pulled it out and saw Resit’s name on the display. She pulled out a square of film and held the pen against it. Resit’s message wrote itself across the blank surface.

Al Shei: Got the contract with Dr. Dane. Big shipment. Had to check with Communications Chief Lipinski to make sure we’d have room in the hold. Dane’s paying extra. Terms are in storage for your eyes and say-so.

Now the bad news. Your business partner and respected brother-in-law Marcus Tully may have been at it again. Dane wanted to know if this was the Pasadena that pulled the plug out of the Toric Station security code. I’m checking to see if there’re warrants out. Better say a few extra du’a’s at prayer tonight. Al Shei felt her teeth begin to grind together slowly. She glanced across at Schyler. He must have seen the thunder in her eyes because he shifted his weight slowly and jerked his blunt chin towards the inspector. Al Shei erased the message and tucked pen and film back into her pocket. “Inspector, will you need my seal for anything?”

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Davies blinked up at her. “Mmm? No, no, not until the results are in.” “Good. Watch,” she said to Schyler, “call me when I’m needed back here.” Mindful of her balance, Al Shei turned around. She did not need to fall over right now. What she needed was to find out was if Tully had left the station yet. Once she was back in the stairwell, she wrote her request for a trace to Tully on a green wall tile and waited impatiently while the station’s AI tracked him down. He was in the Desdemona Hotel module on the outer ring, getting himself a drink in the Othello coffee shop. Al Shei declined to transmit a message to say she was coming. This time, she took the elevators and moving walkways three modules down and ten sideways until she reached the hotel. Once coffee houses had been introduced, they had never left human history. When humanity took itself out to the stars they brought their problems, their religions, their arts, and their cafes. Every station that had the room kept a coffee house for its patrons. The Othello was on the edge of a spacious, plant- filled lobby. The stairwell had been gilded and four different fountains splashed around it. As she made path towards the cafe, ducking and weaving between the other patrons, Al Shei decided that if this module went into unscheduled free-fall, she’d rather be elsewhere. Tully sat at a wide, round table. He leaned back in his chair with his legs kicked straight out in front of him. In between sips from a bulb of rich, black brew

58 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War that could have been coffee, sarsaparilla, or Guinness stout, he whistled cheerfully between his teeth. Al Shei unclenched her fists and waded between tables and server carts to where he sat. “Tully.” She sat down across from him. Startled, he drew his legs in and straightened his back. Someone in his ancestry had supplied his parents with the genes to allow shockingly blue eyes to shine out of his medium-brown face. “Tully, what have you been doing?” He set his bulb gently down on the table. “Nothing you need to be worried about, Katmer.” An alarm bell sounded far in the back of Al Shei’s mind. If Tully had been engaged in his usual petty hacking and cracking, he would have said so. “One day you’re going to remember that I don’t believe you when you say that.” Al Shei leaned forward. “I’ve got a client saying the Pasadena pulled a security plug out of Toric’s Stations secured codes.” Tully glanced quickly around the cafe. “You really want an answer in public?” Al Shei’s fingertips scraped against the table top. “Marcus Tully, you can run your little civil disobedience racket however you see fit, but if you call attention to the ship I have to fly, I am going to have you in the tightest sling the communications collective can sew together for you!” Tully sighed toward his bulb. “The guy got hold of a rumor.” He glanced up at Al Shei, as if to see how she was taking the comment. Al Shei didn’t even blink, and Tully looked down again. “Resit will assure him that your crew and my crew have nothing in common. You’ll get the job and all your profits, and there won’t

59 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War be a problem. Just like there’s no problem for me when you skirt the regs a little too close.” Al Shei was glad he couldn’t see the hard line of her mouth. “Tully, what do you think you’re doing?” He shrugged again. “Keeping the corporations on their grubby little toes, oh-my-sister-in-law. Same as you.” “I do not break anybody’s law.” Her voice was low and furious. “I’m not asking you to protect me.” He pulled another long draft out of the bulb. “If I’m careless enough to get caught then I deserve it, and you’ve got the Pasadena and all the remaining payments on it by default.” His face was blank as a ship’s hull, reflecting her own anger right back at her, but giving away nothing of its own. He knew he could keep pushing her. He knew she would do almost anything before she had to break her sister’s heart and tell her what, exactly, Marcus Tully had turned into. That fact had nagged badly at Al Shei for years. “Tully,” she said softly. “You don’t get it. As long as you continue to play the lone rebel, the ship is mine, because you have already crossed the line. I can take it away any time I want. Your petty temper tantrums have already taken your freedom. I’m trying to give it back to you. Your freedom, and my sister’s.” She got up and walked away without looking back. Something hard collided with her back, sending her stumbling against an empty table. She caught herself with both hands, gasping at the sudden pain.

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“Oh, sorry,” said a man’s bland voice. “I didn’t see a person there. I thought it was just a pile of rags and shit.” Al Shei pulled herself upright and turned around slowly to face the chestnut-skinned, auburn-haired, totally unshaven, can-gerbil. She drew herself up to her full height. “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah.” Reciting the first pillar of Islam loudly was her standard tactic. Bigots seldom knew how to reply to a declaration of faith as a response to an insult. During the Slow Burn, when the fires were cooling and the survivors were starting their own wars, thousands of Muslims turned from their religion to save their lives. Al Shei’s family had remained unmoved. Drawing on those generations of pride gave her the strength she needed to stand up to the bigotry that still dogged Islam. The gerbil sneered, and for a minute she thought he was going to spit, but he just turned and shouldered his way out through the crowd. Burn-brain, thought Al Shei after him. Some people had never let up. A Muslim named Faraq Hakiem started the Fast Burn. Never mind that he was Khurdish and she was an Arab from Dubai and that three hundred years had passed since the last ashes had cooled; she wore the veil, and that was enough for those who thought there was still something to be settled. Al Shei suddenly felt very much in need of a shower. A flash of pink drifted past the corner of her eye and Al Shei looked involuntarily towards it. A blob of yellow floated down and was nabbed out of the air by

61 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War a quick brown hand and replaced with a scrap of emerald green. The green was nabbed and replaced by the pink. The scene cleared up and Al Shei realized she was looking at Dobbs juggling silky scarves; snatching them out of the air as they fell and replacing them into the cascade so they could fall again. The Fool had a ridiculously intense expression on her face; grab, drop, drop, grab. She saw Al Shei staring and blushed a deep umber. “Sorry, Boss,” she said with a twisted grin. “Dropped my napkin, and I can’t... ” drop, grab, drop. “Ooops. Darn it... ” Al Shei felt a chuckle well up out of her throat and she let it go. Dobbs grinned back, snatched all her scarves out of the air and gave her little flourishing bow from her seat. “Your contract says you don’t come on duty until tomorrow.” Al Shei watched, bemused, as Dobbs stuffed the colored scarves into her fist. “At times discretion should be thrown aside and with the foolish, we should play fools.” Dobbs opened her fist, and, as Al Shei expected, the scarves were completely gone. It was ridiculous and showy and simplistic, but Al Shei found herself smiling anyway. The filthy feeling lifted itself off her skin. “See you tomorrow, Boss.” Dobbs looked down at her meal total printed out on the table top. Her eyes bulged in their sockets. She let her head fall back until she was staring at the ceiling, opened her mouth and broke into song. “Let’s vary piracy... with a little burglary!”

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Al Shei froze. The tune Dobbs sang was the same one Tully had been whistling. “What is that?” Dobbs smile was a little puzzled. “Don’t share your partner’s taste in music, Boss? That’s from the Pirates of Penzance, a comic show from before the Fast Burn... ” Al Shei stared across the cafe at Tully, who in turn was staring at his drink. She briefly considered going back there and demanding once again to be told what was going on. Which will get me exactly nowhere. Aware that her newest employee was staring at her, but not caring, Al Shei strode back across the lobby. Her stomach had tightened itself into a knot when she heard Dobbs sing out the words to Tully’s tune, and every second it stayed tight she became more convinced that she was right. This time Marcus Tully was doing more than worming corporate secrets out of secured networks and shunting them to public arenas. It would be just like him to find a way to brag about it in public. Back in the Henry V business module, Al Shei passed right by the bank outlet and went straight into the communications room. Unlike the bank with its open desks, this room was a honeycomb of enclosed booths for private conversations. Al Shei found an empty booth and stepped inside. There was barely enough room for her to stand beside the chair as she jacked her pen into the socket beside the doorway. The booth’s system acknowledged her as a registered station customer with a positive balance on her accounts and shut the door. She could have just sent a packet, but she wanted to say her suspicions out loud and hear a response to

63 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War them from the person she trusted above all others. She also could have done this from the Pasadena and saved herself the cost of the booth rental, but Davis was probably still not done with his inspection. The last thing she wanted was the Lennox inspector overhearing what she had to say now. Al Shei lowered herself into the stiff chair and faced the view screen that filled the wall in front of her. She slid the desktop into her lap and checked the credit in her communications account. She stared at it a moment, running through sample conversations in her head before deciding there was enough. With a series of careful commands, she opened a fast-time channel to Earth, Dubai City, Bala House, for Asil Tamruc. Fast-time communications were not effected by gravitational stress as drastically as fast-time flight. A fast-time message could travel most of the way to the Moon before it had to be translated into speed-of-light signals. The problem with fast-time communication was the cost. The signals had to be boosted, refocused, and redirected every few light years, which required a vast network of both un-manned repeater satellites, and manned space stations. There was a single FTL network between Earth and Settled Space; the Intersystem Banking Network. It had been established by a financial conglomerate that was quick to realize that such a network would mean a stable medium of exchange between Earth and the new worlds. They did let independent users send messages across their crowded lines, but they charged the worth of a first- born child for it. Because of that astronomical price, ships like the Pasadena had a ready business transporting data from place to place.

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Since Al Shei’s family owned one of the largest financial institutions on Earth, Al Shei could have easily had her fast-time communications fees “overlooked,” or paid by Uncle Ahmet, but her ethics forbade the first, and her pride forbade the second. The desktop displayed the message CONNECTING, and ticked off both seconds and available credit. After two minutes and an appreciable chunk of the account, the view screen came alive and Al Shei’s husband, Asil Tamruc, smiled at her from the tidy nest that was his office. It had been ten years since she met Asil, eight since they’d married, and his smile still made her heart pound. “Hello, Beloved,” he said easily. Even across the vast distance that separated them, she could see the cheerful light in his dark eyes. He knew, of course, that only a serious matter would make her lay out the amounts required for a fast-time call. Despite that, his whole body was relaxed, and his long, expressive face was set in an attitude of gentle humor. How did such a man become an accountant? thought Al Shei, as she had almost every day since she met him. “Hello, Beloved.” Al Shei allowed herself a brief smile at the sight of her husband. “There’s trouble, I’m afraid.” When the signal reached him, Asil straightened up just a little, not alarmed, but alert. “What kind?” “Marcus Tully.” She told him about the note from Resit, her uninformative conversation with Tully, and the additional spin Dobbs had added to it. She sat back and waited for her words to reach him.

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Asil’s sigh puffed out his cheeks. “Well, I’d say there’s no doubt he’s been up to something. But I don’t understand why you think it’s more than the usual. It’s a suggestive song, certainly, but he always has had a taste for cultural arcana.” “I know, I know.” Al Shei shrugged her shoulders. “It’s more a feeling than anything else, Asil. I just think it might be a good idea if you traced where Tully’s money came from this last run. We may need to cover ourselves.” “Then I will.” He pulled out his pen and made a note on the desktop in front of him. He glanced up at her, and there was quiet mischief in his eyes. “You could have sent me a text message with all of this, Katmer. I’d have had it in two hours.” She pulled herself up and put a tone of injured dignity into her voice. “Perhaps I wished to speak to my husband. Surely this is my right.” His smile warmed and Al Shei felt her heart begin to melt. “Surely it is.” “Tell the children I love them,” she whispered. “And know full well that I love you.” “I will.” He reached out and pressed his fingertips against the view screen. “And I do.” Al Shei copied his gesture, pressing her fingertips against his and imagining it was the warmth of his hand she felt, not the cool glass of the screen. “Salam, Beloved,” he said softly. “Salam.” Al Shei cut the connection. The view screen faded to black. She sat where she was for a moment, staring at the blank screen. At last, she dropped her pen into her pocket and stood up.

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Whatever happened has already happened, she told herself as she left the booth. It’s time to face what’s still to come.

oOo

Dobbs watched her new employer walk away from the cafe and with a small smile of her own. The Fool pulled her scarves out of her sleeve, folded them up neatly and stowed them in her pocket. The Guild’s profile, as usual, was proving entirely accurate. Al Shei was a determined woman with a strong sense of herself and her goals, but not without a sense of humor. Of course, people without humor or empathy seldom hired Fools, except when certain certifications or ratings required them. Dobbs had found herself a little worried that Al Shei hadn’t known she’d been contracted. Well, every assignment has its own challenges. She took out her pen and wrote out a credit draft on the table top, adding her thumbprint as authorization. The table checked her writing and print and added the words ACCOUNT SETTLED before it absorbed the text. Dobbs considered the blank surface for a moment and drew a simplistic smiling face before she tucked her pen away. Marcus Tully was still sitting at his table, swirling the dregs of his drink around the bulb and watching the way the waves rose and fell in the station’s spin gravity. The report on him had been cursory, since he wasn’t an active part of the crew she’d be working with. He’d been an independent shipper for ten years, dry-docked for at least a third of that time for lack of

67 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War work before he’d married Ruqaiyya Al Shei. After his partner had been arrested for attempted financial mis- dealings, Tully had invited Ruqaiyya’s sister, Katmer Al Shei, to become his new partner in the Pasadena Corp. to share the expenses and risks of operating an independent mail packet ship. He’d apparently benefited from both the marriage and the partnership. He managed to stay constantly employed, even though the rating for him and the crews he assembled was one to two ranks lower than those Al Shei put together. But judging from the pitch and timbre of Al Shei’s voice when she talked to him, there was something serious going on and that it was affecting Dobbs’ new employer. Add that to her abrupt reaction when she’d found out what he had been whistling, and it would take a greener Fool than Dobbs to miss the fact that something was seriously wrong. Need to plug in and find out what’s what. Dobbs got up and left the cafe. The lobby was crowded, but she threaded an easy path between the trickles of patrons. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the bigoted station worker who had slammed into Al Shei. People like him were commonly called “gerbils” because they spent their time running around inside wheel-shaped space stations. They could become be acerbic, opinionated and develop pretty crude senses of humor. Dobbs darted around into his field of vision. “It’s you!” she shouted. “I knew it was you!” She slapped her hand against her forehead. “Holy sun and stars, I cannot believe they let you in here, you wart- brained, six-toed, fractured excuse for a corpse’s ass!”

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The gerbil looked around confused, as members of the passing crowd slowed down to stare. “Who could’ve thought they’d let you just walk around in here!” Dobbs spread her hands out and appealed to the crows. “I can’t believe it! Can you believe it?” she demanded of a woman in a bright red sari. “Him! The ugly, twisted, burn-brain! They let him just... ” “Damp it down, Sister!” shouted the gerbil. “Who are you?” Dobbs gave him a look of utter incredulity. “You mean you don’t know me?” “No!” The gerbil stabbed a finger at her. “And I’ll lay any money you don’t know me!” “Oh!” Dobbs covered her mouth with her hand and let her eyes go wide. “You have to know somebody in order to insult them! I’m sorry.” She gave him an apologetic grin. “See, you got me confused when you assaulted a total stranger back there.” His eyes blazed and his big, calloused hand rose. “Master Evelyn Dobbs.” She drew herself up to her full height. “Intersystem Guild of Fools.” They stood there like that for a moment, then the gerbil, anger burning in his eyes, lowered his hand. Fools could not be touched, by anybody. If he committed assault, the Guild would register his name and no crew that he worked on would be able to hire a professional Fool. There were a lot more gerbils than there were Fools. If the Guild black-balled him, he would never be able to work a first-class ship or station again.

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He could, of course, report her and she’d have to take the backlash. The Guild had very strict guidelines about the proper use of casual clowning. But he just gave her a look that could have blistered paint as he turned and shouldered his way through the gathering crowd. Whistling, Dobbs left the hotel in the exact opposite direction. Despite the fact that Guild scale pay was generous by shipper standards, a full room in the luxury hotel was more than Dobbs wanted to pay out for just the few days that she’d be on-station. Instead, she had berthed herself in what the advertising referred to as a “traditional, economical, Tokyo-style cabin.” That meant it was a private bunk with all the boards and terminals within arm’s reach on the walls. It included a stowage area for her baggage and access to the showers. Her rented bed was two modules over and three levels up. All the modules in this section were dedicated to public business, which meant they were all crowded. Dobbs theorized that shippers spent so much time in space with the same people that they looked for excuses to get out and meet with someone new. As a result, there was a great deal of face-to-face business done here, even though Port Oberon had excellent video and holo-projection facilities. Only some of the space was cut off into the normal wedge-shaped rooms for private, or semi-private negotiations. The rest was opened up, much like tapes Dobbs had seen of ancient flea markets. Sound- dampening panels took the place of canvas awnings. Patrons could order food in bulk or as individual

70 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War meals. They could acquire tailored uniforms or personal clothes, or any service that could be transported between two points. Some shops took up three and four levels and had their own staircases zig- zagging up the sides of their private walls. An open medical lobby fronted the passage to the hospital. A couple of people in bright white med-tech coveralls marshalled a drone-gurney through the sterile-sealed doors. She got an impression of severely bruised skin and clotted blood and winced. If they were still bringing the victims in, that alarm she’d heard earlier had produced a lot of injuries. She knew that Port Oberon had a full-scale bio-garden, but she wondered how far it was going to be able to provide for the people who would now need new eyes and eardrums, and maybe even lungs. Dobbs shoved the grisly thoughts away and stepped nimbly between the crowds and knots and flowing waves of people. Her small size facilitated freedom of movement as she flitted from one clear spot to another. For her, it was like a game of tag with empty floor space as “it,” and if anyone was laughing at her as she darted past them, then she was just putting in a little overtime. Dobbs spotted an empty square foot of carpeting and jumped into it, planting both feet firmly on the floor. She looked up to see a tall, thin, pale man step abruptly away from the wall. She slid sideways just in time to avoid the collision, pressing her back against a wall of order terminals for C-Stacks Inc. “And if they say one word, one, about the budget, that’s it, I’m done!” the pale man shouted at the terminals. He glowered down at Dobbs and she saw

71 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War bright blue eyes, and instantly got the feeling that he wasn’t looking at her. “You’d think,” he thundered, “that they’d ask! That there’d be a meeting! But no it’s just Lipinski we’ve got a packet and you have to fit it in the hold!” Dobbs dropped to the deck, rolled into a fetal position, and shook. Above her, there was a long moment of silence. “Are you okay?” he asked finally. “Are you done yelling?” “I think so.” “Then I think I’m okay.” Dobbs somersaulted backwards and came up on her knees. “You’re a Fool,” he said quietly. “And you’re Rurik Lipinski, Communications Chief for the Pasadena.” She tightened her muscles and leapt to her feet. A small twinge told her she shouldn’t be trying that move in full gravity anymore today. “I didn’t expect to meet you until tomorrow.” Since the Pasadena was a mail packet ship, Dobbs knew the comm-chief, or “Houston,” was the second most important officer on the ship. The first would be the Chief Engineer, the person who kept the ship running; Al Shei herself. Lipinski gave Dobbs a smile that showed a row of even, white teeth. He was an anomaly, in more ways than one, Dobbs realized. First of all, he was really tall. Professional shippers tended to be a compact breed. Even then, most people looked tall from her five-foot elevation, but Lipinski stood head and shoulders above the rest of the passers-by. Secondly, he was nearly colorless. His hair was straw-blond and his skin was the milk-white color that turned lobster red in bright

72 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War sunlight. Dobbs found herself wondering if he was a refugee from one of the Aryan Purist colonies. “You’re with us?” There wasn’t a trace of his previous anger in his voice. “That’s great! We must be getting an upgrade this run.” “That’s what I’ve heard.” Dobbs spread her hands. “But who knows what a Fool might have heard? So, tell me.” She made her eyes large, round and innocent and blinked rapidly. “Do you always shout at walls and passers-by?” Lipinski blushed an extraordinary pink color. “Actually, I do. Lousy habit, but there it is. Get me tense and I’ll yell at anything that doesn’t get out of the way fast enough.” He arched a knowing eyebrow at her. “I’m death to apprentice comm-officers. They can’t run.” His grin spread into a leer. Dobbs cowered behind her hands. “Oh, spare me,” she pleaded, all the while deciding she liked this man. “Please, spare me.” “Okay.” He shrugged and turned his attention back to the order terminal. “I’ve got to finish getting this order in anyway. Al Shei will not thank me if I keep us here contemplating our navels while there’s deadlines to be met.” “Is there something wrong with the data hold?” Dobbs stood on tip-toe and peered over his shoulder. “Yes.” He pulled out his pen and bent over the terminal board. “But there wouldn’t be if our fearless leader Katmer Al Shei wouldn’t keep letting Marcus Tully try to commit felonies with her ship.” He started scrawling orders across the memory board. The station AI must have had his handwriting on file. The screen kept printing out ACCEPTED even though Dobbs

73 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War couldn’t make heads or tails out of the scribbles on the board. “I thought they had a time share,” she remarked, lowering herself back onto flat feet. “They do, sort of... I shouldn’t be talking like this.” He scanned the acceptance notifications on the screen and punched the TRANSMIT key. “All I know for sure is that Dr. Amory Dane has a complicated load he wants us to carry to The Farther Kingdom. Lots of interconnected, self-referencing programs and a cart- load of background data. Tully’s guys burned out three main wafer stacks and reconfigured another four with whatever it was they were doing out there.” He shook his head. “This is why I’m yelling at walls.” “And Fools,” said Dobbs with a grin. “Don’t forget the Fools.” “I don’t think you’d let me.” His smile took on a contemplative air and Dobbs found herself thinking it might be time to make an exit. But Lipinski just sighed and turned back to the terminal. “And, since no one’s ever gotten a direct brain-to-computer interface to work, I can’t just crawl into the lines and see what’s going on in the hold for myself. So, I’ve got to rent all kinds of extra tracers and an AI coordinator, and Al Shei is going to be furious when she sees what I’m doing to her credit balances.” “Only if the data doesn’t get where it’s going,” said Dobbs. Lipinski gave her another thoughtful look. “You’re not half the Fool you ought to be.” “Shhh!” She waved him to silence. “You want me to get fired?” She glanced around frantically.

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As she did, Dobbs saw a woman push herself away from the wall and turn deliberately towards them. It would have been difficult to miss her. Her golden-brown skin was mottled with masses of purple and black bruises. Her tan sleeve had been rolled up to expose a blood blister that spread across her forearm like a spoiled rose. Her other arm was encased in the beige plastic form of a stasis tube. A sterile patch covered her right eye. Her good hand clutched the handle of a wafer case so tightly her knuckles had gone white and she walked with the care of someone who didn’t really want to make the pain any worse. “Sorry to pry, Fellows.” Her language was English but her accent had a nasal drawl to it which could have come from Australia, Cornwall, or the southern reaches of Northern America. Her greeting, though, marked her as a Freer. “I heard you say you were under contract to Katmer Al Shei?” Lipinski’s adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed his shock at her appearance. “Yes, we are.” The woman’s right shoulder rolled forward as she tried to move her arm. She winced and scowled at the stasis tube. “I’m Jemina Yerusha. I’ve just contracted to be the Pasadena’s new pilot for this run.” Lipinski choked. “A Freer? They hired a Freer?” Yerusha shifted her grip on the wafer case and dropped her gaze so she focused on Dobbs. “I need to report to the Watch Commander.” “Who will immediately tell you to report to the bio-garden for a new layer of skin.” Dobbs looked her over with an air of exaggerated criticism. “You might want to save yourself a step.”

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Yerusha smiled sourly. “Already been there. They’re growing me a new arm and a fresh eye. They’ll be ready in another twenty-four hours or so.” She tried to chuckle, but she winced again. “I was helping lock down the module after the blow-out. Didn’t move quite fast enough when the extra seam burst.” Dobbs nodded thoughtfully. It was part of the Freers’ system of living. If there was a disaster on the station or ship where you were, you helped. “Anyway, my agent is an idiot and I don’t want him babbling to Watch and the owners about what went over. That groundhog could ruin my chance at a job when the contract’s less than two hours old.” She gave Dobbs a twisted grin. “I’m ugly, but I’m mobile and I can at least check in and see my station.” She propped herself up against the wall. Lipinski looked her up and down. All trace of humor had vanished from his face, and been replaced by suspicion. “The meds didn’t mind you walking out like that?” She snorted, an action she seemed able to manage without hurting herself. “I’ll go back when I’m sure I’ve still got a job.” “Because the full effect of your heroism couldn’t possibly be conveyed over the video lines.” Dobbs hoped the quip would elicit an explanation. Yerusha could have easily checked in with the Watch Commander over the monitors and explained herself. Yerusha squinted down at her. “Watch yourself, Fool. My headache shot hasn’t kicked in yet.” Dobbs arched her eyebrows and opened her mouth, but Lipinski cut her off. “And what’re you

76 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War planning on bringing aboard with you?” He pointed at the wafer case. Ah. Here it comes, thought Dobbs warily. The white plastic case was thirty centimeters on a side, which made it big enough to accommodate a fifty-wafer integrated stack. It had a blue border, which was the Freer color code for top-grade hardware. Lipinski would have spotted all of this. He probably would have jumped to the same conclusion she did about the contents. Yerusha’s mouth hardened into a straight line. “What business is it of yours?” Dobbs was surprised. Freers were brash, proud and contentious, but they were seldom secretive. “Because I’m Communication’s Chief aboard Pasadena,” replied Lipinski firmly. “And I have a right to know what’s coming aboard my ship.” “And I have a right to bring aboard anything that’s legal, non-infectious, isolated, and under my weight limit.” With difficulty, she hefted the case to show the Landlord’s double-ring seal emblazoned on the side, certifying that the contents of the case was everything she had just stated. Lipinski’s jaw tightened. Dobbs tensed, in case she needed to intervene. “Yes,” he admitted. “You do. But if anything comes out of that case, I have a right to inspect it and confiscate it.” “You do.” Yerusha did not let her gaze waver. “As long as you understand that.” Lipinski pocketed his pen and turned away. “I’ve both got to check in at the docking bay,” he said to Dobbs. “You want to walk along?”

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Yerusha evidently decided to ignore how the question was directed. “You two go ahead.” She gingerly pushed herself away from the wall. “I’ll follow.” Lipinski gave her a hard look, but shrugged and took the lead. Dobbs fell into easy step beside Yerusha, watching the way the woman concentrated on making her body keep moving. “Did we lose anybody?” she asked. “Eh?” Yerusha cocked an eye towards Dobbs and the Fool saw it was a bright hazel despite being sunken in from the bruise. “Some, yeah. Could have been a lot more, though.” The sheen in her eyes told Dobbs she was seeing something other than the crowded corridor. “That’s why it’s going to take the bio-garden so long to do my arm. There’s a couple of gerbils that need new lungs. The can’s a total loss.” She shook her head with a resignation Dobbs was used to seeing in engineers, architects and others who worked and lived with machinery. “Do they know what happened?” Dobbs cocked her own eye in an imitation of Yerusha’s expression. “No,” said Yerusha, too sharply. It could have been her pain, or Dobbs’s bad imitation, but Dobbs didn’t think so. “No idea.” “The Landlords have got to be crawling up the walls,” Dobbs suggested. “Do them good.” Yerusha stared straight ahead. “They don’t get enough exercise.” “I thought gerbils were noted for running around their wheels,” Dobbs remarked as they followed Lipinski through the door to the elevator bays.

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“That bunch isn’t gerbils.” Yerusha leaned her bare arm against the wall. “They’re spooks and ciphers.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “And groundhuggers, the lot of them.” Coming from a Freer, that was a much more dire insult than it generally was. Dobbs glanced up at Lipinski who was keeping his eyes straight ahead and studiously ignoring Yerusha. She tapped the wafer case softly. “What’s his name?” Yerusha’s eyes snapped open, and Dobbs gave her her most non-threatening smile. She’d been right. The wafer stack inside the carrying case held Yerusha’s artificial intelligence. Freers believed that planetary ecology kept human beings trapped. They believed that true freedom came when humanity built its own environments specifically tailored to their needs. Freers lived in stations and ships and were not permitted to even set foot on the ground. They also believed that the cycle of life and death was a leftover from the time humans had lived exclusively on planets, and that when a human died, their soul was released into the void, where it travelled along, useless and voiceless, like a photon packet without any eye to see it. Their belief system posited, however, that if a sufficiently complex artificial environment could be created, the soul could be trapped in it, just as it could be trapped in the body of an infant born about the time of its death original. This unique explanation of reincarnation was the Freers explanation for artificial intelligences that occasionally achieved violently paranoid independent life. Their

79 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War massive neural nets, the Freers said, had caught a human soul. Some Freers “adopted” artificial intelligences and spent their time trying to create an environment that could catch a soul, and thus finally end the loss of knowledge and kinship that evolution had forced on humanity. Some people regarded this as incredible blasphemy. Some, especially people who’s worlds had known the disastrous after-effects of an AI becoming a rogue entity, saw it as a dangerous idiocy. Dobbs studied Lipinski’s stiff shoulders. It’s trouble in the making. Well, what’s a contract without that added spice of a personality clash? she asked herself ruefully as the elevator doors opened and they crowded themselves inside along with twelve other shippers. The elevator rose and gravity dropped, creating confusion inside Dobbs as her sense of balance worked out how to respond. All around her, the passengers eased their weight from foot to foot, or swallowed hard, or twisted their necks, or made any of the hundred other mostly useless physical compensations to the changes. Everyone but Yerusha. She just leaned against the wall, held onto her AI case, and continued to breathe. It took no great skill at observation to notice that something was seriously wrong with her and that the meds should not have let her go. On the other hand, Freers were a notably contentious and militant group. Titania Station had become Free Home Titania by withstanding a siege that cost the landlords more than five hundred lives and hundreds of thousands in

80 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War equipment and negotiations. Yerusha might just have been proving she was as tough as her parents who stood the siege. Then again, she might not. Dobbs eased her own weight from foot to foot and wished she hadn’t thought of that. The doors opened onto the hanger bays. Yerusha’s eyes opened at the same time. Lipinski and Yerusha stepped out in the middle of a small gaggle of passengers who dispersed in different directions, moving with the care required by partial gravity. Dobbs followed them all out, keeping her eyes open for whatever was going to happen next. It happened just as the airlock to the Pasadena opened. Dobbs looked ahead and saw a squared-off, roman-nosed man with skin the color of baked earth come out of the Pasadena airlock, obviously called out by their arrival in the bay. He wore the pocket-filled coveralls that was as close to a shipper’s uniform as anything. Then, she heard footsteps brush the carpet behind her. Dobbs turned to see a man and a woman in Oberon security green lope out of the corridor. Yerusha hissed and jumped forward. The male green snatched at the air behind her. In the next breath, Dobbs lifted herself on her tip-toes and leaned forward. The green’s torso collided with her shoulder. In the light gravity, it just knocked Dobbs forward half a yard, keeping her right in his path before she began to slip towards the ground. The greens ducked frantically around her as she rolled onto the deck plates. In two long, bounding strides, Yerusha was through the airlock and across the threshold into the Pasadena. Her feet slid out from under her and her

81 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War body lazily settled down until her back measured its own length against the floor with the wafer case clutched against her chest. Green Man shoved the roman-nosed man out of the way and lunged towards her. Lipinski caught Roman Nose’s arm before he lost his balance. Green Woman grabbed Green Man’s arm and pulled them both up just short of crossing the Pasadena threshold. Yerusha rolled over and held up her hand to the approaching greens. A glaze of pain crossed over her eyes, but there was a puckered smile on her face. Roman Nose pulled himself upright and looked down at Yerusha as if he was memorizing her face. Then he turned and took in the greens with the same care. “Pilot Jemina Yerusha,” Yerusha called past the greens to Roman Nose as he steadied himself. “Checking in.” “Watch Commander Schyler,” he replied, his gaze darting between Yerusha and the security greens. “Wondering why the hell you’re doing it like this.” Yerusha grimaced and shifted her one-handed grip on the wafer case so that its corner was no longer digging into her chest. “I was trying to avoid a hassle.” She nodded towards the greens. Schyler stuffed his hands into the pockets on either hip. Dobbs saw the cloth bulge and strongly suspected he had just thumbed a button on his pen. She picked herself up and made a great show of dusting herself off. The Green Man did not wait for Schyler to ask what was going on. He walked up to the threshold formed by the seal between Port Oberon and the

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Pasadena. Dobbs did not miss the grim look that formed on Schyler’s face. She settled herself back against the wall next to Lipinski, who was staring at the bizarre scene with his jaw hanging open. Dobbs reached up and closed it for him. “Jemina Yerusha.” The Green Man let his shadow fall across the pilot. “Yes.” Yerusha propped herself up into a sitting position. “Registered with the Titania Freers?” He pulled a fold of film out of his pocket. “Yes.” She tugged at her overall to straighten out at least some of the wrinkles. He shook the film open. “You’re wanted for questioning in regards to the explosive decompression in the Richard III business... ” “No, I’m not,” Yerusha replied calmly. Schyler faced the Green Woman. “‘Dama, maybe you’d do me the courtesy of telling me what’s going on?” The Green Woman blinked and gathered her professional lines. “The decompression event in the Richard III business module had features which match a pattern of... ” “What they’re trying to say is that they think a Freer blew out an airlock,” chimed in Yerusha. “They’re trying to get us all tidied into the security can where we won’t upset anybody.” She glowered at the greens. “We were helping. Do you think I’m happy about the fact that I lost an arm and an eye for a bunch of ground-hugging... ”

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“There are questions,” said the Green Woman firmly and loudly. “That need to be answered by the personnel on the scene.” “The AIs recorded the whole thing... ” Yerusha swept out her good hand. “The AIs cannot be used as uncorroborated testimony.” Green Man clenched the film in his fist. “Oh right, I forgot,” sneered Yerusha. “We are capable of building intelligence but not of trusting it, or what it has the potential to become.” Her hand curled even more closely around the edge of the wafer case. “What an enlightened, progressive outlook you have, ‘Ster.” Green Man strangled a sigh. “Let me help you up, ‘Dama Yerusha and we can get this over with.” He shoved the film back in his pocket and held out his hand. Yerusha’s mouth twisted into another grin. “Unless you’ve got a specific warrant to enter the Pasadena you cannot take me out of here.” She turned her attention to Schyler. “I think that’s the reg, isn’t it?” “Oh yeah, that’s the reg,” agreed Schyler, and Dobbs couldn’t decide whether his tone was bemused, or just confused. “Unless I decide to throw you out of there,” he added. At the moment, Dobbs guessed, he was trying to decide who was annoying him worse, Yerusha or the greens. “Are you refusing to cooperate with security?” Green Woman asked Yerusha pointedly. “Am I being arrested?”

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“No, but you are being stupid.” Green Man took a step forward. “Do you think anybody’s going to stop me if I just haul you out of there?” “I do.” Everyone in the hanger spun around. Resit stalked out of the corridor, burgundy skirt billowing around her ankles in lazy waves. She stopped right between the security greens and the entrance to Pasadena, then turned on her heel to face the greens. “I’m Zubedye Resit, ship’s lawyer for the Pasadena,” she said smoothly. “‘Dama Yerusha is under contract to Katmer Al Shei of the Pasadena Corporation, which makes her my client.” She paused to let the entire speech sink in. She folded her arms and tapped her fingers impatiently on her forearm. “Why are you pursuing my client?” “Not bad, considering she just got here,” whispered Lipinski to Dobbs. “Slow lawyers get eaten young,” Dobbs replied seriously. Green Woman looked like she was forcibly swallowing something unpleasant. “Shouldn’t you be praying or something?” Resit smiled. “It’s only time for the Salatul Jumu’ah, the Friday sermon. That’s optional for women.” She flipped open the flap on her bag and pulled out a film and her pen. “I believed I asked a legal question.” She squinted at Green Woman’s badge and wrote down the number. “Do you really want me to request that the recording of this conversation be transferred to your superior immediately?” Green Man gave his partner a dirty look. “‘Dama Resit, we just want ‘Dama Yerusha to come to the

85 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War security module to answer some questions about the ... decompression event.” “They couldn’t talk to me in my hospital bunk either,” said Yerusha to Resit. “They were hauling Freers out of there left and right.” “Must have been interesting to see,” remarked Dobbs. “Oh, that it was.” Resit shot them both a “shut up” glance. “You have the authorizations on hand, I hope?” She tucked her own film away and held out her hand to the greens. Green Man handed over a pair of films. Resit scanned them. “This does not give you the authority to pursue, detain or forcibly enter.” She handed them back. “I think we all have a complaint to register now.” She gestured towards the hatch to the station corridor. “You’re not... ” exclaimed Green Woman. Resit’s grin showed her teeth. “Oh, but I am. Shall we?” Green Woman’s face flushed darkly. Green Man pointed up at the station camera and she swallowed again. Side by side, they headed towards the station airlock. “Talk to her, will you?” said Resit to Schyler before she followed the greens out. Schyler touched his forehead in salute. Then, he turned towards Yerusha and extended his hand. “I really wouldn’t try that again.” Tucking the wafer case awkwardly under her arm, Yerusha accepted his hand and let him pull her easily to her feet. “Thanks.” She wiped at the sheen of perspiration that had appeared on her forehead. Dobbs

86 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War knew she’d been right. Yerusha was not in any shape to be up and about. “I’m not about to let security shove me around, Watch. I’m under orders to you, not them.” “I don’t care what you try to pull with security. I mean with Resit.” He jerked his thumb towards the airlock. “Oh, marvelous,” Yerusha twisted her neck sharply and Dobbs heard a joint crack. “Another one who doesn’t like Freers?” Schyler smirked. “Another one who doesn’t like unnecessary wirework. Filing a complaint on your behalf is not going to make her evening, I’d be willing to swear to it.” He stopped and took a good look at the blister on Yerusha’s arm. “Do you want to sit down someplace comfortable?” She shook her head. “I’m fine.” Schyler looked her up and down. “You’re lying,” he said bluntly. “All right. Since you acknowledge my command, you are ordered to get back to the hospital and have them do something about this.” He waved towards her bruised face and arm. Schyler pursed his lips. “Lipinski, will you walk her down? I want there to be somebody who can holler for Resit if any other greens decide to pick her up.” “Sure, no problem,” said Lipinski to the wall. “I’ve only got the whole data hold to reconfigure.” “And you need to pick up the parts you ordered,” Schyler finished for him. “Good. That works out fine.” The look that passed between the two men was one that Dobbs decided she would have to learn to read. Lipinski left with Yerusha and Schyler turned slowly, thoughtfully to Dobbs.

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“And you are?” he inquired. “Evelyn Dobbs.” She touched her forehead in salute. “Master Fool for the Pasadena.” “Oh, you’re our Lennox C.” Schyler shook her hand. “Impressive entrance.” She beamed. “Takes years of special training.” “I suppose,” he said, favoring her with the same calculating look he’d used on Yerusha, “that I don’t need to tell you that Resit really does not like Freers.” “I got that feeling.” Dobbs nodded. “But thank you.” Schyler leaned against the Pasadena threshold and rubbed his clean-shaven chin thoughtfully. “I hate to say this, Master Dobbs, but I think we’re really going to need you on this trip.” Dobbs bowed. “‘Let a fool be serviceable according to his folly,’“ she quoted. “I am also, by the way, checking in.” “I thought you might be.” He crossed the Pasadena’s threshold and waved for her to follow him. “Might as well formalize at least one of you.” “Thanks.” Dobbs climbed aboard the ship that would be her home for the next eight months. She had studied the plans when she had received the contract. The Pasadena followed the standard layout for packet ships. It was two bulbs held together by a long drop shaft. The larger bulb held the bridge, the berths, the kitchen, the shielded data hold and much of the life support. The smaller bulb held the engines and the reactors. The fuel and air tanks were strung on the drop shaft like rings on a pole. Like the station modules, the shaft meant every deck was a hoop. Schyler led her around the curving

88 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War corridor. This deck, which was probably the data-hold, was stark, with only labels and green memory panels to break up the white, ceramic walls. Schyler took her into a briefing room. An oval table surrounded by enough chairs for Pasadena’s entire sixteen member crew took up most of the space. The wide wall at the far end was one solid memory board. Schyler settled into the nearest chair and used his pen to activate the table space in front of him. He wrote his authorization across the main screen and added CREW CHECK IN after it. The table absorbed the text and lit up two palm readers next to the active space. “I’ll need your pen,” said Schyler. Dobbs handed it over and he slipped it into the socket in the side of the table. Dobbs, familiar with the standard, Lennox-approved check-in procedure, pressed both hands against the palm readers that lit up in front of her. The table copied the contract from her pen. Then, it confirmed that the fingerprints that activated the pen were the same as those pressed against the reader and printed ACCEPT in front of Schyler. It did not speak, though, which surprised her. Schyler saw her eyebrows arch. “Owner prejudice,” he said. “Neither Al Shei or Tully particularly likes the machinery to talk back.” “Must frustrate the AI.” Dobbs lifted her hands off the reader and stuffed them in her pants pockets. “They don’t like being mute.” Schyler shook his head. “There’s only two AIs on board this ship, and neither one of them lives in the hull. There’s Resit’s boxed law firm, and the Sundars’ medical advisory.”

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Dobbs raised her eyebrows as far as they’d go and waggled them. “Al Shei doesn’t like machines that think either?” “No, she just doesn’t like it when they try to think too much.” Schyler extracted her pen. “Partly it has to do with being such a mechanical engineer. Partly it has to do with flying with Lipinski for ten years.” “That’s right.” Dobbs re-pocketed her pen. “He was at Kerensk, wasn’t he?” Schyler nodded and Dobbs sighed. Most settlements and stations depended on artificial intelligence to run the power and production facilities that made life away from Earth possible. Twenty-five years ago on the Kerensk colony, one over- programmed AI bolted from its central processor and got into the colony network. Panicked officials shut the computer networks down to try to cage it. Never mind the factories, the utilities, the farms. Just find that thing before it gets into the water distribution system and the climate control. Before it starts to make demands. Before it starts acting too human. Electricity and communications went down and stayed that way. Before three days were out, people froze in the harsh cold. They began to starve. They drank tainted water. They died of illnesses the few working doctors couldn’t diagnose on sight. When the colony did try to power up again, they found their software systems shredded to ribbons. It could have easily been human carelessness, but the blame was laid on the AI.

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“Fifteen thousand, three hundred and eighteen dead,” said Dobbs to the table top. Not one of the worst AI break-outs, just one of the more recent. Schyler’s brow wrinkled. “You too?” Dobbs hooked one finger around her Guild necklace. “I was born there.” She’d been totally incapable of reason when the disaster happened, but she still carried it with her. The ideas of the screams, the desperation, the hundreds of useless, pointless deaths. All of it caused by one rogue AI, by a creature that found itself suddenly alive and didn’t know what to do about it. She could understand Lipinski’s fears, and why he would be infuriated by Yerusha, who actually wanted to try to reproduce such a phenomena, even under controlled circumstances. He knew about violence that could ignite between frightened, ignorant, wildly different beings. He possibly knew that, even better than she did, and from the look she’d seen on his face, he was less than willing to forgive the stranger for wanting to stay alive. Schyler clucked in wordless sympathy and changed the subject. “You’re all set.” He got to his feet. “Your clearances will be listed on your cabin boards when you get settled in. You can bring in thirty-five pounds of personal effects. Sorry about that, we’re trying to run a little light this trip. Do you want to see where you’ll be?” “Thanks.” She let her necklace go and put a smile back on her face. “I’d actually — ” The left-hand wall beeped, cutting off her sentence. “Tully to Pasadena,” said a man’s tired voice. “Schyler, here.” Schyler tilted his head up.

91 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War

“Can you let me in?” Dobbs tracked his voice to the intercom patch below the left-hand memory board. “There’s some stuff I still need to get out.” Schyler leaned both hands against the table. “I’m not on my own in here, Tully.” “Thirty seconds, that’s all I need. Just left some stuff in my cabin.” Schyler pressed down harder. With the light gravity, Dobbs thought he might actually lift himself off his feet. “You’re checked out, Tully. I can bring what’s left... ” “Come on, Tom. Thirty seconds.” Schyler leaned back and let his hands drop down to his sides. “I’ll be right out. ‘Bye.” He turned to Dobbs with a worried look. “I’m going to have to give you the tour later... ” Dobbs waved her hand dismissively. “I’m a Master Fool, I’ll find my way around.” She spun on her toes and marched straight into the wall. “Ow.” She clutched her nose and staggered backwards. “Eventually,” she said, rubbing the offended appendage. Schyler gave her a grin that might have become real if she’d had a few more minutes to work on him. Dobbs let Schyler escort her out the door. She stepped out of the bay and didn’t give Marcus Tully, who was fidgeting by the elevator doors a second glance as she got into the lift and picked her floor. As the lift began to sink, Dobbs remembered that when she had left the cafe, she had intended to try to find out what was really going on with the co-owners of this ship.

92 Sarah Zettel | Fool’s War

That, she fingered her necklace, may take longer than I thought.

93 Camelot’s Blood

Sarah Zettel

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from Book View Cafe Prologue

My narrow chamber seems a little darker today. Through my slit of a window I see the sky is clear and blue but daylight does not penetrate here. These stones in these walls are effective guardians, and in my fancy they lean a little too close, as if they want to see what I write upon this page. I do not wish them to see. I do not wish any to see. This may be the final proof that my wits — in which I have taken such pride — have deserted me. Yet I do not pause in my writing. It is also possible that this thing is true. This is not the first time I have written of my wandering monk. A bluff, hearty man with a warrior’s arms, and a pilgrim’s staff. He visits me frequently, providing laughter for my old age, and an ear for my thoughts. Indeed, it is because of him that I have ventured to set these chronicles of lost Camelot down. He came again today. I was sitting in one of my usual retreats, beside the hazel tree that stands hard by the monastery’s stone wall. There is an old stone bench there where I like to rest, for the peace and the chance to let the sun bake some of the pain from my old, twisted bones. The monk climbed through the breach in the wall, was tall and hale and smiling as ever, and his shadow was long in the evening sun as he strode across the grounds. And I swear before God, this is a true record of the conversation we held: “God be with you this evening, Sir Kai!” He is the last to call me by this title.

95 Sarah Zettel | Camelot’s Blood

“And God be with you, Brother.” I paused and let us be silent for a moment. His silences are always comfortable things. Since I mean to record only the truth here, I will say that for one of the few times in my life I was afraid to speak. But at last my fear galled me too strongly, and I did speak again. “A strange thought occurred to me lately, Brother.” “And what is that, Sir Kai?” “That for all the deep discourse you and I have held, and despite our many friendly meetings, you have never once told me your name.” “Nor have I.” He smiled, a wry smile. He looked like a tale-spinner who knows his audience has anticipated his carefully crafted joke. “But then, you have never asked me.” Which was true, and until recently I had not stopped to wonder at it. “I spoke to the Abbot about you. Do you know what he told me?” “Should I?” “He told me there was no such a one as you who came visiting here. He told me I should pray hard, for the Lord had clearly granted me visions, or perhaps the Devil had. He seemed unclear as to which it might be. He did say I’m often seen talking to myself, but no broad, bearded monk with a white staff had ever been seen, with me or without me.” The monk nodded, judiciously, as if trying to decide the merits of my declaration. “What do you think I am?” he asked. “That, Brother, is an intriguing question.” I am amazed at how calmly I spoke. But then, I have seen many a strange thing in my long days. Usually, though, they came in far less mundane forms than this monk. “I note you do not deny that you are a vision.”

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He shrugged. “We are all many things as we pass our time under Heaven.” “This is so.” I loaded my final bolt. “They tell a tale in these lands. It is of a man who came from the west of my own island, brought here as a slave from the Dumonii lands. He became a holy man, they say. They say he converted the heathen and the pagan here, and performed many miracles.” I narrowed my eyes at my companion. “Might your name be Patrick?” My monk laughed, loud and openly. “It might, Sir Kai. It might.” I should have been afraid. I had been afraid to begin this. Now that it was begun, though, it seemed right and natural that our conversation take this turn. How could I be afraid of this … this vision who had become both comforter and familiar gadfly? I admit that more than anything, I was rankled. No man likes his fellows — even taciturn monks of little imagination and less wit — to think he has lost his reason. I felt this companionable vision might have done me the courtesy of showing itself to the brethren so I would not be mistaken for a dotard. “You are supposed to be dead.” Patrick slapped his knee and got to his feet. “Time will come, Sir Kai, when you are supposed to be a dream.” Fear at last came on me. Not from his words, but from the thought that my words might drive him away, never to return. Age and loneliness pressed heavy on my head. “Will you come back?” I heard the quaver in my voice, and was ashamed. Patrick nodded, his face comprehending, but blessedly free of pity. I do not know if I could have born that. He laid that warm, work-worn hand on my shoulder. “Fear not, Kai. I will come back at the proper time.”

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He walked away, stepping through the gap in the wall, leaving not even his shadow behind. So, I sit here in this dark, stone cell, wondering what I have seen and why, and what this proper time might be. The pain in my legs is bad today. I feel the time of endings closing in on me like these too-close walls of my cell. I fear it, as men are wont do, and yet I welcome it too. I fear not seeing the days to come, and yet I fear seeing them, for I have already seen so much in my lifetime and I am so very tired of it. So, to keep these great and terrible feelings at bay, I begin writing once more. I have not yet set down the tale of Agravain, the second of the sons of Lot. He is the one of my nephews to whom I was closest, which perhaps is why my hand shakes now that I think to write of him. But it was also he and his bride who brought about a great ending that was in itself a beginning, although none of us knew it at the time. Here then begins the tale of Sir Agravain and the Lady Laurel Carnbrea. Kai pen Hir ap Cynyr At the Monastery of Gillean, Eire

98 Chapter One

In the fortress of Din Eityn, the king lay dying. Din Eityn squatted on a great black precipice, as old and as solid as if it had been carved from the living rock. Men who knew nothing but the working of stones and the worship of wells had once come here. They laid down stones without mortar to shelter themselves from the wind. Other men, ones who knew the working of bronze and understood the secrets of oak and mistletoe, came to cast these ancient ones out. They wove wicker fences and raised the walls higher. The the Romans drove all before them and took the great precipice after a bloody siege that was still sung of by bards and poets in both lands. They squared the walls of Din Eityn and built towers to better keep the watch. That was four generations ago. The Romans were fled, but the rock and its many-layered fortress now called Din Eityn remained. The sons of the bronze- workers reclaimed the great place and they ruled on the thrones and the bones of their ancestors. Now, Lot, the oldest surviving son of that lineage, screamed with the pain of his own passing. The king’s screams caused surprisingly little disturbance in that dark keep. Some men, drowsing in the court under the summer stars, turned and muttered beneath their harsh woollen blankets. Others, lounging on the parapets while drinking from their leather bottles or playing at bones beside their fires, cursed the noise and kicked the hounds who tried to howl in response.

99 Sarah Zettel | Camelot’s Blood

King Lot had been laid in his great bed in his great hall. A fire burned brightly beside his resting place, and the linens tangled around his arms and legs were the finest that could be provided. These things brought him no comfort. Pain tossed him from side to side, dragging his cries and his moans from his ravaged throat. But none dared approach him. Not one of the cowering women who hovered in the dark doorway brought cloth or herb to their king, even now that the swelling in his legs had so greatly increased that he could not rise. None of the men slouched at the far end of the hall so much as looked up. Only the two chieftains who sat on the other side of the fire from the bed made any move. Lord Pedair rubbed his eyes. He was a grey, old man now, stooped by the weight of the years. The long nights of watching had left him weary and heartsick. He had known Lot in cleaner times, when they were both stronger, better men. It was a painful thing to see what Din Eityn had become, almost as painful as to see what had happened to Lot. The king’s madness had driven away all men of strength and loyalty. Instead, he had surrounded himself with the corrupt and the cringing, who would follow any order, no matter how mad, as long as they could plunder the folk of Gododdin, and anyone else who crossed their paths. “Will he hold long enough for word to reach Camelot?” Pedair asked. “I do not know. They are laying bets in the forecourt now.” Ruadh’s mouth curled into a sneer of distaste. Time had robbed Lord Ruadh of all the hair on his head and turned his long mustaches pure white. It had not, however, clouded his eyes nor his judgment.

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Like Pedair beside him, Ruadh had ridden to war with Lot in aid of King Arthur. He was the only other one who offered to take the night watches with Pedair. The king could not die without witness. Lot kicked at his coverings. His feet were so swollen the skin on them had cracked and the wounds oozed with clear matter. The stench of illness hung heavily in the great square chamber. The swelling should be lanced. There should be hot cloths and poultices. And I do not move. Pedair’s hands dangled uselessly between his knees. That is my king and my friend there, and I do not move. Lot writhed, his torso twisting and his arms flailing at nothing at all. His head fell towards Pedair, and Pedair saw the king’s face contorted by pain and rage, his cracked teeth bared, his eyes burning. “Traitor!” Lot roared. “Stinking, whoreson traitor! Come to pick over my bones, Pedair? Come to dance on my tomb!” His mouth stretched into a horrible leer. “Stay then, vulture! Maybe she’ll take a liking to you next and you’ll be dancing for the devil to her tune!” He laughed, a sound more harsh and horrible than his screams. “Dance like me!” He lifted one grotesquely swollen leg and the words died away in a scream of pain. “How much longer can he last?” Pedair whispered when he could speak again. Ruadh shook his bald head slowly. “Not long. God be praised.” “Kill them!” bellowed Lot, his hands clenching into fists, strangling nothing but air. “God rot them! Crush them!” In the next second, his hands fell to the furs and all the anger drained from his face. “Water,”

101 Sarah Zettel | Camelot’s Blood he rasped plaintively. “I thirst. I burn. Mercy’s sake, someone bring me water.” Pedair looked sideways at Ruadh, spat into the fire, and slowly got to his feet. A pitcher and two wooden mugs stood between the men’s stools. Pedair filled one with small beer, splashing dark droplets onto the stones. Slowly, shuffling from the stiffness in his knees, he brought it to the king’s bedside. Lot looked at him, and for a moment, Pedair thought he saw his liege in the depths of those fever-bright eyes. He held the tankard to Lot’s lips. Fury distorted Lot’s face again, and he lashed out, grabbing and twisting at Pedair’s arm. Pedair cried out in pain, and dropped the mug, splashing ale everywhere. “Poison!” bawled Lot. “You’d poison your king, whoreson! I’ll hang your head from my gate!” He shoved Pedair, sending him reeling back towards the fire. Ruadh caught him before he stumbled into the flames and helped him to his seat again. “He still sees.” Rubbing his wrist and panting for breath, Pedair watched the king sink back onto his bed, plucking restlessly at the furs and muttering his curses. “But what does he see?” asked Ruadh. “We should have sent to Camelot before this. Pedair watched his king lashing from side to side, as if to avoid a series of blows. “Had there been any way to do so in secret, I would have.” “I know,” said Ruadh. “I know.” The king groaned, a low, harsh horrible sound and for a moment, he strained to sit up, his eyes gleaming in the firelight and his mouth gaping in an

102 Sarah Zettel | Camelot’s Blood evil grin. But his strength did not hold, and Lot collapsed back onto his bed. “You come,” the words came out between Lot’s gasps for breath. “Even now you come to me.” The wretched king paused, listening to that voice only he could hear, and his face twisted with a deeper pain. “No. It is not true!” Pedair knotted his fists. How much longer could he stand to wait? It was obscene to sit here while a strong man writhed in pain, while his hands clutched the linens and sweat ran down his brow. “It is not true! You are not she! You are not! Oh, God, no! Morgause! Morgause! Don’t leave me!” Pedair started forward, but Ruadh laid a hand on his arm. “Do not let him come to grips with you again, Pedair. He’s killed a man in his fits. He’ll do the same to you.” “Morgause!” the king shouted. “Morgause where are you! It is not true! It is not true!” The last word choked Lot, and the scream faded into weeping, before rising again, a cry of rage and pain and the last strength of a man trying to hold back death and despair with nothing but his own broken will. The old men bowed their heads and as best they could, they prayed for the dawn.

103 Taco Del And The Fabled Tree Of Destiny

a merlin’s tale

A novel by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Purchase Taco Del And The Fabled Tree Of Destiny from Book View Cafe First: Something’s Up

Lord E Lordy wanted the Wiz. That’s where the Last Little War got started. You see, Lord E Lordy — he’s alcaldé of the next- door kingdom of Potrero-Taraval — was of a mind to conquer. This was not unusual. Lord E was always of that mind. Potrero has been spreading all the time, bit by bit, south and east toward Excelsior and Merced. It started doing this when Lord E’s daddy was alcaldé of Potrero. He was an expansive bastard. He pushed Potrero-Taraval down against tiny Bernal in the southeast and up against Embarcadero all the way to the Farm. He even gobbled up the Buena Vista, whereupon the Embarcaderans beat him back, but not before some folks died. Folks like mi madre y padre. Lord E’d like to be an expansive bastard, too, but he’s fortunately not as good at it as his daddy. Once in a while he sends his knighties against the Border between Embar and Potrero, but they always turn back — usually about the time they see our knighties with their body-armor and AKs, and decide knives and crowbars won’t cut it.

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But this time, Lord E determined that he would leave his knighties at home and send only smeagols over the Border. ‘Cause Lord E had a new merlin and Lord E’s new merlin had a plan. It is my eternal shame that I didn’t know this. It was Deadend, smeagol extraordinaire, who brought the smell to Hismajesty’s attention. “Somethin’s up,” he says. We are hanging in the Throneroom of the Regency Palace when he comes in and makes this pronouncement. “What’s up?” asks Squire, ‘cause that’s his job. Hismajesty don’t talk to smeagols. “It’s an ill wind from Potrero-Taraval,” says Deadend, “Lubejob’s been skulking around the Farm.” “Says who?” asks Squire, scathing-like. “Or are you fabricatin'?” “Kaymart and Bags put me onto the rumble. I saw the smeagol myself. It was Lubejob. I put a tail on him. Followed him all the way back to the Slot.” “Ask the smeagol, ‘then what?’” orders Hismajesty. “Then what?” asks Squire. “Then he huddles with his gang. Mark me, Squire, there’s evil afoot — we’re being scoped.” Hismajesty looks to me. “Had you an inkling of this perfidy, merlin?” he asks me. “The branches of the Tree of Destiny did quiver,” I say and cross my fingers, ‘cause the TOD was sitting on the balcony in a stiff breeze at the time. “I perceived no cause.”

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Hismajesty’s brows go all gnarly. “Summon Scrawl,” he tells Squire and Squire turns to the gofer next to him and says, “Gofer Scrawl.” Hismajesty’s brows are still looking like smooshed black caterpillars. “Prepare to read the runes,” he says to me. I do, and damn quick. Hismajesty’s an ace dude if you’re square with him, but if he thinks you let him down — wham! — you could be deadjim in no appreciable time. I don’t wish to be deadjim, so I get my rune can and hustle back to the Throneroom. Scrawl is there when I get back, and Firescape and Cinderblock, too, ‘cause this looks like it could be a job for the military. She’s a piece of work. Firescape, I mean. Number one jade — all rigged out in black leather and red spandies and redder hair, with her Magic Weapon slung at her hip. My pants get uncomfortable. I shake my rune can to announce myself and get my hormones' attention off Firescape. Hismajesty waves a hand at me. He’s not scowly now — mostly, I think, ‘cause of Hermajesty, who is sitting in his lap. Hermajesty’s name is really Ampam and she was born in the produce bin of a mini-mart on Columbus, but His M doesn’t care, though he is of higher origin, having come into this world in the back seat of a Mercedes-Benz. There is a circular pit in Hismajesty’s Throneroom. We call it the Pit. Here, we gather to read runes and jam on Saturday nights. This is where Scrawl and I go now. While the Majesties and the others sit in the soft cushions around the shallow edge, Scrawl and I move

107 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff | Taco Del down onto the stone floor and begin to circle each other. She shakes her rune bag at me; I shake my can at her. It is a bright red can and says “Hills Bros” on it. There is a picture of a merlin drinking a cup of coffee on the front, and it is this I direct at her so she will remember that I am a merlin and she is only Scrawl. She yields, of course, ‘cause that’s protocol, and I am the first to spill my runes on the center of the great Mandala in the floor of the Pit. We both hunker down to ponder them. Scrawl makes humming noises and nods as if she sees auspicious stuff. I see nothing but broken chips of glass and bottle caps. There is even a matchstick or two and a button from the fly of my jeans. There is also a rotten old peach pit; someone’s used my rune can for a garbage receptacle. I snag the pit and chuck it over my shoulder. Scrawl "ahems" at me, then waves her hand over the stuff like she is stirring a pot. I look at her face but her big, watery eyes are mum. I wonder if she is wondering what I see. I squint at the runes, then my eyes go wonky like they do. I see a shape. Looks like a giraffe, but that doesn’t make sense. I look at it some more and it gets to be a crane — the kind there is near some of the big skyscraper carcasses downtown. “A crane,” I say and nod, then see something else. “And a scales.” Scrawl comes to peer over my shoulder. “Yeah,” she says. “Could be.” I move to another angle. My wonky eyes see a mountain...or a pyramid...or maybe it’s the Regency Palace.

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I say, “Mountain,” and Scrawl mumbles, “My turn, Taco-face.” She moves, too, giving me the hairy eyeball. Then she screeches, “Danger! Danger! They’s after something!” “Sooth!” says Firescape. “Of course, they’s after something. Lord E’s always after something.” I begin to suspect that Scrawl sees less in the runes than I do, but while I am trying to make sense out of “crane,” “scales” and “mountain,” she stands up straight as a lamp post, clutches her head and says in her best Voice-O-Doom, “They’s after Hermajesty!” The Majesties don’t like this pronouncement. They look at each other and get all scowly again. I check my higher consciousness, trying to sense out what this has to do with cranes and scales and mountains. When I think of mountains, I think of trees. Mountains have lots of trees — more than the Farm, even. And they are much bigger than the Fabled Tree of Destiny — Giants. This makes me think I am supposed to be thinking of the Fabled TOD. I say as much. “I think of the Tree of Destiny. Runes are not enough. The Tree must be consulted.” Scrawl sees that Hismajesty likes this pronouncement better than hers, so she gives me the hairy eyeball again. I am the only one who can talk to the Tree. Still, she pretends to be agreeable. “Taco’s right,” she says, “meanwhile, I shall consult the wall runes.” We are dismissed and I make my way up the Great Crystal Elevator to my chambers on the top floor of the Palace. The Palace is much narrower at the top than it is at the bottom. On my floor there are only eight big rooms, joined two and two. Four are the Majesty’s; four are mine,

109 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff | Taco Del although I’ve considered asking Firescape to share them with me. Two of the four have beds so I have my choice of sleeping places. Naturally, I have in mind that she should share the beds, too. I go to the room I use as a workshop. There, out on the balcony, is the Fabled Tree. He is enjoying the sun, and the tips of his branches reach upward, waving. I am sorry to disturb him, but I must, taking my seat beside him at the balcony. He’s a Douglas Fir. I know this ‘cause of the Wiz. I also know that Trees have sexes just like people and animals. It just so happens that Doug is a boy, which is good, ‘cause the name fits better. “O Tree of Destiny,” I say. Normally, I call him Doug, but this is ritual stuff. “O Tree of Destiny, we have a problem. Lord E Lordy has spies upon us. His head smeagol’s been seen in Embar. All the little smeagols’ve been seen too. So says Kaymart, Bags and Deadend. O Tree of Destiny, we fear the kingdom of Embarcadero is jeopardized by these skulkings. Scrawl says Lord E wants Hermajesty. I need to know is this so and how he means to get her.” I bend my face to the little Tree. The boughs brush my cheek. I close my eyes and breathe in the firry smell. It reminds me of the Farm that now is all that divides southwestern Embarcadero from Potrero- Taraval, and where I spent many child-days. Nothing happens, except I can almost see the Farm with its giant Trees and flowers and strange buildings. Which lack of something makes me wonder — like I always wonder — how I got to be a merlin. I know it’s ‘cause I got the Tree. I say a thanks prayer

110 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff | Taco Del that Doug chose me and not somebody else (like Scrawl, for instance). When I open my eyes again, I see something odd. I see a knightie looking up at me from the plaza outside. This is not unusual except that she is half- hiding behind an old trolleycar and she is not wearing Firescape’s colors. She is wearing the yellow and black of the Virgin Guard, the knighties who patrol the Richmond near the Farm. She sees me just as I see her and disappears behind the trolleycar. A chill goes down my spine. I pick up Doug — pot and all — and head back to the Throneroom. The Majesties are surprised to see me lugging the TOD out of the Great Crystal Elevator. “What the hell?” says His M and salutes the Tree. Hermajesty throws him a kiss. I ask Firescape if she knows any reason one of Sweetie’s Virgin Guard would be wharfside instead of on her normal beat around the Richmond Virgin. She can’t think of any, and when I tell her the Tree inspired me to know there was a yellow knightie in the courtyard, skulking, she and her sidekick, Cinderblock, unsafety their magic AKs and head for the street. “Well, merlin?” Hismajesty is looking kingly at me. “Well? What has the Tree of Destiny revealed?” “The Tree says,” I say, though I am clueless, “there are smeagols all about us.” I set Doug’s pot down and dust off my hands, catching a whiff of his nice firry smell and trying to think of something more to say. I do. “The Farm must be watched night and day. This knightie the Tree saw is ersatz. Which means that, most likely, one of Sweetie’s gang is deadjim. Maybe more

111 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff | Taco Del than one. First, smeagols around the Farm, now smeagols in disguise, at the heart of it all. Think of it, sire. If you wanted something close to Lord E, what better way than to disguise yourself as someone who could get real close?” His M is nodding. “Yeah. Like a knightie. But why a Yellow Knightie from the Virgin Guard? Lord E’s gotta know the Palace is guarded by Red Knighties.” I shrug. “She had to get past all kinds of eyes, Majesty. I suspect she cacked the first knightie she came across.” His M is still nodding. “But is she after my queen?” I don’t know the answer to this, but I’m not about to say that. Scrawl saves me from having to open my mouth. She comes in wailing like a house on fire. “Oi!” she’s saying. “Oi! They’ve left signs! Th’arrogance of ‘em!” They left signs, alright. LORD E RULES! was the sign. Plastered all over the side of the old trolleycar. I didn’t have to guess who did it. Only question is, why so bold? Hismajesty doesn’t ask me again if Lord E is after Hermajesty. He has Firescape set a guard on her and puts all the knighties in Embarcadero on alert. Rumbles start flying. All kinds of scuttlebutt. I hear all of it, of course, ‘cause I’m listening. A good merlin has ‘ears’ all over the place. A better merlin is pro-active. I go down to the Gee Gah to hang around the steamy stalls and shops that smell of fish and herbs and incense. That’s where I hear that Lord E’s shopping queens. According to the rumble along the

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Du Pon Gai, he’s lost another lady-lord to the dolores. Childbirth, says the rumble. The old ladies and gents in their shops and stalls chatter like pigeons, blaming it on the water, the food, the air in Potrero. On the outside, I think they’re right. It could be any of those things. Potrero got its problems, that’s a surely, foremost of which is a King who don’t give a fig about what he can’t stick in his treasure house. And there’s a lot of sicklies, too. But I know there’s always something inside the outside — something that makes the outside work bad. In the case of Potrero-Taraval, that thing is the dolores. A long time ago, see, way before the Getting Out — hell, before there was even a city here — this whole place belonged to a people called Ohlone. They named it Awaa-te and lived close to the water. One day, they woke up to find aliens — my own ancestors — staring at them from inside these silly tin hats. My ancestors put them all into a dios house called Dolores, which means “sad.” In this dios house, the Ohlone caught the alien's diseases and died. There are thousands of them buried around the Dolores dios house. I learned this from the Wiz. By the time the folks who called themselves Americans sent a government agent to check up on the Ohlone, there was only one left — an old man named Pedro Alcantara. Pedro told the agent that he had lost his son and asked if the agent couldn’t help to find him. And then he said, “I am all that is left of my people — I am alone.” The Dolores dios house lies smack inside the boundaries of the northern-most Potreran barrio. You

113 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff | Taco Del can see the top of it from Embar. That, I thought, was why Potrero was so sickly and so sad — those spirits were still there — the Ohlone dolores. I am pondering this when I bump into my good buddy, Creepy Lou. “Thay!” he says to me. “Thay Taco!” (Which is ‘cause he’s missing a few teeth.) “Thay, Taco! You be scopin’ the rumble? Lord E lost hithelf another lordette.” “I be hearing that,” I say. “Third one.” He nods, looking sad. “Third one. Young, too.... Thecond trimethter.” This pokes my Alice bone. “Where’d you hear that?” Creepy Lou scratches around in his scraggy hair, making dust and leaves rain onto his shoulders. “Shmeagols.” Interesting. “Deadend?” “Naw, little shmeagol,” he says, and jerks his head three times to the right. “One of his hangabouts. Shmeagol says, uh, Lord E thinks we got some kinda magic. ‘Cause Hermatchsty has three babies, already, no hitches, no glitches.” The last word comes out in a shower of saliva. I blink and shake my head. “No, really. Th’ Alcaldé thinks our women are magic.” His face lights up; big holey grin, a little wicked. He pumps his left knee up and down and jerks his head three times to the right. “I think tho too.” Makes sense, I s’pose. Odd sense. Lord E didn’t have such good family luck. He hadn’t produced an heir yet. His M has three — two girls and a boy. So, Lord E might think if he has the right queen — a magic

114 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff | Taco Del queen — he can have heirs too. And slit Hismajesty’s throat to the bargain. I shake my head, this time meaning it. “Our women aren’t magic,” I say, “just healthy.” Lou nods, stamps his right foot, and grabs at something I can’t see. “It’s the water. Damn bad water in Potrero.” “Damn bad attitude,” I answer, knowing it’s the Dolores.

115 Coming Soon:

Imago

Amy Sterling Casil

Dedication

To the families and children of Family Service Association and Home Again Project, Redlands, California. I have risen in search of history I have lifted the rock to pick the white blind grubs beneath I have gazed in the lake of glass to see the man who wears my face I have picked the red bones clean I have sought the truth in flesh And told my soul to flee. Chapter One

Katie Jacques paused in the hall beside the door to her grandson Harmon’s room. He was inside, singing. “Katie, Katie, give me your answer true...” She supposed he was singing about her. Harmon always used her first name. He was an unusual boy. He often told her that he intended to grow up and run the world. She knocked lightly. The singing stopped. “Come in, Katie,” Harmon said, his voice wavering between boyish treble and callow adolescence. “It’s cold today,” she said. “I thought that you might like some after-school hot chocolate.” She bore two Campbell’s soup mugs on a tray. One held his hot chocolate, the other plain green tea for her: no sugar. The Campbell’s mugs were Harmon’s favorite. He said that he liked the little soup-boy, with his bright red and white checkered suit. At sixty-four, Katie Jacques could still be called a beautiful woman. She’d long since passed the point of caring about that, but she saw her young-old face reflected in the mirror over Harmon’s bed, and smiled even so. He’d been working on his town model again. Once, she had suggested that Harmon turn it into a model train layout. “That’s for wussies,” he replied in a calm voice. She never mentioned it again. “I just finished the new church,” he said, pointing at a three-sided Spanish-style structure. “That’s the Baptist church. Next, I’ll do the Catholics.”

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“It’s wonderful,” she said, leaning over the model, which took up much of the north wall of Harmon’s spacious room. The house was too big, she thought, remembering her childhood room, with its narrow girl’s bed and white Queen Anne coverlet. She’d barely had enough room for a gold velvet-covered stool and her cheap Sears dresser, with its cracked white paint and fake gold trim, that peeled off after a single summer season. Harmon’s room seemed larger than the entire house she’d grown up in. But of course, she could say nothing of that to him. What child would understand something like that? “Here is the church,” he said, playfully. He sipped some of the hot chocolate, then laced his fingers together. “Here is the steeple,” he added, bringing his forefingers up in a point. Katie laughed. They’d played that game before he’d even started kindergarten. Now, here he was in sixth grade. Her heart jumped. She ruffled his hair and sipped her own tea. “Open the doors and see all the people!” Harmon turned his hands over and waggled his fingers. Then he lifted the roof of the model church and showed her the “people” inside. Dozens of tiny Disney characters, all lined up neatly. Goofy, Donald, and the Seven Dwarves; Mickey and Minnie stood by the altar. “Look at them!” she exclaimed. “How about this?” She put one hand over her nose and pretended that she pulled it off. Harmon didn’t respond. He replaced the church roof, staring intently at Katie, and re-laced his fingers, waggling them once more. They moved furiously back

118 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago and forth. Then, he moved his hands to and fro, as if he was rocking a cradle. “What are you doing?” she asked, still laughing. “Guess,” he said, grinning, his green eyes shining happily. “You’re playing Rock-A-Bye Baby,” she said. His eyes darkened. “A fishing boat?” she asked, her voice wavering. “No,” he snapped. “Look!” “I don’t know,” she said. Please, let him not be getting angry, she thought. His eyes were narrowing. The fingers still waggled. Then at once, they went stiff. He thrust his hands in her face. “I set the church on fire,” he snapped. “And they’re all running away!” Katie shivered. “But as you can see,” he added; “They didn’t quite make it.” His long, sensitive fingers curled back and forth, twisting, almost writhing. “Oh,” Katie said, sipping her tea. “How creative.” Harmon was still for a long moment, then he swept the Baptist Church from the table in one brief, graceful movement. The delicate foam board walls shattered, spraying Katie’s legs with white powder. The steepled roof skittered across the floor. The Disney figures — all ceramic — tinkled as they tumbled to the hardwood floor. Minnie’s head rolled away. Goofy’s body slid toward Harmon’s bed, while his legs remained by the ruined model. Harmon smiled. Then, he cracked his knuckles.

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This was in the Spring of 2005; eventually Harmon did finish all the models, including a mouse-ear silhouette on the double doors of the Catholic church.

oOo

Max Prinn’s brother Joe worked as a programmer for DisLex, and Max had already heard about DisLex chairman Harmon Jacques’ PerfectTown, even though he wasn’t supposed to know a thing about it. When he and his wife Cindy ordered their first season pass to the Magic Kingdom, he called ahead to ask if there was any chance, any at all, that they could get into the PerfectTown on their first visit. “My brother works up in Sunnyvale,” Max told the operator. Mentioning the DisLex headquarters usually produced great results, especially when Max was calling about the bill or service. She put him on hold for twenty minutes while he rinsed the dishes and tore his junk mail into halves, then quarters. Just as he was throwing the mail in the recycle bin, she came back saying, “are you one of the Gold Star Preview Winners?” “Yes,” Max said. He felt only a tiny twinge at the lie. “Can I have your confirmation code?” So much for that, Max thought. A shred of brightly-printed junk mail that he’d missed fluttered to the kitchen floor. He bent, picking it up, then said, “uh” to the operator, who sighed in return. “Is it this?” he asked, reading the numbers printed above the postal bar code on the address label, right below where it said “Prinn Family or current resident.”

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“Let me check,” she said. The phone clicked. A few seconds later, she returned. “Mr. Prinn, our database seems to be down. I can’t —” “My brother told me that it was a really great ride,” Max blurted. “He’s worked on parts of it. They’ve all been —” The operator laughed. “I’m sure if your brother is up in Sunnyvale, it’s okay,” she said. “Why don’t you just give me your GoldStar card number?” “Sure,” Max said. He had that memorized; it was his social security number plus three extra digits. “Well, I see that,” she said. “At least that’s working. I tell you, I don’t know how they expect us to do our work, with this network broken down all of the time.” She sounded middle-aged, but good-spirited. Maybe she’d had the same kind of training that Max had. He sold home water purification systems over the phone and the net. “You have a nice voice,” he told the operator. “Thank you!” she replied. He imagined her beaming. Max, you have a gift, he thought. “Smile when you talk,” he added. “Smile from the wrists down when you type!” “That’s right,” she said. “Every day.” “DisLex is lucky to have somebody as nice as you working for them,” Max said. He paused. Maybe that had been a bit too much. He heard something rustling in the background, then the tell-tale clicks of a keyboard being worked. “Your passes will be out today,” she said. “Just press the print button on the autoscreen when you download them.”

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“Oh, thank you!” he said, amazed that his heart was pounding. Wait until he told Joe about this! Why, Joe wasn’t even going to get to see the PerfectTown for months — this really was a special preview for the GoldCard promotion winners only. A hundred of them, or something like that. “And your daughter is how old?” the operator asked. “Seven,” Max said. “She’s in second grade. Christian school, here in town.” The line clicked again. “I hope you enjoy the preview,” the operator said. “You’re one lucky man!” “Yeah,” Max said. “Thanks!” “You know to check your printer before you start,” she added, with the smile still in her voice. “Sure,” he said. “Because it’ll only print once, then the file is gone. We can’t issue you another file.” “Right,” Max said. Darn right he’d check that printer. Imagine going to all that trouble to get the first passes to see the PerfectTown preview, then buggering up the damn print job? Not Max Prinn. He and Cindy and little Tina were going to be the very first ones to see it. He pictured the jealous faces of the guys at the country club, and Cindy’s bright blue eyes widening in surprise. And how excited Tina would be. Nothing was too good for Max’s girl. He’d be right there holding his baby’s hand while they saw the complete simulation of the future. According to Joe, the tiny people that the computer created were actually alive. They thought, lived, moved around — had feelings — everything! “Thank you so much, ma’am,” he said to the operator. “Could I have your name?”

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“Marilyn Chen,” she replied. “C-h-e-n.” “You’ve done such a great job with the network trouble and all,” Max said. “I’m going to tell my brother about you the next time we talk.” “Oh thank you, Mr. Prinn,” she said, her voice fluttering. “It’s been a pleasure helping you!” “Likewise,” Max said, breaking the connection. He straightened his collar and called upstairs. “Hey Cin! Cin! You’re not going to believe what I just did!”

oOo

Ten days later, Max, Cindy and Tina piled out of their forest green Chrysler vancruiser and trotted to the gates of the Magic Kingdom. It was a spring Tuesday, so there were only a few dozen people in line. The season pass got them in the gates, where an electric cart waited. The cart had a striped awning that reminded Max of a fruit-flavored gum he’d chewed as a kid. “It’s so cute!” Cindy said. “Look, Tina! It’s waiting for us.” A standing sign printed with “GoldStar Special Preview Members” stood next to the cart. “Red carpet treatment,” Max said. Cindy smiled up at him, her freckled nose wrinkling. Tina grabbed his hand. His heart jumped a little, feeling her small fingers in his. “Come on, honey,” he said, helping her into the cart. Cindy followed, then he sat on the edge, resting his feet on the running board, getting comfortable. A balding man in the back extended his hand. “Ray Martinez,” he said. “Can you believe we won this

123 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago thing?” His wife smiled benignly; she looked as if she’d missed her morning cup of coffee. “Yeah,” Max said. “Incredible luck.” Cindy elbowed him, rolling her eyes. He’d told her the whole story. “You know,” Martinez said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I got my lawyer on them because they were dicking me on our bill. We live in Palos Verdes. They keep trying to force through the water surcharge.” “Yeah?” Max said, deciding that Martinez was one of those types who lived to make trouble. “The lawyer sent a registered e-mail, and the next day, boom! Sally got the message that we’d won the tickets!” “Ha!” Max said. “Really?” Cindy said, turning around. Martinez started to say more, but Tina, tugging on Max’s shirt, interrupted. “Look, Daddy! Goofy’s going to drive us.” “No,” Max said. “That’s my namesake.” “Oh, yeah,” she said, voice full of awe. “That’s the teenage boy, Max.” “Name’s Max Prinn,” Max said, turning to Martinez and his wife. “I had to take a lot of jokes about this guy when I was growing up.” Martinez’s wife whispered something, and the blank look on his face faded. “Yeah,” he said. “Oh, yeah! That one’s called Max.” “All right,” the driver said, his elongated, putty- colored dog face bobbing up and down. “Let’s hit the road! We’re off to see the PerfectTown.”

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“Whee, daddy! Whee!” Tina cried as she curled against him and the cart set off. Cindy smiled and ran her hand through her wheat-colored hair. They were traveling at least five miles an hour through the oldest part of Disneyland: Main Street USA. They passed the old Mister Lincoln exhibit. It was closed now; Max had heard from his brother Joe that it was going to be preserved as a museum. Max saw a character in an unusual costume standing beside the old brick building. The guy’s clothes were ragged, and he wore some kind of ugly mask that resembled a wild pig. “Hey, who’s that?” Max asked, leaning forward and tapping his cartoon dog-headed namesake on the shoulder. The cart slowed as cartoon-Max turned. “Who’s what?” he asked. “Over there,” Max said, pointing at the figure. The guy crouched. He was skulking! No Disney character ever walked like that, like some knuckle-dragging freak. “By Mister Lincoln?” cartoon Max asked. “Yeah, I see him.” The cart came to a stop, its electric motor whining down. Cartoon Max pressed his cheek and started speaking softly. Max heard most of what he said. “Intruder by Mister Lincoln,” he said. “Can’t believe they’re everywhere. I thought they cleared them all out —” Max suddenly understood. The man he’d seen was no Disney character, he was a viral freak, and the Magic Kingdom had been invaded. Was there nothing and nowhere safe? He pressed Tina close to him.

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Cindy’s eyes were wide. She’d seen the figure too. Tina looked up at Max and said, “what’s wrong, daddy?” “It’s a bad man,” he said. “They’ll take care of him.” “Why?” Tina asked. “Oh, honey,” Cindy said, leaning over to kiss Tina’s smooth, dark head. “I can’t believe they’ve gotten in here,” Martinez said. “Damn freaks!” “Hey,” Max said, turning and raising one brow. He looked at Tina, then back at Martinez. The message was unmistakable: watch your language around my little girl. Martinez’ brow furrowed, then he sat back, putting his arm around his wife, frowning. Max hoped that he was embarrassed. “Daddy, I’m scared,” Tina said. Her small shoulders were trembling. The driver turned, waggling his dog ears. “Hey, sweetie,” he said. “Don’t be scared. You think my dad would let somebody do something bad here? Or Mickey Mouse? That’s just a guy who’s lost. We’ll help him find where he’s supposed to go.” “Really?” Tina said. She looked up at Max, her dark eyes full of uncertainty, and also wonder that Goofy’s teenaged son had spoken to her. “What’s your name?” Cartoon Max asked. “Tina,” she said in a tiny voice. He extended his big, three-fingered glove. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Tina,” he said. “You’re so sweet,” Cindy exclaimed. Max smiled at the driver. He was good — Max couldn’t believe how quickly he’d smoothed that over. Half a dozen

126 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago security men in bright blue jumpsuits were approaching the Mister Lincoln building. “That was fast,” Martinez said. “See those guys?” Cartoon Max said, pointing at the security men. “Those are our helpers. They’ll help that man find his house.” “Did he run away from home?” Tina asked. “I think so,” Cartoon Max said. “Then he’s in a lot of trouble,” Tina said. “He might get a time out.” Max grabbed Tina and hugged her fiercely. Cindy put her arms around both of them. From the back of the cart, Martinez said, “You’ve got a great family.” Max turned and nodded. The men in the blue jumpsuits were entering the closed Mister Lincoln exhibit. Another group had appeared, starting down the narrow alley to its side where they’d last spotted the intruder. The freak. “I can’t believe that this is a problem here,” Cindy said to Cartoon Max. By that, she meant the derelict: the freak. “Well, it’s not a problem for us,” he said. “We’ve got everything under control.” “I’m sure,” she said in a tart voice. She looked at Max: he’d hear what she really thought later. Cindy was a little bit on the liberal side and often expressed sympathy for the freaks. “Come on,” Cartoon Max said, turning back to his steering wheel. “Let’s get this show on the road!” He finished with a silly laugh.

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Moments later, they were at the end of Main Street, turning the corner to Tomorrowland and the PerfectTown.

oOo

Their PerfectTown guide was a lovely young woman with porcelain skin, smooth blond hair, and perfect teeth. Max noticed Cindy’s expression when she caught sight of him looking at her with a pleasant and possibly dreamy expression: the set jaw meant that he’d hear about that later, too. “I’m Marisa,” the guide said in a soft, modulated voice. “I’ll be your guide to where the past meets the future: DisLex’s PerfectTown.” Max wondered how it was possible that a dress with a Peter Pan collar and a neat bow at the back could look sexy. It did. They followed the guide down a long, padded ramp. Fifteen-foot high, seamless metal doors opened with a whispery rush as they entered what the guide Marisa called “the lobby.” “Tina, look!” Max said, lifting his daughter up. Beside him, Cindy took a deep breath. “My God,” she said. They stood on a balcony that overlooked the PerfectTown. The guide’s words seemed to fade. For the town that lay at their feet under what seemed to Max to be a transparent bubble appeared to cover several square miles. Max felt his stomach grow light with vertigo. How had they managed to build something like that — under Disneyland? It looked bigger than the entire above-ground Magic Kingdom. He shook his head, trying to make visual sense of it.

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“It’s huge,” Martinez said, rushing to the railing and leaning over. “Look at that! I see a park, and over there — look! You can see the cars!” “Houses,” Cindy said in a breathy voice. “Thousands of them.” “There’s a steeple,” Tina added. “Daddy, I see a horsie!” “It doesn’t look like a hologram, does it?” the guide asked. “No,” Max admitted. “It doesn’t.” “They look real. Look! That man in jogging pants is scratching his head, wondering what to do,” Cindy said. “Honey, look!” She guided Tina’s small dark head to see the man. Tina’s brow wrinkled. “I can’t see him,” Tina said. “I see the tall man in black with the funny hat.” “Yeah,” Martinez said. “It’s Cesar Chavez.” “You!” His wife poked him in the ribs. “That’s a little girl. She’s dark, like this one here.” She pointed at Tina and smiled a tight little smile. “You’re all seeing something different,” Marisa said. “That’s the way it works. The simulation shows itself differently to each person who comes to it. There’s never been —” “You mean Tina sees the horse, my wife sees the guy scratching his head, and I see the cars and churches?” Max asked. The guide nodded, flashing her polished smile. “You must be interested in technology and architecture,” she said. “Children are —” Tina grabbed Max’s sleeve and tugged. “It’s not a horsey any more,” she whispered. “It’s a big brown dog now.”

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“Is he friendly?” Max asked. Tina nodded. “You must be wondering,” the guide said, gesturing over the bubble of the town with one pale, slender arm, downed with hair in the lambent light, “where do these things come from?” “I figured it’s all a computer program,” Martinez said. Max looked briefly at him and wondered how the other man could interpret the figure who’d ambled into his view as Cesar Chavez. Aside from the one-foot height difference between the two cultural heroes, the tall man with the black knee-length coat and stovepipe hat was so obviously Abraham Lincoln that even Tina could have recognized him. Cindy started giggling. “It’s a clown, Max,” she said. “And his nose is falling off!” “You’re absolutely right,” the guide told Martinez. “It is a computer program, but the most sophisticated program the world has ever known. The figures you see are real. They change as you look at them, and as they interact among themselves.” “Interact?” Max asked. Cindy looked at him; he could tell from the way that her eyes narrowed suddenly and the pupils contracted that she was fascinated, but also fearful. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, and drew Tina close. “Daddy, now the doggy ran away. I just see a little boy. He’s wearing a blue striped shirt and dumb- looking tennis shoes.” “That’s nice,” Cindy said, smoothing Tina’s hair. “Yes, as far as they’re concerned, they all live in the same town. A real town. The PerfectTown,” the

130 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago guide said. “They’re called imagos. That’s an unusual word that has several meanings.” “Images?” Cindy asked. “Yeah,” Martinez said. “Like the movies, only three-dimensional.” “A movie made with dolls,” his wife said. “I guess this is —” “The world’s most expensive puppet show,” Max said, laughing. The guide smiled at him. It reminded him of the way his second-grade teacher had looked at him when he’d come up with the wrong answer. “No, they’re not puppets. They think. They can do things for themselves. They live, get married, go to church and school — even have children. Or, something like that,” she said. “They’re changing right now, even as we watch them.” “There’s something not right about that,” Cindy whispered in Max’s ear. “It reminds me of a poem I read. Or maybe it was an old TV show. There were all these dolls trapped in a —” “Shh!” Max silenced her, because the guide was continuing with her explanation. “An imago is the mature stage of an insect,” the guide said. “Like a butterfly, coming out of its cocoon.” “We had silk worms at school,” Tina said. “They spun their cocoons, then they came out as pretty moths while we were at home asleep.” Max began to wonder if the guide was one of these imagos herself, as he watched her lean over and pat Tina’s cheek. “I don’t see any bugs or butterflies,” Martinez said.

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“He just saw Cesar Chavez in a black suit with a stovepipe hat,” Max whispered in Cindy’s ear. “Cesar Chavez was four feet tall.” She slapped his arm, rolling her eyes. He grinned to himself. “An imago is also an image. Something as real as, but other than, the the world that is.” Martinez started laughing. “I get it now,” he said. “It’s like that old game. What was that? Sim Town?” The guide turned her lovely face toward him. “It has its basis in something like that,” she said. “So, what if somebody pulls the plug?” Martinez made a nasty popping, snapping noise back in his throat, like a lightbulb burning out. The guide shrugged. “There is no plug,” she said. “How can it —” “It’s alive,” she said. “The PerfectTown grows each day. It is part of the DisLex central computer, but completely separate from —” “From our bills?” Max said. The guide nodded. “The computer is now divided in two parts. It has —” “Mama, listen!” Tina exclaimed. “Don’t interrupt,” Cindy said, leaning over. “No!” Cindy said. “A song. Can’t you hear it?” Everyone turned toward the PerfectTown. “I think I can,” the guide said. “It’s the little boy,” Tina said. “He’s singing.” At first, Max heard only a bare whisper. Then the song grew louder. He could almost make out the words. “I hear it,” he said. “I think.” Then he turned to the others. “Do —” “I do,” Cindy said. Her hands reached for Tina’s shoulders and she drew her daughter to her. Max had

132 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago never seen quite the same kind of look in her eyes. He moved close, but something in his wife’s eyes pushed him away like a magnetic repulsion. She covered Tina’s ears. The boy’s voice filled the room. Katie, Katie give me your answer, true I’m half crazy, all because of you You once were my dear grandmother But you just could not stay true Katie, Katie When the sun goes down, I’ll burn the city Then I’ll murder you “Oh, my God,” Cindy said. “Look at the kid!” Martinez cried. “Tina, don’t look!” Cindy crushed Tina’s head into her belly and stared down at the PerfectTown, her eyes growing wider and wider. “He’s burning that church,” Martinez’ wife said. “Are you nuts? Look at him! He’s running after that lady with a knife.” “Holy —” Max’s oath was cut short in utter shock. It was like a dream, one of those dreams where you try to scream — something is chasing you — something horrible and dark, with foul breath and claws — and you can’t quite get away, and you can’t scream, or say a word — nothing. Not ever. The kid in the blue striped shirt and geek tennis shoes cut off Mister Lincoln’s head with a machete. “He’s got a bottle now, with a cloth sticking out of it,” Cindy said. Somehow, Tina managed to squirm free. Max didn’t know how. Cindy shrieked, but it was too late. “He hurt the doggy, Mama!” she cried.

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Max hoped he would never again see anything like the expression on his daughter’s face. The guide’s hand was over her mouth. A quarter- inch of bloodshot white showed all the way around her big, pretty blue eyes. She spoke into her wristband. Max watched her pale fingers trembling. Her lips were trembling as well. “You’ve got to stop this,” she said. “Control — we have a —” Max heard something coming back from her wrist, but he couldn’t make out the words. “It’s a boy,” she said. “Some kind of insane boy.” Again, the buzz of a voice just beyond Max’s hearing. The horrible song continued. And changed. Grew dissonant. Stopped rhyming. Became a chant. Like something they’d sing in a blasphemous monastery where the crosses hung upside-down. There were words that he didn’t want Tina to hear. Words he was sorry that he’d heard, especially in the Magic Kingdom. Other words he didn’t know, but which chilled his body deep inside to hear them all the same. The guide’s voice broke through, high and desperate. “It’s his imago. No — it is him. He has blond hair. A knife. A bomb. Sword-thing. I don’t —” “We’ve got to get out,” Max said. He grabbed Cindy’s shoulder and spun her toward the double doors where they’d entered, lifting Tina by the waist. “What should I do?” The guide looked around and gestured toward them. “The doors won’t open,” she said. “They’re programmed not to until we’re —” “Like Hell they won’t!” Max cried. He looked at Martinez, who gaped at the carnage below them, his

134 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago wife clinging to him as she gasped and wept. “Help us!” Max yelled at the older man. Martinez moved one leg forward with excruciating slowness. It was like one of those cold-sweat dreams. Max began to wonder if he’d made any sense at all, or if his words had been heard. “We have ten more minutes,” the guide called toward them. She was wringing her hands, then she opened them toward Max, Cindy and Tina, pleading. “We can sit and wait. Look away from it. It will stop. They said it would —” Max felt a sharp rush of pity for her. She was young. He knew it wasn’t her fault; knew also that she was as frightened as any of them were. He remembered the man who’d been killed in that terrible accident on Space Mountain. The Magic Kingdom took a lot of pride in the fact that nobody had ever been hurt badly there since, not even nuts who tried some crazy stunt, like trying to kill themselves by flinging their bodies from the bridge of Snow White’s castle. It was a different Magic Kingdom now than it had been when he was a kid. Back then, it had been the happiest place on earth. Now it was perfect. DisLex, not Disney. Hell, they ran the whole state. Power, water, trash, newspapers, satellite, net, movies... Max looked back at her a long moment, and then he realized that Martinez had moved and was standing by his side. “Together,” he said, looking at the older man. Martinez looked out of shape, but his shoulders were big. He had some weight to put toward it. At once, they rushed the double doors.

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Max felt the pain in the meaty part of his back, right where you were supposed to punch someone if you really wanted to hurt them. “Chingadera!” Martinez swore, rubbing his shoulder. Max knew that was a really bad swear word in Spanish, but he had never quite been sure what it meant. “Madre de Dios!” Martinez continued. “That won’t move,” he added. Max knew what Madre de Dios meant. When he looked toward the guide, she was sitting in a fetal position, her arms wrapped around her knees, head resting above that. Her eyes were closed and she was rocking back and forth. The song was now a series of long, keening wails, something like what Max thought you’d hear coming from a ward for the criminally insane. “Mama, Mama,” Tina said, over and over. Cindy held her tight. Fear and a mother’s fierce protectiveness had made her face as taut and expressionless as an Aleutian mask. “For God’s sake,” she said through her teeth. “Get us out of here!” Max sensed something amid the wailing roar. Later, he could never had said what made him turn away from the Armageddon of the PerfectTown, away from the double doors, and away from the guide, but he did, all the same. To see a sliver of light, perhaps two hundred yards away, in the opposite direction along the rail that kept them from falling into the PerfectTown. Or PerfectHell, as he would later term it.

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The sliver of light grew until Max could make it out as a door, and it was not artificial, but natural light. He grabbed Cindy’s wrist and spun her. Martinez turned as well. His wife’s wailing, which had joined the horrible death-cries coming from below, softened. A hand beckoned through the door. Something about the hand was not quite right, but Max didn’t question that. He grabbed his wife’s wrist. This time, she took Tina and carried her like a baby, though she weighed seventy-five pounds, and he heard Martinez breathing heavily as he followed. Max pulled up short as they reached the door. He put one arm out, protecting Cindy, Tina and the Martinez’s, stopping them from going any farther. Because there had been something wrong with the hand at the door. The fingers were wrapped in gray- yellow rags, twisted, and grimed with oil and filth. The hand led to a thick arm in an army surplus jacket, and the face that peered through the door at them was nothing any decent person could look at without shuddering. Their rescuer was a freak. Max didn’t know if it was the same one they’d seen on the way in. It probably was the same one, he thought, because this was a pig man and there weren’t many of those. Or so he’d read. Or heard. “Look man, we’ve just had a bad experience. If you’re going to try to rip us off or infect us, you’ll have to come through me,” Max said, steeling his voice. He felts his hands ball into fists. The freak shook his head. “I was outside. I heard screaming,” he said.

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It was almost impossible to believe, but the voice that came out of his diseased face was normal, even gentle. He sounded educated. “You’re not going to —” Max blurted. The pig man averted his head. Maybe the brief movement was something that an animal would do if it was in trouble, or wanted to defer to a stronger beast. Max guessed that was what he was to this freak: a stronger form of beast. “Goddamn freak!” Martinez blustered. He pushed his way past Cindy and Tina, his wife in tow. He was shaking his fist. “I heard the bad noises,” the pig man said. “I know how to get in and out. I thought you might need some help.” “Max,” Cindy whispered. “Don’t make any trouble with him. He was just trying to —” Max put his hand on her cheek, then looked back at the pig man, who was truly one of the most filthy, boil-ridden, bristle-tufted and twisted creatures he’d ever seen, and that included pot-bellied pigs at the Los Angeles County Fair and embalmed creatures sewn together at the Museum of the Weird in Hollywood, and slowly, he smiled. “Thanks, man,” he said. “No problem,” the pig man replied, swinging the door open wide and stepping back as far as he could to let them all pass. Inside the PerfectTown, the hideous, wailing, shrieking song stopped. The guide screamed once, then she too was silent.

138 Chapter Two

On a discreet palm screen, DisLex chairman Harman Jacques watched his new assistant Julie Curtez checking her makeup in the mirrored surface of the outer doors to his office. It was amazing what people would do when they thought no one was watching. Someone told him once that character was what people did when they thought they were alone. “No one’s ever alone,” he whispered. He liked the thought that Julie thought she was alone, though. After a moment, he released the doors and let her in. “I suppose I picked a great day to start,” she said, standing in front of his desk, her arms folded at her waist. She meant the PerfectTown mess. Harmon swiveled in his chair to face her, and as always, he smiled inside at her polished good looks. Like a good girl, she wore her gloves. He wore none, of course, but unlike most others, he had no fear of the Human Mutational Virus, or any other nasty bug that might be festering out in the mire beyond his air- scrubbed office and his clean, perfect world. “Somebody told me once that you might as well learn to firefight in a maelstrom as a bonfire,” he said as he stood. Harmon wasn’t about to entrust the PerfectTown public relations disaster to the good people down at the Magic Kingdom. “We’ll take my Lear down there,” he said. “We’ll pay a personal call on Max Prinn and his family. I assume the packages have been shipped?” Julie nodded. The first order of her day had been to gather

139 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago gifts for the Prinns: a peace offering after their visit to the PerfectTown had gone so horribly wrong. “You’ve watched Prinn on the newslinks,” Harmon said as he started from his office, waiting for her to pass in front of him as one of the tall doors silently opened. By her smile, he could tell that she appreciated his consideration. Amazing, how women thought about these things. Letting the lady go first meant that he was able to enjoy the view. “Yes,” she said, looking over her shoulder. That hair, halfway down her back, and so black and soft and smooth. “What do you think of the man?” “I think he’s like the guy who said he found a rat in his Coke,” Julie said. Harmon laughed. “Exactly.” “So,” she said, “we have a new hometertainment system for the family, a complete set of the original character dolls for the little girl, and the home décor choice kit for mother.” She paused in the hall. He came close enough to her to catch the bare scent of her perfume: something of spice, and perhaps gardenias. “Very good,” he said. “I’ve got this.” He slipped the DisLex Platinum card from his pocket and flashed it at her. “I don’t even have one,” she said, her brow furrowing. He smiled. “You will.” Then he added, “This one is charged for a year. They’ll have everything free.” “I think that should win them over. It was all an unfortunate error — imagine those bugs in the program,” she said in her light, soft voice. How hard

140 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago she had worked to eliminate her Chicana accent; to speak as well as anyone on the newslinks. Imagine that, Harmon thought. Bombs away. What a bad boy I am. Then, imagine you in my arms and us inside of each other. “There’s the other matter,” he said. “Yes?” She raised one fine dark brow. “The freak,” he said, hardening his voice. The worst part of the whole mess was that the two families had been “saved” by the mutant pig man, who should never have been in the Magic Kingdom at all. It was too late to pass him off as some type of aberration; the independent newslinks were featuring story after story of people who’d also seen mutants at the Magic Kingdom. Been accosted by them, hit up for money — or worse. Not that Harmon believed any of it, but the truth didn’t count on the news; not even DisLex news. The Board insisted that there be “controlled chaos,” which meant “let the reporters do what they want.” Tradition. Journalistic privilege. Whatever. Right now, it was a worse problem for the company than even the PerfectTown mess. Freaks, in the Magic Kingdom. People wouldn’t want to expose their children to that type of thing on a thousand-dollar family trip. But Harmon had a plan. He’d coopt the Prinns. Maybe they’d even have a friendly reunion with the pig man, a deformed, infected vagrant named Tommy Lee Tucker, now safe and sound at Harmon’s other PerfectTown: Camp Roberts. Which wasn’t exactly a camp. “Him,” she said. Her gloved hand went to her neck.

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“Give me your glove,” he said, suddenly. He didn’t know why he said that. Suddenly he thought about his other assistant, his best man Dick. And Dick was turning his back. Go away, he commanded. Dick obeyed. “You don’t need the gloves when you’re with me,” Harmon said. “I’m safe. You’re safe.” He watched her lower lip tremble. Kiss it, he thought. He heard himself saying more things, comforting things. Things of confidence and safety. She would not give him her glove. He could hardly continue to insist. Later, he thought. A little later. And he changed once more. “I’ve had the pig man interviewed,” he said. “He’s been taken to Camp Roberts, and he’ll be perfectly safe. Perhaps he’ll even be cured.” “What?” she said, starting to laugh nervously. “Camp Roberts? Is this a new resort?” “It’s another project,” Harmon said. “Out of your area. Camp Roberts is just the start.” Julie’s dark eyes narrowed. “Maybe we shouldn’t fly down so quickly,” she said. “How can I know what to say if there’s this much that I haven’t been briefed on?” “I’ll tell you on the way,” Harmon said. “In one way, it’s a whole world for you to discover. In another way, I can tell you in a few minutes.” They had been walking slowly, and between one step and the next, she stopped, crossing her arms. She took a deep breath. An expression came over her delicate face, one that he couldn’t quite decipher. Then, she spoke.

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“I... I’m not comfortable with this. What if they have questions? I might say something wrong. There’s so much I don’t know — the pig man being taken to this camp? Why? How?” Harmon smiled, holding her eyes with his for a long moment. He read many things there: apprehension, uncertainty, and quite a bit of fear. Also fascination. Just kiss her, he thought. Inside his head, Dick the imago spoke a single word. “Animal.” Harmon forced Dick’s imago away once again, but he did not kiss Julie. Instead, he put his bare hand on her arm and gripped, not too hard, feeling the warmth of her skin through her sleeve. “We’re changing things, Julie. The world as you know it is no longer there. All that you see,” he said, continuing to look steadily in her eyes, then breaking the contact when he thought the moment was right, “is veneer. Like a layer of mahogany on a cheap pine table. Tissue-thin, covering something very different that lies beneath.” “Sir,” she said, her voice cracking. She looked at his hand on her arm, but she did not pull away. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. Her eyes went wide. “Take off your gloves,” he said. He felt electric. Trust me, he thought. Let me tell you. Let me love you. Be inside my body. I want to be inside yours. The scent of her perfume hit him. He stood in the moment, and caught a bare tendril of her skin and the fear on her. And the excitement.

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I don’t have to say I’m a God for you to believe it, he thought. She pulled her arm away, but gently. Then, she slipped one glove from her hand, her fingers slender and the color of pale creamed coffee beneath. He took the glove, then he took her bare hand in his, and he kissed it, smiling up into her eyes. He let his lips linger on her warm skin. “You’re safe,” he said. “There is no virus here, nor anywhere I go.” She gasped. “You will always be safe with me.” “Mister...” she said. “Harmon,” he told her. She was silent. She began to speak, but he lifted her hand and pressed her fingers to her lips. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “And you’ll meet my other assistant, Dick. You and he are the two halves,” he said. “Halves?” she whispered. “Body and soul,” he said. “I don’t know,” she said, and other things of astonishment, and backing away. But Harmon had already taken her bare hand. And he had kissed it. The sense of it still burned on his lips. In the Learjet, she busied herself with the list of gifts for the Prinn family. Harmon sat silently watching her, making no pretense of work. “I do trust you,” he said at last. “You’ll make a marvelous impression on the family. Remember,” he said, smiling slightly at her. “They should believe that you and I are the best of friends.”

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She looked up from her computer with an expression he could not decipher. “My husband might not care for that,” she said. The words hung in the air- conditioned cabin. Harmon preferred never to think of her husband Frank, that wetback beaner in a thousand- dollar suit. He said nothing. After a moment, she continued. “There’s a new item here.” “Yes?” Harmon said in a mild voice. “A house. In Palos Verdes.” Harmon nodded. “Corporate property.” “Mister...” “Harmon,” he said. “That’s one of our model homes. Safe, gated and virus-free.” She nodded. “I’m familiar with that program. This is a very generous gift. With the other items, we are now up to about half a million dollars in —” “Money’s not the issue,” he said. “Confidence is.” “Our customers.” “And you. Look down there.” He indicated one of the jet’s windows with his finger. Julie rose and went to the window. “Do you see?” “I see something down there. Buildings. Looks like a lot of wilderness. A lake. Are we south of Monterey and Carmel?” “Yes,” Harmon said. “Just north of San Luis Obispo. That’s Camp Roberts.” “That’s where you mentioned — where the pig man who rescued the Prinns is,” she said. “It doesn’t look like a camp. It looks like some kind of —” “It was an old military base. We’ve taken it over. Exclusively for victims of the Human Mutational Virus. They’re safe there, and they’re being helped.” He grinned at her.

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“I had no idea,” she said. “They have places to live there? Work?” He nodded. “We’re working on a cure,” he said. “We can rewrite their genetic structure, given enough time and enough research on the proper models. That’s where the PerfectTown comes in.” “Harmon,” she said. He liked that she was trying his name out in her mouth, even if she sounded very uncomfortable. “I had no idea. But how can the computer do —” “Later,” he said. “If you look down there, you’ll see what an ideal environment it is. Natural beauty, great weather, even their own water supply.” “An old military base,” she said. “I think maybe I have heard of it.” “Possibly,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve driven past it.” “Yes,” she said. “I believe that I have. You say they work down there, get exercise and so-on?” Then she smiled at him, and Harmon felt warmth in his chest, and in other places. “Oh yes,” Harmon said. “They’re running all the time. Things like that.” The jet flew south, and Camp Roberts faded into the distance.

146 Chapter Three

Tommy Lee Tucker the pig man was Camp Roberts’ seventh runner. Under the knife-bright Central California sun, three DisLex guards squinted through their mirrorshades while Tommy broke from Dorm B jogging group. He veered past the pea green barracks, straight toward the electrified fence. Tommy was fifteen yards from the fence when the nearest guard raised his Remington 870 twelve-gauge and took aim at his back. “Hey, man, he’s headed for the fence!” called another guard. Tommy didn’t turn. His ankle gave as he hit a ragged chunk of cement, hidden amid the tall spears of sawgrass near the fence. Time seemed to stretch as he fell to one knee. The internees watched: fish twins barely out of their teens, the three other pig men, the bear man who liked to brag he’d been a technodance dee-jay, and the dozen other freaks of assorted sizes, shapes and colors who occupied the bunks in Camp Roberts Dorm B. The guard in the tower slammed the alarm button and screamed down at the others, “Stop the runner!” One guard, open-mouthed, stared at the tower instead of Tommy. One who had been trotting broke into a full run. He paused and brought his hand to his mouth. “Damn it, he’s gonna fry!” Tommy was on his feet again, limping. He turned back, eyes like black olives in his fleshy pink face, and held up his right arm, fingers forming a “v.”

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That night, when the XO debriefed the security staff, the guard who’d trotted after Tommy, a forty-five year-old divorcee named Karl Hehle, insisted that Tommy had flipped everyone off. Meantime, in Dorm B, the freaks whispered in their bunks, evenly divided as to whether Tommy had given a peace sign or a victory sign. No one was going to ask them for their opinion, but they argued anyway. Karl Hehle was within twenty feet of the running pig man. He stopped, went to one knee, and took aim with his twelve gauge. It was a riot gun and he was armed with it in case the freaks got out of hand and decided to charge. It wasn’t the kind of gun anyone was supposed to fire at a running target. Running away, at any rate. “Hey, freak,” he yelled. “The fence is on.” Then, he squeezed the trigger and discharged a sandbag. The sandbag hit Tommy square between his shoulder blades. Tommy’s arms flew up and his chest slammed into the fence. Some of the freaks said later that a blue spark shot from the back of his head. Not everyone saw that, but everyone saw the flash. Everyone heard the sick, crackling sizzle. Tommy’s sneakers smoked as he jerked like a dancing puppet. The freaks made a few steps forward, but everyone knew not to touch him. Raymond the dog man started to cry. “Fried shit,” said Karl Hehle, cradling his weapon. The tardy guard who’d been gaping at the tower arrived and took out his comm. “Runner on the fence,” he said. “Sector five jogging track. We need the truck.” Three miles away, the comm roused the Camp Roberts paramedics from their backgammon game. The tallest of them swore under his breath as he crumpled

148 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago his can of Sunkist Orange and tossed it through a miniature Lakers hoop into the recycling bucket. “Another three-pointer,” he said. They were still laughing about the lucky shot as they climbed leisurely into the truck and pulled on their gloves and masks. “You know what’s the worst?” the driver said as they bounced along the one-lane ribbon of asphalt toward the jogging track. “They stink so damn bad.” Yeah, yeah, the others agreed. Lewis Starr, Jr., the tall paramedic who’d made the three-pointer, was wishing he had another Sunkist Orange. “Like barbecue,” Lewis said, staring out the window at the rolling green hills. Come summer, the grass would be golden brown. The fires would begin. Lewis Starr was from South Carolina and he’d eaten a lot of barbecue. The favorite meat there was pork, cooked for hours with brown sugar and vinegar and a touch of crushed red pepper. They called it chop meat or pulled meat. People drank Pepsi while they ate it on a squishy white bun with coleslaw on top. When it got seared in the pot with some melted Crisco it smelled just like one of the runners did after they got racked up on the fence. Lewis Starr kept his thoughts about pulled meat and barbecue to himself. His thoughts grew even worse when they got to Tommy Lee Tucker and Lewis Starr saw that he was a pig man. They had finally turned the fence off and Tommy Lee Tucker’s charred corpse lay crumpled in the grass. When Lewis Starr bent down, he saw that the pig man’s orange polyester coveralls had burned clear through to his broad chest, and the fabric and flesh had sealed together in a blue-black welt. Karl Hehle stood

149 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago by, gabbling about how he’d tried to stop the disaster. Lewis couldn’t read the pig man’s I.D. off the coveralls. It had been blackened away, except for the last two numbers. “It was Tucker,” Hehle said. “I saw his face. Man, he was the one that rescued that family. I saw him on the news.” “They’ll make certain tonight when they count heads,” Lewis replied. The pig man’s face was turning purplish. He looked like a black hog. Maybe a little like a black man. The one who rescued the family? Yeah, Lewis guessed he had heard something about that. Back in South Carolina, they didn’t have many freaks. Nothing like California. When he’d left Carolina, Lewis had felt no misgivings about going out West and taking the job at Camp Roberts. DisLex paid well, and Lewis needed the money to get through medical school. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, even though before he had left Greenville, his oldest auntie had asked him whether or not he felt right being around all those “ugly niggers.” That was how all the church ladies of a certain age referred to the freaks; Lewis guessed it was because most of them were dark, or had dark fur. Lewis Starr would never eat pulled meat again. Not with cole slaw, not with anything else. The surviving freaks from Dorm B crowded around as Lewis and the others lifted Tommy Lee Tucker’s body onto the stretcher and wheeled it toward the truck. They knew Tommy Lee was dead but they still stared, some with angry glares, others with expressions of sympathy or sadness on their godawful faces.

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“He shot him,” Raymond the dog man said, pointing at the guard Karl. “Then he hit the fence.” “Damn murderer,” said one of the fish boys under his breath. Lewis searched their faces. Then, he looked at Karl Hehle. Shiny mucus ringed Hehle’s mouth and there were flecks of food on his chin. A few paces away, Lewis spotted the mess where the guard had lost his breakfast. It looked like something a puppy might do. It wasn’t Lewis’ business to ask anything, but he caught Hehle’s eye. “He was heading for the fence?” “Yeah,” the guard said. “Everybody was hollering at him.” He looked at Tommy Lee Tucker’s body, then back at Lewis. “The stupid shit flipped me off.” “Man, if they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna do it,” one of the other paramedics said. Lewis cinched a black woven strap across the body. “Did you try to stop him?” Lewis knew the answer. Like all the freaks, the pig man was hot with HMV, the human mutational virus that made people pray for AIDS instead; worse than any killer out of Africa or Asia. “Hell, yeah!” Hehle crossed his arms, indignant. The man reminded Lewis of his middle school football coach, only his crewcut was shorter, the skin showing bluish white beneath the bristly hair. There were liver- colored moles here and there on his scalp. Lewis figured that if the guard’s barber shaved too close, he’d cut one of those moles clean off. Maybe he had. There was a crusty scab above Hehle’s right temple. HMV insinuated itself right through torn skin. A little gob of spit from the dead man’s cheek could get on the guard’s fingers, then the guard might rub his head. Not

151 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago that Hehle or any of the others would have thought that far ahead, or in that much detail. Hehle just wouldn’t have touched the pig man if he could help it. One of the twin fish boys stepped forward. “It ain’t right,” he said in the wet, mucousy voice all the fish people had. Lewis had to avoid looking straight at the fish boy, because his narrow, almond-shaped eyes were not at all human. The pupils were too big, not quite round. Periodically, a bluish, filmy membrane would slip up like a window shade, obscuring both iris and pupil. The fish boy grabbed Lewis’ arm. “Do something, man,” he said. “It ain’t right.” Lewis remembered that the fish boy’s name was something crazy, like an old- time rock star. Elton. Or Elvis. Lewis shook his head. With a hard look on his face, Karl Hehle stepped in and shoved the fish boy aside. The others stepped back, unwilling to confront the guard. As Lewis climbed in the truck, he looked over the group of freaks. “You all take care now,” he said, his voice sounding childish and sanctimonious, as if he had been back in church choir. “It’s all over.” The fish boy’s weird eyes were full of impotent pain and rage. Lewis wondered if maybe that was how his great-grandfather had looked when they told him he never had owned his farm and called him a “squatter.” The driver squirted Ozium into the truck as they left. It did nothing for the stink, just adding a sharp odor of chemical disinfectant to the stench of burnt meat. Lewis gagged, remembering the fish boy and the others. He had no idea what it would feel like, seeing

152 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago your friend break and run toward a high-voltage fence. Seeing him fry, jumping around like a six-inch trout on a hot iron griddle. Lewis knew about trout and griddles. Back in his locker, Lewis had the card of a man he’d met fishing a couple of Sundays before at Lake Nacimiento. Lewis went out early most weekends. He hardly ever saw anyone until he’d been out a couple of hours, but this man had been out on the lake one morning, with his line in the water, sipping hot coffee. They’d got to talking. Lewis had shared the man’s thermos of coffee, and he had taken the man’s card. His name was Frank Curtez and he said that he was a DA in San Luis. He had been interested in what went on at Camp Roberts. Said he’d heard some stories. Lewis had almost thrown the card away. But maybe just from laziness, he’d thrown it in his locker. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand to stop the burnt odor. The man who said you’d get used to that kind of stink didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Maybe he’d go fishing again on Sunday, out in that clean lake air. Maybe he’d call Frank Curtez. God knew he couldn’t stand by and watch another man rack himself up on that fence without doing something. The body of Tommy Lee Tucker slipped from the stretcher as Lewis and the driver wheeled it up the steep ramp of the morgue. The other paramedics weren’t very careful about picking him up, and they let his burnt head slam against the cold cement. Tommy Lee Tucker’s eyeballs had been cooked way back to the nerve and that makes changes in the flesh, no matter whether you were a freak or as tall,

153 Amy Sterling Casil | Imago straight-limbed and normal as Lewis Starr. The eyeball slipped out of its socket and flopped wetly against Tommy Lee Tucker’s temple. The driver started laughing. “Anybody for a couple holes of golf?” Everyone chuckled nervously except Lewis. An eyeball isn’t much smaller than a golf ball. It looks a lot bigger than most people think, once it’s out of someone’s head. Lewis Starr always followed procedure and unlike two of the others, he still wore his rubber gloves. Very gently, Lewis pushed Tommy Lee Tucker’s eye back into place. He couldn’t shut the pig man’s eyes, but he drew the sheet up over his swollen face. None of the paramedics laughed. The pig man’s cooked egg white eyes haunted Lewis Starr that night. He had to call that man, Frank Curtez, because if he didn’t, he knew that those opaque blind eyes would haunt him forever.

154 Everran’s Bane

Sylvia Kelso

155 I

Where the dragon came from, nobody knows. It may have flown down from the torrid north, up from the icy south, east across the endless red deserts of Hethria, or west over the bulging blue eyeball of Nerrys’yr, the Peaceful Ocean. Whatever its origins, most people were sorry that it fell upon Everran, which was not only a small kingdom but prosperous, and not only a prosperous land but a contented one. They may have felt such a place should be dragon-proof as well as extraordinary. As dragons go it was quite ordinary. That is, it was longer than an ocean-going ship, black, mail-clad, claw-toed, fire-breathing, winged, and ravenous. Or silver, fire-breathing, crested with stings, bearing a scorpion’s tail, and ravenous. Or molten gold, crocodile-legged, fire-breathing, winged, clawed, possessing eyes that spellbound its prey before the teeth dismembered him. And ravenous. Always ravenous. These descriptions come from eyewitnesses, or, at least, those who left at speed from a safe distance. No one close enough for accuracy survived. Which brings me into this song: my name is Harran, and for three years before the dragon came I was hearthbard to the Everran kings. Being hearthbard, I am naturally a harper, which as naturally means, lore- keeper: the guardian of past and present, to whom truth is a sacred trust. I shall have cause to remember that, before this song ends. But I pledged myself to make it, and the holder of that pledge shall have truth

156 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane entire and unbroken, however discreditable it proves to me. My own origins are not a mystery. I come from Meldene, those high western hills where the winds riot and the yeldtar bloom crimson amid the gray rocks and gray hethel trees. People call it a hard country, grudging, dull: but if you pause to watch the sun slide on the hethellin groves, or try to number the subtle shades of gray that play amid the leaves in their twinkling galaxies, you may never crave bright colors again. Perhaps that vision, like the memory of my parents’ tall, narrow house above the gate in Vethmel, is biased by time as well as miles. After all, it is eleven years since I left for Saphar with a harp under my elbow and a most noble ambition to be the crower of the age, eleven years that have brought me from the carriers’ taverns to the houses of the carriers’ masters, thence to the hethel oil and vineyard owners’ halls, and on to the marble floors and rosewood ceilings of the palace itself. It is a fine palace, despite its oddity. It overlooks Saphar as Saphar overlooks Everran: a thin angular heap of towers and sun-rooms and open audience halls, straggling along the thin high cinnabar scarp from which Saphar falls in rucks of red tile and golden thatch and whitewash to the loop of Azilien, whose clear blue currents girdle the city like a gemstone in a ring. Curiously for a capital, Saphar itself was a happy town. There were few beggars, except those too lazy to work, and Everran has plenty of work. The soil of Gebria and Tirs and Meldene is too poor for our neighbors to covet, but the vineyards of Stiriand and

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Saphar and the hethel groves of Meldene demand much labor, and repay in kind. Hethel oil has underwritten half our aristocrats, and our wine is counted the best in the Confederacy. Since our people are too canny to breed big, expensive families, we need not export men, and our lords learnt three generations back to keep their place in things. There were cobbles in the streets, good engineers had arranged the water supply to the many fountains, and the houses rarely fell down, causing lawsuits more often than funerals when they did. I knew little of that when I looked up that first time, pausing on the bridge over Azilien. It was a clear sunset, with a sky like a vast azure bell, making the crimson-shot bulk of the Helkent ranges a mere backdrop for the city beneath. In the elbow-crook of river and range it rose upon its knoll in cornice after cornice of golden light, glossed blue with smoke, edged bright with sunset gilt, buzzing and ringing like a happy human hive. Close by came a cheerful racket from a wayside inn. Higher, a harper was playing in some wine-lord’s feast. Highest of all, silver bells rang out from Asterne’s lookout post, a sweet wind out of the autumn sky. I shifted my father’s harp in its old leather sling, and thought: I shall be a song-king. Here is my inheritance. If there may be more than one kind of king, there was only one king in Saphar, as Beryx taught me the first time I played for him. It was in the great audience hall, at the feast on Fire’s day. My patron was a high lord, since I was well up my peak by then, and he took me as others took their jesters or jugglers or fire- swallowers: to amuse Beryx, after the lord Iahn had

158 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane been pledged on His hearth, and the real drinking of the night began. In such a small capital royalty is not remote. Beryx had crossed my path a score of times, riding out with hawk or hound or border cavalry, banqueting in guildhalls, dispensing justice or inspecting half-built porticoes, overseeing the wine and oil weighed in market when the Confederate traders came. That night in the palace still seems my first real sight of him. Red light from burning tarsal wood and golden light from pendant hethel lamps overflowed the hall, cascading through open arches into the sky where Valinhynga, the evening’s herald, loveliest of planets, was just pricking through. In Saphar, men dress their halls in air and dress to allow for it. All down the table the lords wore fur-lined jackets and trousers of creamy Quarred wool, with gold chains of office shining over everything. They answered the silver tableware, the ruby glow of wine, the glitter of gems on the ceremonial sword sheaths propped against each chair. But at the table’s head Beryx leant a little aside, chin in palm, elbow on the arm of the king’s seat, and all the light of the hall seemed to gather on his royal crimson cloak, his raven hair, and his long, lazy, twinkling green eyes, that saw so much and made such a joke of it all. Sea-eyes, the name means, so it was of sea I sang: not Nerrys’yr, the wide blue ocean, but Berfing, the green southern sea where the whalers of Hazghend stain the ice-floes red with blood. Everyone knows that in boyhood he ran away to ship with them. As I sang I could see the royal brooch, a huge circlet of whale- tooth ivory, rich cream upon his crimson cloak.

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The lords clapped at the end, in more than courtesy. It made my patron flush. He was high in his clique, and ambitious of climbing higher, and had seen me as a chancy ladder rung. He called to Beryx, “Is he not a prince of harpers, lord?” Beryx nodded. Then the corners of his long mouth went up, and he drawled, “A prince of harpers, Vellan. But not—yet—a king.” Though Vellan was a ruddy man I saw his color fade. It was a mere moment, a tiny aside. Yet I, too, saw those eyes were the color of an iceberg’s shadow, and I, too, understood. Then Beryx looked back to me and smiled, a real smile this time. “Harpers are long-minded in Meldene,” he said. “So, you will find, are kings.” So I went back to the lords’ halls, and I wrought with my art as vinegrowers do with weeds. And two years later, when the corsairs ravaged Quarred and Beryx took his soldiers down to a great cleansing by the sea, I made a song about newer deeds. When I finished, he leant back in the high seat and nodded toward the right side of the fire, the place of a hearthbard, which had been empty since his father’s harper Quennis died. “Bring a seat for the harper, Kyvan,” he told his chamberlain. “He has been standing long enough.”

oOo

The king’s hearthbard is expected to entertain at every banquet, with an endless fund of songs and a fine tact in their choice. He also adorns household ceremonies, from Lords’ days to chambermaids’

160 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane betrothals, creates memorable lore from mundanities, and commemorates both his lord’s judgments and his nobility. I had my rank, my bardic lodging, my robes and role to fill. The one flat in the strings, and that an ungrateful one, was within me. Beryx was easy to serve and easier to compliment: in three years I never had to hide one shabby deed. But in those three years I was never more or less to him than a hearthbard, and he was never more or less to me than a king. Nevertheless, it was as hearthbard that I had attended audience, on that chill spring morning when the first news came. Counselors, messengers, plaintiffs had all come muffled to the eyebrows: I relished the fire near my own ribs. Vast blue gulfs of air spread below us over the slopes of Saphar Resh, which were all that most delicate green of newly burgeoned vines. Trying to catch it in a couple of phrases, I hardly heeded the messenger, till the silence round him made my fumblings over-clear. “...from Pentyr, lord.” A farmer, an ordinary pharr’az, dirty breeches, wide straw hat, wide red face. But the cheeks were drawn in, and shiny with sweat. “Couldn’t find a mirror-signaler nowhere, we thought best to send... There’s half a deme of vineyards scorched to ash. ‘N steadings burnt. My neighbor Varn.” He swallowed noisily. “We heard the screams. ‘N Pensal’s gone, lord. That selfsame night. Fire high as the stars... Burning. We smelt it on the wind.” I saw general Inyx’s hand clench upon his sword. He had gone against the corsairs. He knew what such burning meant.

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Counselors clucked like hawk-scared fowls. In the high seat, Beryx’s face was hidden from me, but Inyx stiffened when he spoke. “Pentyr deme burnt. Pensal razed. Where was my lieutenant in the north?” The farmer rolled his eyes up. Appalled, I saw he had begun to weep. “Marched out, lord. All t’garrison of Pirlase, ‘n Lyvar at their head. When I left ‘twas three days—three days quiet. ‘N never a man of ‘em come back.” Inyx’s sword rasped, half-drawn, then driven home into the sheath. Beryx said, “Thank you.” Then, to the chamberlain, “Kyvan, attend this messenger. Counselors, good day.” Counselors’ mouths opened. Shut. Out they went, and the rest with them. Only Inyx stood his ground. Beryx left his high seat and paced about. Harper and general, we watched him as he walked, wind fluting the crimson cloak, across the hall and back across, blazing, dulling, from arch to sunlit arch. Tall, and straight as a spearhaft: a kingly king. Halting, he looked at Inyx: squat, black, gnarled as an aged hethel tree, his calling in his face. Their eyes spoke, an old comradeship. Beryx said, “Pentyr deme. Half Stiriand Resh.” I remember finding it odd that Inyx, usually so definite, should seem hesitant, indeed reluctant to speak. “Lyngthirans,” he growled at last. Beryx shook his head. “There’d have been some alarm.” “Quarred, then.” “Too early. And too far north.”

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When Inyx said nothing, he went on, “Pensal sacked. A whole deme burnt in a night. Not an entire army could do that.” Inyx growled in his throat. Beryx said, “And the Pirlase garrison clean gone. If it were raiders, someone would have got back.” Not raiders? What else on earth could it be? I looked at Inyx, still mute. Beryx looked too. Then he said, “You think it is.” If Inyx did not want to listen, nor did he like what he heard. He shook his head about. Then he burst out, “Why should it be? What’s to say it’s that at all? It could be—” “It could be what?” He waited. “It could be what, old lad?” Inyx growled under his breath and tossed up both hands in a surrender long since become habitual. “The Phathos?” “The Phathos,” Beryx agreed, “first.”

oOo

So messengers went to the observatory of the Phathos, the seer of Now, Then, and Soon. And the Phathos, sitting in the high seat with his claw fingers on the carven chair arms and his thin white beard tumbling over the blue velvet gown that hid his thin old knees, closed his eyes and said in his thin high voice, “It is a Skybane. Its name is Hawge.” Any question of Whence or Why it came or How it might be removed, he declined to hear. Since the hearthbard is also made free of the king’s presence chamber, I too received that messenger.

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After he left, Beryx set a foot on the hearth-kerb and stared down into the core of the fire. “A Skybane,” he said. On the hearth the coals glared, red as the aura of that word. A Skybane: known in lore if not in living memory, and through that lore they move like baleful meteors. Small matter indeed if it had come down from the torrid north, up from the icy south, east across Hethria, or west over the Peaceful Ocean. It was here. Fabulous, legendary. Crown of scourges, king of catastrophes. Slowly my training reasserted itself. Harpers are men’s judges as well as their memorials. It was for Beryx to deal with this. It was my part to gauge how he dealt. But within the common urge to refuge with our betters from disaster, within the harper’s scrutiny, rose a small sharp personal interest: now, at last, I would plumb the man under the crown. He was still gazing into the heart of the fire. The green eyes were cold, but to my astonishment, full of an intransigent mirth. Then his mouth corners went up. “A dragon,” he drawled. “And in our time. Sad luck—for us.” “Sad luck?” The last thing I had looked for was frivolity. He gave me the tail of an eye. Then he said wryly, “Prophets are seldom so... concise.” I gave my opinion of the unhelpful Phathos on my harp. Beryx laughed. “And its name,” he said, “is Hawge.” His brows knit. “Is there value in knowing that?” Of a sudden he thrust out a foot to hook round a chair and swung himself astride it with elbows on the back as any

164 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane carrier in a tavern might. Kingship was in his blood. Kingliness he could shed like a cloak. “What does the lore tell of dragons?” he said. “There are many songs,” I began. “Sing them,” he said. The shadows reversed from east to west while he listened, chin in palms, eyes unwavering upon my face. I sang of the goldsmith who became a dragon when he fell in love with his hoard, and his brother whose greed brought a youth to slay his bloodkin on that golden bed. Of the sea-dragon who ate maidens chained to a rock, slain by the head of a woman whose face turned her beholders into stone. Of the lion-hero who slew the dragon guard upon a tree of golden apples at the Other End of the World, of the fire-breathing monster whose slayer was obliged to ride upon a winged horse. Of the sage who mastered a dragon simply by speaking its name, and the dragon who from vanity showed a spy in its lair, its only chink. Of the bowman who found that chink. When I finished, Beryx said, “Go on.” I looked at him. He said, “You know you haven’t sung it yet.” So I sang of the old king who went out, with nothing but mortal might and valor, to slay a fire-drake and save his land: how the dragon seared his flesh and melted his armor, his horse died, his company fled, and he himself, sore scathed, gave the dragon its death wound and took his own. I made a cacophony of the final chord. Beryx paid no heed. As the jangle died away, he murmured, “But he saved the land. In the end.”

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Then he sat up and began to number briskly on his fingers, showing me how a harper’s vision differs from a king’s. “Dragons breathe fire and fly. They are so armed and armored, it is an ill march going against them without some great weapon. Of knowledge—or of magic. Which we lack. Or unless you are a hero-god. Which we are not. Their stomachs are bottomless, but they hoard gold: I must visit the Treasury. You can parley with them. We must wait till it lairs for that. They may be mastered by a wizard. Which we also lack. Or... by courage alone.” “What may be done by courage alone?” asked Sellithar the queen, entering from the garden with a swish of silk and a timbre of laughter in her voice. Sellithar is tall, and fair as Beryx is dark, and comely as women go: but her deep, pure voice is resonant as human harpsong, which is why I have been in love with her since the first word I heard her speak. “What may be done?” she repeated as we rose. She was smiling, yet her wide blue eyes held a sort of timidness. “A dragonslaying,” Beryx told her, smiling also, “as demonstrated by the king of the Geats.” She caught her breath. Her hand caught the band of sapphires at her throat. Faintly, she said, “Oh, no.” “No?” He was still smiling. “Why not?” Her pupils widened till her eyes seemed almost black. “You,” she sounded breathless, “are the king.” Then, at last, I saw the fullness of the threat. Climbing to my eminence, I had never paused to wonder what upheld the world for me to climb, never pondered the nuances of that word “king.” Never

166 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane thought past the lucky wanderer, the dashing soldier, to the years of trading, building, dealing justice, managing lords and guilds, guarding borders, keeping the Confederacy in tune. Yet each dull daily decision asked as much skill and foresight as that cold glance which had quenched Vellan’s uprising with a look. How often had I heard it, at some insoluble debate in market or quarry or guildhall? “Take it to the king.” It was upon this Everran rested, as upon the harp’s firm arms the fragile strings. “Starflower,” he was saying, light as ever, “you and my harper are a pair. He’s sung all morning round what any ditch-digger would tell me. And you won’t even think of it.” When she did not reply, he spoke at last those words I had so sedulously avoided: the first words in dragon-lore. “A dragon’s coming is a curse upon a land. Unforeseen, but not unearned.” She looked down on Everran: lovely, carefree, and prosperous. “What has Everran done, to earn a curse?” He turned his hand out. “You know the saying.” “Not in Tirs.” She is from Maer Selloth, citadel of Tirs, our southern Resh. The Resh-lord’s daughter. Wed, perhaps, to secure all three. “Liar.” He was laughing still. “Skybane, king-bane. King-summoned, king-slain.” Frightened out of respect, I snapped, “If the king is an idiot.” “Master harper,” he remarked, while I sat gagged by my insolence. He did not seem offended. He was studying the rich, dark beams of the rosewood roof. “Master harper, what do you suppose the Findarre and

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Kelflase garrisons will say if I send them after Lyvar’s men—alone?” I retorted with spirit, “That you are a wise general as well as a king.” He shook his head. “That’s no road for a king.” “Better,” I lost all prudence, “to fry nobly and leave Everran to the dragon—and to Vellan’s kind?” He was looking at me as he had at Vellan. He had not moved a muscle, but his pupils had dilated. It was like hurtling headfirst into two black, deadly, sentient wells. “Harran is right,” Sellithar, invisible, sounded more breathless than ever. “Beryx, he’s right. If you were—what would Everran do?” My sight returned. The king had looked away. He strode to his high seat and whipped around, fingers white on Everran’s carven crest of the shield and vine. “This time,” he said balefully, “I shall quote some lore.” He jerked a thumb at Saphar. “Nine kings ago, our founder Berrian turned that from a pit of brigands to a country’s capital. Eight kings ago, his son threw the Hethox out of Gebria and built a wall to keep them out. Seven kings ago, my forefather Berghend ransomed Meldene when he leapt onto the Hazghend spears. Six kings ago, his son met the Lyngthirans in Stiriand and drove them north of the Kemreswash for good. Five kings ago, his son Berazos founded the Confederacy. Four kings ago, his son brought it through the plague. Three kings ago, my longfather taught the Everran lords that a king is not a corsair’s figurehead. Two kings ago, my grandfather built this palace,” his eye softened, glancing up, “after he led Quarred and Estar to burn the corsairs in their ships.

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One king ago, my father rebuilt Saphar to match, after he steered us through the five-year drought.” His hand clenched on the crest. “Now comes a Skybane. The king of plagues. Up there,” his hand shot north, “are wasted lands, burnt steadings, razed towns. Dead men. Soldiers. And helpless, innocent folk. That is my land! My forefathers’ trust! Do you think that I, a Berheage, will sit like an Estar shophet and watch it butchered before my eyes!” From the palace garden a black and white eygnor sang liquidly, limpidly, in the hush behind his steps. Then Sellithar said, between tears and laughter, “He always goes where he wants. And you would have to fight, if you did get there first.” My only answer was in the harp. It grasped a child’s phrase, summoning the apple-buds to Tirs. Sellithar caught her breath. Said, “Help him, Harran,” and went.

oOo

A fine parting chord. But how was I to follow it? A harper preserves lore, graces banquets, and soothes unquiet breasts: he does not change the key of kings. But she had asked for Beryx. And it was Sellithar who asked. The king was in council. I duetted with an eygnor in the sketchy shade of hellien trees where palace garden meets gatehouse bastion, until green gowns filled the gate beneath. Inyx was making for the armory and merely nodded when I fell into step. He was in haste. I asked,

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“What does the king plan?” He answered as soldier to soldier: quick, curt, and frank. “Scouts. Evacuate. Raise the Confederacy. Levy. March.” “March where?” His sharp black glance was wholly incredulous. “Stiriand!” “The king goes himself?” I got both eyes that time. “What would you think?” We strode down the walkway past the Stiriann watch-tower, Gebrian and Meldener, short and tall, thick and thin. Looking down on those wide, solid, desert-fighter’s shoulders, I decided to take a chance. “I think—surely, that is general’s work?” He swung and stopped. He stood four-square, a fire of haste frozen by soldier’s discipline. I half expected a challenge for imputing cowardice, but with same clipped gruffness he said, “Laid me five to one in gold rhodellin you’ll find a prophecy to keep him home.” I threw up both hands. “If I could!” He altered neither look nor posture: but his words announced the ally I sought. “Told him, it’s running the whole phalanx into forceps before he’s set skirmishers. Like his father. If they don’t want to listen—chut!” “But surely...” “He’s a Berheage. They’re not much at leading from behind.” He was off again. Keeping pace, I asked, “Inyx— what will it be like?”

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His face lost all expression. “You’d know better than me.” I thought of what I knew. “But—Lords of the Sky, he’ll not take levies against that! Untrained levies—raw Everran farmers—!” Inyx gave a short grim snort. “Levies are for Saphar. He’s taking volunteers. Three hundred picked volunteers. From the Guard.” I gulped. “Phalanxmen that can ride. I’d be luckier finding teeth on a chicken. But they’ll ride for him.” There was feeling now: not envy but the rawness of anticipated grief. The thousand Guardsmen, core of Everran’s army, trained, tried, tempered to a single sword-arm, were the pride of Inyx’s heart. “But surely Estar... Hazghend...” “Seen a dragon lately? Their champions’ll be raw as ours.” “Oh, Four!” Another snort. “Fine sight we’ll be. No mail, he says. Iron’ll fry you alive. Leather, he says. Bull-hide from toe to crown and round the sarissa hafts. Set of grannies waving fifteen-foot spindles. And archers. In a phalanx. Never led such an abortion in m’ life.” His stride quickened. “‘March in three days,’ he says. I must get on—” Next morning, down in the marketplace before all Saphar, I watched Beryx seek his volunteers. The Guard marched in with that concerted thump and ring of perfect unison which only the best troops can achieve: tall stalwart Meldeners, tough lithe Tirianns, squat massive Gebrians, wrestler-built Stirianns, all the weight and muscle and endurance the phalanx demands, a two-hundred-and-fifty file,

171 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane quadruple column, of shining greaves and mail hauberks and wide-brimmed helmets, their big round shields bearing Everran’s crest. And rippling above like the quills of a deadly porcupine, the sheeny heads and fifteen-foot hafts of the sarissas, the phalanx spears. Inyx bellowed. Two thousand iron-shod boot- heels crashed. Crashed again. With a halt and half-turn they formed a semi-circle about the auctioneer’s rostrum, just as Beryx ran lightly up its steps. “You all know,” his voice, barely raised, was clear and carrying as a trumpet call, “there is a dragon loose in Stiriand. Our folk are dying up there. This is not a matter for orders.” A sudden elfish smile. “This is a matter for companions. I am going to meet the dragon. I ask for three hundred volunteers.” The ranks rippled sharply, once. For an instant I wanted to cover my eyes, not to see his shame. Then I realized the front rank had shrunk their shoulders as if overcrowded, heard the hiss from behind—“Isyk, you great oaf, lemme through!”—and understood. There were a thousand volunteers.

oOo

Slowly I climbed away from the scattering crowd, the carriers’ taverns, the lords’ mansions, the huge spouting serpents of the gate-square fountain, up the zigzag way whose every turn brings your right, unshielded side to the bastions above. Under the massive gate arch built by Berrian, cut with his personal crest: a wide, unblinking, huge-pupilled eye. Up the gatehouse steps. Past the barracks and retainers’ houses, the watch and fighting towers, the

172 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane armory, halls, garden, royal apartments. Still that unblinking stone stare was on my back. I am a harper, I told it. My task is to preserve lore. To make it is heroes’ work. The eye did not blink. I descended the Meldene walkway. The hearthbard’s tower looks to those gray hills from the citadel’s brink: a nice touch, I had always thought. The door opened on my harp, hung in its new cover, marehide stitched with beryl stones to outline the vine and shield in scintillant green fire. Beyond was the great Quarred hanging, miniature gods and heroes in a verdant paradise beneath the smoky-lavender clouds of terrian trees in bloom: my last year’s Fire-feast gift. On the sideboard stood the silver jug and goblets he gave me for that corsair song. The set of ivory tuning keys, the inlaid Hazyk armring, the riot of seven colors in the hearthbard’s ceremonial robe—Enough! I cried, whirling to the window. Sellithar was sitting with her maidens in the tiny pleasance just beneath. Very clearly, as the door closed, I could recall the flower hues of their dresses, the twinkle of needle and ring, the crisp eucalypt tang of the helliens whose thin shade splashed Sellithar’s hair. She was wearing a coronal for which I once made a song: a play on, “gold and lesser gold, the lesser crowning more.” It ran in my head as I went, searching for the king. The Treasury is a place I love, not for avarice but because the play of light on precious things is the music of light itself. Everran had its share in those days: gold, silver, gems; gifted, won, inherited. The king stood facing the barred window, the Treasurer at his elbow, and as he turned I recognized what he held.

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If nobody remembers Maerdrigg, all Everran knew his maerian. Berrian brought it, to be the pride— some say, the luck—of his house. It is oval, a palm wide, an inch thick at the center, the color of translucent milk: but move it, and the depths prickle into shifting, arrowy, red and golden fire. They say men were and are and will be ready to kill for it. It was also the only gem in Everran’s treasury I had never been able to like. Beryx had been handling it with something like my own fascinated repulsion, but as he glanced up it vanished in a glint of mirth. “Master harper.” He acknowledged my bow. His mouth corners puckered. “Have you come to reveal a prophecy, by any chance?” “Alas, lord,” I answered blandly. “You have lost your bet.” He laughed outright. “So my old Lockjaw talked at last! What is it, then?” “It is a favor, lord.” My own voice: why did it sound so strange? “I have come to ask for a horse.” He grew very still. The quiet of masked regret. Even, possibly, grief. “And, master harper, where do you wish to ride?” “To Stiriand,” I said. The Treasurer opened his rheumy old eyes and stretched his tortoise neck. Beryx looked taken aback. Then he said rather hurriedly, “Master harper, I will not hazard you. This is no harper’s work.” “Permit me a confession, lord.” I kept my tone light. “There is another lore-word I omitted. When the war-lords meet, it says, ‘The bards of the world

174 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane appraise the men of valor.’ Such a meeting as this, then, is surely harper’s work?” His eyes narrowed. Then they altered. He handed the maerian away without looking where. “Harran,” he said a little thickly, “you shall have your horse.” And I went out feeling absurdly pleased for one who has just contracted to commit suicide, because he had never before called me by my name.

oOo

From then on Beryx most resembled a whirlwind set on legs: you cannot simply walk out of a kingdom and clap to the door. Message after message went out to call up levies in Gebria, Tirs, and Meldene; to ask help from the Confederacy in Quarred, Estar, Hazghend, and Holym; to summon his uncle as Regent from Aslash; to order urgent evacuation of Stiriand. Nothing mobile would stay in the dragon’s reach. And north, too, went the scouts and mirror-signal relayers who would direct our march. I had my own kingdom to arrange. My one body servant, used to bards, said calmly, “To meet the dragon. Yes. Will you be taking the great robe?” But there was also my treasury of lore, more precious, more jealously warded than my blood. I spent the next two days feverishly rehearsing my apprentice in the Ystanyrx, the Great Tales, inwardly crying, Why did I do so little? Why did I start so late? When he was saturated, I said, “Tomorrow, then.” He rose from the window seat, carefully wrapping his harp, a slender, serious lad with deep brown eyes. Almost desperately I said, “Zarrar, you will

175 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane remember?” And his face broke into its rare, impish smile. “Have no fear, lord,” he said. “Whatever befalls you, the songs will be sung.” I was so wrapped in my own affairs that it came as a surprise when the queen’s steward asked me, next morning, to play for her at Ilien’s festival. Everran honors the Four Sky-Lords without ostentation: people go in their own way and their own time, up to fly Air’s huge gaudy kites atop Asterne’s thousand steps, out on the roads with the saplings to plant for Earth, off to Hazar’s little green plain where bonfires seed the dark for Iahn’s day, and down to the river for Ilien. Descending through the city, Sellithar and her maidens and I swelled a steady stream of families and households, each with the wine-pitcher and the toy boat piled high with Water’s beloved smoky-lavender terrian flowers. Below us the long narrow parks along the river margin were moving flower beds, and Azilien’s bosom wore a drift of smoke-blue petals and tiny white sails, their progress followed with cries of tension and delight and cheerful woe. If your boat reaches the bridge safe, says Saphar, your wish will return in the coming year. Sellithar’s maidens were merry already. Sellithar, in a smoke-blue smoke-thin gown that honored the Water-lord and made her eyes rival Azilien, was quiet. As we crossed the springy new grass, she said abruptly, “Beryx was too busy. It’s the first time I’ve been—alone—for Ilien’s day.” “I remember,” was all I could manage. Being near Sellithar always clogs my tongue.

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She glanced east. In the river’s bight, a stand of silver-green morgas trees cupped the white head of the Phathos’ tower. “Was the Phathos,” she said with the same strained abruptness, “no use?” “All he told us,” I answered ruefully, “was the dragon’s name.” “Its name?” Something near horror dilated her eyes. The coronal’s freestanding golden terrian sprays shook above her golden coils of hair, and something squeezed my heart. “Lady... Sellithar.” I hoped she would not catch the interval. “It will never reach Saphar. And if it did... the king would have you away long before. He would never risk such a—” Treasure. What can you say, when every word turns to revelation, or to fulsomeness? Her hand twitched and jumped on her sapphire collar. She was distressed for some hidden thing, and I knew it. And it was not my place to comfort her. “Lady,” I said, “shall we trust it to Ilien?” So at the water’s brink I sang the slow, sinuous Ilien’nor, while Yvalla poured the wine, slowly, gracefully, its red thinning and coiling away into the pellucid stream. Then, more graceful than the falling wine, Sellithar knelt to launch the boat. The water cradled it: a propitious breath of westerly plumped the sail. It glided away. At such times a ninety-year-old can be only nine. Yvalla and her fellows jumped squeaking up and down, gasped, cheered in relief, and so did I. Sellithar stood rigid, eyes fixed painfully on the dwindling shape.

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It neared the bridge, one among a flotilla converging on the pier eddy, Yvalla was running deer- like for a closer lookout—and the wind changed. Like a slap it backed to the north: a vicious gust scourged the river-face. The tiny sails jerked aback, entangled, capsized. As the gust fled away, the bridge- arch swallowed a drift of pathetic debris and a trail of drowning flowers. Sellithar went so white I almost dared to catch her arm. “No,” she said faintly. “I am well. Thank you, Harran. No. I can walk alone. Only... only... I think we will go home now.”

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Ilien’s day falls on a full moon, which left the eygnors wakeful as I. I tracked the lattice shadow, dismembered the bed: hated birds’ effortless mastery. Then surrendered, took harp and cloak and went out into the noon of night. South-east of my tower a tongue of garden slants down from the royal apartments to the deep-cut stair of a ancient postern gate. The garden was afloat, ethereal, the loftiest terrians reduced to pure line and shadow, a painter’s sketch in an unpaintable light, but the air was rich. Dewy grass, tang of helliens, honey breaths of norgal tree blossoms, mingled with a drift of pure wizard’s spice: a rivannon tree, thick with sprays of brown and yellow flowers. In its shadow I sat down, tuned, and waited for music’s release. But the spell was never realized. Someone was trying to take a mule through the postern gate.

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I heard the obstinate clatter and snort. Breathless mutters: a muffled clang as the iron wicket swung shut. Moonlight showed me the tall ears, the obstinately humped quarters: a swathed head, skirts. “You really should know better,” I said, coming along the wall, “than to try that with a mule. Especially at night.” The mule cracked its nostrils, the driver choked a shriek. I just caught the halter in time to prevent a bolt. The mule skittered, trembling. The woman faltered, “I could not—there was no other way.” There was no way of disguising that harpsong voice. “Sel—Lady,” I said. “Where—why—what in the Four’s name are you doing here,” I took in her coarse clothing, “like this?” The over-tuned string broke. Dropping back against the wall, she buried her face in her hands and burst into such a spasm of sobs as almost tore me apart. I could not release the mule, I dared not embrace the queen. Another rescued us both. “Sellithar.” The mule’s ears flickered and relaxed. The queen fell forward to that quiet, all-sufficient voice. “What is it, clythx?” It means, Heart. And he said it with such tenderness. The sobs died away. The queen rested in his arms as in sanctuary: but the note in that pure voice was defeat. “I was going away. To Stiriand.” Beryx did not stiffen. And only I could see his face. “But clythx... why?”

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“Because,” another stifled sob, “I asked Ilien... and the ship sank. Before the bridge.” I would have cried, Will you augur from such child’s omens as that? Beryx knew better. Kindly, gravely, he persisted, “But clythx—why Stiriand?” I made to shift the mule. He gave his head a violent shake. Within his arms, that pure voice spoke with a rending despair. “To find the dragon,” it said. I think I froze. Certainly, I could not believe my ears. Beryx sounded carefully casual. “Surely, clythx, a king and three hundred guardsmen can deal with that?” “But the curse is my fault,” said the hidden voice. “It has been my fault these last five years.” The eygnors caroled on, heart-whole, oblivious. The mule hove a bored sigh. Very slowly Beryx freed a hand, cupped her chin, and lifted her face to his. “Clythx?” The quiet had changed. Now it chilled my spine. “Who has made you think a queen must breed like a carrier’s mare?” She merely shook her head. I saw his shoulders straighten. When he spoke, his voice had changed again. Steady. Deliberate. Accepting more than the role of comforter. “Clythx... remember the lore. If it was that which— brought the curse—a dragon is summoned by the king.” I must have jerked the lead-rope, for the mule flung its head up and his voice changed in a flash. “Now Harran shall stable your nag and you can take off those abominable clothes and we’ll all forget

180 Sylvia Kelso | Everran’s Bane this,” I felt his eye on me, “and go where we ought to be: home in bed.” He turned her about in his arm, and they walked away, her head against his shoulder, his arm tight about her waist. Left with the mule and the moonlight, I tried to feel thankful, and could find only an ache that overrode the too explicable dread. For we both needed comfort, and she had taken it: but the comfort she had taken was not mine.

181 Short Story Sampler

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“Inferno,” by Laura Anne Gilman

P.B. took one look at the sea of bodies and skirted around them, not wanting to deal with any more people today than he had to in order to finish off the job. He knew some humans on a social basis, but they were Talents, magic-users. They could see beyond white fur, black claws, eyes that were cat-slitted and the color of dried blood. He had no such faith in these human Nulls to do other than scream and point. Or point weapons. Idiot humans. Not that the Talents were any better, overall. Humans were all annoying creatures.

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Update 11 March 2009: Short Story Sampler Update 11 March 2009: Casil, Kelso Update: 8 March 2009: Radford Update: 6 March 2009: Clough Update: 5 March 2009: Zettel Update 28 February 2009: Bohnhoff First publication February 2009

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Cover courtesy Amy Sterling Casil

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