“Patience.” That was Sergeant Krikor’s throatily accented Russian. “They have to come in close enough so they can’t get away easy when we start mauling them.”

Time . . . Yes, it was an enemy, but it killed you slowly, second by second. The ghosts out there, the ghosts sneaking up on, swooping down on, Bulola could kill you in a hurry. More often than not, they were a worry in the back of Sergei’s mind. Now they came to the forefront. How much longer? He wanted to ask the question. Ask it? He wanted to scream it. But he couldn’t, not when Krikor’d just put Fyodor down. He had to wait. Seconds seemed to stretch out into hours. Once the shooting started, time would squeeze tight again. Everything would happen at once. He knew that. He’d seen it before.

For the dozenth time, he checked to make sure he’d set the change lever on his Kalashnikov to single shot. For the dozenth time, he found out he had. He was ready.

Sergeant Krikor bent to peer into his night-vision scope. “Won’t be—,” he began. Maybe he said long now. If he did, Sergei never heard him. Sure enough, everything started happening at once. Parachute flares arced up into the night, turning the mountain slopes into brightest noon. Krikor pulled his head away from the night-vision scope with a horrible Armenian oath. Since the scope intensified all the light there was, he might have stared into the heart of the sun for a moment. Behind Sergei, mortars started flinging bombs at the dukhi, pop! pop! pop! The noise wasn’t very loud—about like slamming a door. The finned bombs whistled as they fell.

“Incoming!” somebody shouted. The ghosts had mortars, too, either captured, stolen from the Afghan army, or bought from the Chinese. Crump! The first bomb burst about fifty meters behind Sergei’s trench. Fragments of sharp-edged metal hissed through the air. Through the rattle of Kalashnikov and machine-gun fire, Sergei heard the ghosts’ war cry, endlessly repeated: “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!

Allahu!. . .”

Some of the dukhi, by now, were down off the hillsides and onto the flatter ground near Bulola. Sergei squeezed off a few rounds. The Afghans went down as if scythed. But they were wily warriors; he didn’t know whether he’d hit them or they were diving for cover.

Bullets cracked past overhead, a distinctive, distinctively horrible sound. The dukhi had no fire discipline. They shot off long bursts, emp-tying a clip with a pull of the trigger or two. A Kalashnikov treated so cavalierly pulled high and to the right. Accuracy, never splendid with an assault rifle, become nothing but a bad joke.

But the dukhi put a lot of lead in the air. Even worse than the sound of bullets flying by overhead was the unmistakable slap one made when struck flesh. Sergei flinched when he heard that sound only a few meters away.

Fyodor shrieked and then started cursing. “Where are you hit?” Sergei asked. “Shoulder,” the wounded man answered.

“That’s not so bad,” Vladimir said.

“Fuck you,” Fyodor said through clenched teeth. “It’s not your shoulder.”

‘”Get him back to the medics,” Sergeant Krikor said. “Come on, somebody, give him a hand.”

As Fyodor slapped a thick square of gauze on the wound to slow the bleeding, Sergei asked, “Where are the bumblebees? You said we were supposed to have bumblebees, Sergeant.” He knew he sounded like a petulant child, but he couldn’t help it. Fear did strange, dreadful things to a man. “And why haven’t the Katyushas opened up? “

Before Krikor could answer, a burst of Kalashnikov fire chewed up the ground in front of the trench and spat dirt into Sergei’s eyes. He rubbed frantically, fearing ghosts would be upon him before he cleared his vision. And, also before Krikor could answer, he heard the rapidly swelling thutter that said the helicopter gunships were indeed swooping to the attack.

Lines of fire stitched the night sky as the Mi-24s—three of them— raked the mountainside: thin lines of fire from their nose-mounted Catlings, thicker ones from their rocket pods. Fresh bursts of hot orange light rose as the rockets slammed into the stones above Bulola. Along with cries of “Allahu akbar!”

Sergei also heard screams of pain and screams of terror from the dukhi—music sweeter to his ears than any hit by Alia Pugacheva or losif Kobzon.

And then, as if they’d been waiting for the bumblebees to arrive— and they probably had—the men at the Katyusha launchers let fly. Forty rockets salvoed from each launcher, with a noise like the end of the world. The fiery lines they drew across the night seemed thick as a man’s leg. Each salvo sent four and a half tons of high explosive up and then down onto the heads of the dukhi on the mountainside.

“Betrayed!” The cry rose from more than one throat, out there in the chilly night above Bulola. “Sold to the Shuravi\n “They knew we were coming!”

“With God’s help, we can still beat the atheists,” Sayid Jaglan shouted. “Forward, mujahideen! He who falls is a martyr, and will know Paradise forever.”

Forward Satar went, down toward his home village. The closer he came to the Russians, the less likely those accursed helicopters were to spray him with death. He paused to inject a wounded mujahid with morphine, then ran on.

But as he ran, sheaves of flame rose into the air from down in the valley, from the very outskirts of Bulola: one, two, three. They were as yellow, as tightly bound, as sheaves of wheat. “Katyushas!” That cry rose from more than one throat, too—from Satar’s, among others—and it was nothing less than a cry of despair.

Satar threw himself flat. He clapped his hands over his ears and opened his mouth very wide. That offered some protection against blast. Against salvos of Katyushas . . . “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God!” Satar gasped out. Against Katyushas, prayer offered more protection than anything else.

The Russian rockets shrieked as they descended. They might have been so many damned souls, already feeling Shaitan’s grip on them. When they slammed into the side of the mountain—most of them well behind Satar—the ground shook under him, as if in torment.

Roaring whooshes from down below announced that the Russians were launching another salvo. But then the ground shook under Satar, and shook, and shook, and would not stop shaking. Evil dreams, pain-filled dreams, had come too often to the dragon’s endless sleep lately. It had twitched and jerked again and again, trying to get away from them, but they persisted. Its doze grew ever lighter, ever more fitful, ever more restless.

A hundred twenty Katyushas—no, the truth: a hundred eighteen, for one blew up in midair, and another, a dud, didn’t explode when it landed—burst against the mountain’s flank that was also the dragon’s flank. Thirteen tons of high explosive . . . Not even a dragon asleep for centuries could ignore that. Asleep no more, the dragon turned and stretched and looked around to see what was tormenting it. The screams on the mountainside took on a different note, one so frantic that Satar lifted his face from the trembling earth and looked back over his shoulder to see what had happened. “There is no God but God!” he gasped, his tone altogether different from the one he’d used a moment before. That had been terror. This? This was awe.

Wings and body the red of hot iron in a blacksmith’s forge, the dragon ascended into the air. Had it sprung from nowhere? Or had it somehow burst from the side of the mountain? Satar didn’t see it till it was already airborne, so he never could have said for certain, which was a grief in him till the end of his days. But the earthquakes stopped after tJiat, which at least let him have an opinion. Eyes? If the dragon might have been red-hot iron, its eyes were white-hot iron. Just for the tiniest fraction of an instant, the dragon’s gaze touched Satar. That touch, however brief, made the mujahid grovel facedown among the rocks again. No man, save perhaps the Prophet himself, was meant to meet a dragon eye to eye.

As if it were the shadow of death, Satar felt the dragon’s regard slide away from him. He looked up once more, but remained on his knees as if at prayer. Many of the mujahideen were praying; he heard their voices rising up to Heaven, and hoped God cared to listen.

But, to the godless Shuravi in the helicopter gunships, the dragon was not something that proved His glory to a sinful mankind. It was something risen from the Afghan countryside—and, like everything else risen from the Afghan countryside, something to be beaten down and destroyed. They swung their machines against it, machine guns spitting fire. One of them still carried a pod of rockets under its stubby wing. Those, too, raced toward the dragon.

They are brave, Satar thought. He’d thought that about Russians before. They are brave, but oh, by God the Compassionate, the Merciful, they are stupid.

Had the helicopters not fired on it, the dragon might have ignored them, as a man intent on his business might ignore mosquitoes or bees. But if he were bitten, if he were stung . . . The dragon’s roar of fury made the earth tremble yet again. It swung toward the gunships that had annoyed it. Helicopters were maneuver-able. But the dragon? The awakened dragon, like the jinni of whom the Prophet spoke, could have been a creature of fire, not a creature of matter at all. It moved like thought, now here, now there. One enormous forepaw lashed out. A helicopter gunship, smashed and broken, slammed mto the side of the mountain and burst into flame.

Satar couldn’t blame the Soviets in the other two gunships for fleeing then, fleeing as fast as their machines would carry them. He couldn’t blame them, but it did them no good. The dragon swatted down the second helicopter as easily as it had the first. Then it went after the last one, the one that had launched rockets against it. Again, Satar could not have denied the gunship crew’s courage. When they saw the dragon gaining on them, they spun their machine in the air and fired their Gatling at the great, impossible beast.

Again, that courage did them no good at all. Dragons were supposed to breathe fire. This one did, and the helicopter, burning, burning, crashed to the ground. The dragon looked around, as if wondering what to do next.

Down in Bulola, the Russians serving the Katyusha, launchers had had time to reload again. Roaring like lions, roaring like the damned, their rockets raced toward the dragon.

They are brave, too, Satar thought. But I thought no one could be stupider than the men in those gunships, and now I see I was wrong.

Sergei said, “I haven’t smoked any hashish lately, and even if I had, it couldn’t make me see that.”

“Bozhemoi!” Vladimir sounded like— was—a man shaken to the core. “Not even chars would make me see that.”

Sergei wasn’t so sure he was right. The local narcotic, a lethal blend of opium and, some said, horse manure, might make a man see almost anything. But Sergei had never had the nerve to try the stuff, and he saw the scarlet dragon anyhow. He was horribly afraid it would see him, too. Sergeant Krikor rattled off something in Armenian. He made the sign of the cross, something Sergei had never seen him do before. Then he seemed to remember his Russian: “The people in this land have been fighting against us all along. Now the land itself is rising up.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Vladimir demanded. Just then, the dragon flamed the last bumblebee out of the sky, which made a better answer than any Krikor could have given. The dragon looked around, as if wondering what to do next. That was when the Katyusha crews launched their next salvos—straight at the beast. Sergei had never known them to reload their launchers so fast.

That didn’t fill him with delight. “Noooo!” he screamed, a long wail of despair.

“You fools!” Krikor cried.

Vladimir remained foulmouthed to the end: “Fucking shitheaded idiots! How the fuck you going to shoot down something the size of a mountain?”

Katyushas weren’t made for antiaircraft fire. But, against a target that size, most of them struck home. And they must have hurt, too, for the dragon roared in pain and fury, where it had all but ignored the helicopter gunships’ weapons. But hurting it and killing it were very different things. With a scream that rounded inside Sergei’s mind as much as in his ears; the dragon flew down toward the Ural trucks. It breathed flame again, once, twice, three times, and the trucks were twisted, molten metal. A couple of the men who’d launched the Katyushas had time to scream. Somebody from the trench near Sergei squeezed off a banana clip at the dragon. If that wasn’t idiocy, he didn’t know what was. “Noooo!” he cried again. If Katyushas couldn’t kill it, what would Kalashnikov rounds do? Nothing. Less than nothing.

No. More than nothing. Much more than nothing. The Kalashnikov rounds made the beast notice the Red Army men in the trench. Its head swung their way. Its great, blazing eyes met Sergei’s, just for a moment. Its mouth, greater still, opened wide.

Sergei jerked his assault rifle up to his shoulder and fired off all the ammunition he had left in the clip. It wasn’t that he thought it would do any good. But how, at that point, could it possibly hurt?

Fire, redder and hotter than the sun.

Blackness.

“Truly,” Satar said to his father, “there is no God but God.”

“Truly,” the older man agreed. His left foot, his left leg halfway up to the knee, were gone, but the wound was healing. The Russian medic— now among the dead—had done an honest job with it. Maybe Satar’s father could get an artificial foot one day. Till then, he would be able to get around, after a fashion, on crutches.

Satar said, “After the dragon destroyed the Shuravi at the edge of the village, I thought it would wreck Bulola, too.”

“So did I,” his father said. “But it knew who the pious and Godfearing were, or at least—“ He chuckled wryly. “—who had the sense not to shoot at it.”

“Well . . . yes.” Satar wished his father hadn’t said anything so secular. He would have to pray to bring him closer to God. He looked around, thinking on what they had won. “Bulola is ours again. This whole valley is ours again. The Russians will never dare come back here.”

“I should hope not!” his father said. “After all, the dragon might wake up again.”

He and Satar both looked to the mountainside. That streak of reddish rock . . . That was where the dragon had come from, and where it had returned. If Satar let his eyes drift ever so slightly out of focus, he could, or thought he could, discern the great beast’s outline. Would it rouse once more? If it is the will of God, he thought, and turned his mind to other things.

The dragon slept. For a while, till its slumber deepened, it had new dreams. The black tulip roared out of Kabul airport, firing flares as it went to confuse any antiaircraft missiles the dukhi might launch. Major Chorny—whose very name meant black—took a flask of vodka from his hip and swigged. He hated Code 200 missions, and hated them worst when they were like this. In the black tulip’s cargo bay lay a zinc coffin. It was bound for Tambov, maybe three hundred kilometers south and east of Moscow. It had no windows. It was welded shut. Major Chorny would have to stay with it every moment till it went into the ground, to make sure Sergei’s grieving kin didn’t try to open it. For it held not the young man’s mortal remains but seventy-five kilos of sand, packed tight in plastic bags to keep it from rustling.

As far as the major knew, no mortal remains of this soldier had ever been found. He was just . . . gone. By the time the black tulip crossed from Afghan to Soviet airspace, Chorny was very drunk indeed. Trish Cacek was also in my last anthology, and her story therein was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. She didn’t win, but that’s okay because she already has a Stoker and a World Fantasy Award. She is the author of a short story collection, Leavings, and a new novel from Tor titled Canyons.

“Belief” was the second story Trish hit me with for Redshift; the first one just didn’t work for me, but when I started this one I knew it would. Some stories just have yes written all over them, and sometimes you can’t put your finger on why. This was one of those.

Yes.

Belief

P. D. Cacek

They said there’d be some disorientation in the beginning. The trouble was, he couldn’t remember who they were or how long he’d been there. Wherever there was. But that was a question he’d leave until he felt— something. . . anything—until the disorientation they told him about was gone. Until then, he might as well just relax. Yeah, that was the ticket, just kick back and go offline for a minute. Who’d told him that? A strong voice . . . rough like wood and deep . . . A tatt man, but old and stooped. . . white hair and sparkling blue eyes. . . hands just as rough as his voice . . . working hands he called them, hands that knew bow to dig holes and mend fences and thread the slimiest worms onto fishhooks and lift baby birds back into their nests . . . “Man’s gotta know when to kick back and go offline now V again, boy. Man’s gotta know when to just take a minute and unpeel his eyes to the wonders around him.”

His grandfather . . . the words wrapped within the rough, deep, old man’s voice like warm bread around jam. He remembered. Chancy, Robert F. Private/First Class. SF# 72-114v-001011-nfm09330. Thank God.

Sitting up, he swung his legs over the side of a narrow, flat platform. It was soft, the surface dimpling when he pressed down on it with his hand; the covering cool and white. A scent lingering against his fingertips when he lifted them to his face. Summer winds and chlorine . . . helping Grandma hang the wash, the wet windblown sheets fluttering against him. A bed, he was on a bed. He laughed out loud and heard it answered by another. A rail-thin old man walked out of the shadows beyond the bed, laughing and clap-gnarled-fingered hands. His skin was so black it made the ring of fuzzy white hair that encircled his head look like burnished silver. His clothing was practically rags, the sleeves of his checkered shirt hanging in tatters and the cuffs of his pants frayed.

“ ‘Memberin’ now, are you? “

Chancy straightened his shoulders, absently tugging the front of his tunic as if he were facing a brigadier general. The old man’s eyes and grin widened at the same rate.

“Whoo-wee, will yor lookit all dem medals. You be some kinda war hero, ain’tcha? Ah seen boys no older’n wid less . . . some wid more, but none is nice as yorn.”

“They’re not medals,” Chancy answered. “Combat personnel don’t wear medals in the field.”

“No?” The old man seemed disappointed. “Well, dey be right purdy, anyways. Ah ‘specially likes dis one.”

He looked down when the old man tapped the face of his COMLink, tracing the spiderweb crack across the front with a thick, yellow nail. There’d been a pain . . . something entering his chest. The old man smiled at his broken reflection. What the hell happened? Where was the rest of the squad? A small ripple of displacement pitched him forward.

The old man was stronger than he looked.

“It be aw’right now, son. You jist tryin’ too hard. It’ll come back t’you when it’s time. Best not t’worry yoreself more’n you have to. You didn’t come as far as some, but you came yer own way, an’ dat can be as muddy as any.” He helped Chancy down off the bed and held out a hand. “I be called Samuel.”

It probably took a moment longer than it should have before his own hand closed around the offered one, but the old man didn’t seem to notice.

“Chancy, Robert F. Private/First Class. SF# 72-114v-00—“

“Chancy? Dat be yore name? Ah ‘members a stubborn ol’ mule we done had name o’ Chancy. Wouldn’t do a lick o’ plowin’ less’n he got his stalk o’ sugar cane reg’lur.” The old man slapped Chancy lightly on the shoulder. “ ‘Peers t’me dat we hadda put dat ol’ boy down ‘cause o’ it. Da massa, he didn’t cotton t’orneriness in man or beast. Lost m’own daddy ‘cause o’ dat. You ain’t gonna be dat stubborn, is you?”

“No, sir. Please, sir, can you tell me where I am?”

The smile etched deeper into the wrinkles covering the man’s cheeks as he reached out to take Chancy’s arm. “Oh, ah ain’t no sir, son, an’ nebber been one, so you don’t haffa go callin’ me dat. But we best be goin’ now. You feels up t’it?”

Chancy angled his body away from the touch. “Go where? And you didn’t answer my first question. Where am I?”

The old man just kept on smiling. “Yep, ain’t a long way, but it’s a ways t’go. Yep, dat be true a’nuff. Best we git started.”

Chancy looked down before taking a step. The flooring was mono-tone gray and featureless, similar to the walkways on the transport—function regulating form. He looked up, turned his head from side to side. The walls and ceiling were hidden in shadows too thick to see through, the only light coming from some unknown source directly over the bed. Gravity, similar to that on the transport. Wherever he was, it was familiar enough to make him brave. “I asked you a question, old man, and I expect an answer. Now.”

His combat glove clamped around the threadbare front of the man’s work shirt and pulled. A wooden button the color of old cream tore away from the material and struck Chancy’s chest armor like a . . . a

. . .

Something small and fast. . . a projectile. What’s it called?

The gravity shifted for a moment beneath him.

“Whoa now, see dat . . . you bein’ jist as stubborn as dat ol’ mule.” Laughing, the old man gently pried open Chancy’s grip and patted the hand within the glove. “An’ dat ain’t gonna help none. Ah know all

‘bout dat. Don’t go pushin’ at yoreself, you’ll know when you know, so dere’s no use in gettin’ yore feathers ruffled up ‘til den. Now, best we be goin’. You feel up’t walkin’ or you want me t’carry you?

Ah cin, if you like.”

Chancy looked down at the stooped, raggedy figure and shook his head. For some reason, there was no doubt in his mind that if he asked, the old man would have done just that without breaking a sweat.

“No, thank you . . . I can walk. Is it far?”

But the old man was already shuffling toward the shadows, shaking his head. “Is it far? Far’s far or far’s short depending on where you going, ain’t it? You come along now an’ we’ll see jist how far we gots t’go afore we git where we going.”

Chancy’s head began to pound. The old man was crazy, and if he stood there trying to make sense of what was being said—or not said— he’d go crazy, too. Grunting low in his throat, he got three steps away from the bed before noticing how naked he felt.

“My gun . . . and combat visor,” he yelled into the shadows where the old man disappeared. “Where are they? I need them.”

“Dey be safe, don’t you worry ‘bout dat. Come along now, Chancy.” A low chuckle echoed from the darkness. “Ah jist love dat name. Chancy. . . jist like dat ol’ mule, stubborn as da day is long. Hee-hee.”

“Hee. Hee,” Chancy muttered, and followed the sound of laughter into the shadows. He didn’t remember opening a door, but suddenly he was outside, squinting into bright gray light. The landscape before him was one of mist and clouds, the ground hidden beneath an undulating blanket of fog. Although Chancy couldn’t see the sky or make out the horizon’s demarcation line, every few minutes flashes of sheet lightning would ignite huge areas above his head. And each time he’d cringe and hike his shoulders, waiting for the boom of thunder that never came.

Not thunder. . . something else . . . something worse than just a sound. .. a loudness that exploded when it got inside a man and turned him inside out something. . .

A pain ripped Chancy open and dropped him to his knees. He’d been in the lead, racing his best friend, Jacksen, to the top of a steep, bare rock incline while the enemy fired down at them. It was a game . . . whichever of them got up the hill the fastest won. Brownie points, that’s all it was. A game the two of them played at least once in every battle they were in. Just a stupid game to see who was the fastest, the bravest while bolts of lights and flame shot overhead and bullets buzzed through the thick hot air like . . . like . . .

‘Jacksen—I’ve been hit! Ohmygod, Medic! Med—“

Gagging at the back-flush of copper and bile that filled his mouth, Chancy looked down to see his heart. . . what was left of his heart shudder through the ragged, dripping hole in his chest. Too late . . . I’m going to die. God. . .

He remembered reaching into the hole, to see what it would feel like. He remembered. But this time pain—and wound—disappeared the moment he touched it.

“Startin’ to come back, is it?” Samuel asked. “Figured it all out, did you?”

Chancy sat back on his knees and ran his gloved hands against the solid chest plate. No hole. No wound. No pain.

“I really am dead, aren’t I? I was killed in battle.”

Samuel clapped his hands and smiled from ear to ear.

“Dere you go . . . ah knew you’d be gettin’ it faster’n most. Must be da name. Dat ol’ Chancy mule mighta been one contrary animal, but ain’t no one could say he weren’t smart as a brand-new tack.” The smile lessened just a bit when he patted Chancy’s shoulder. “You be fine wid dis, son. You dead, is all, and nothin’ else bad cin happen t’you no more.”

Dead. I’m dead. Didn’t seem so bad when he said it to himself like that. “But I don’t feel dead.”

“Well, ‘course you don’t, son. Dead is jist like livin’ ‘ceptin’ it ain’t.”

Makes sense, in a way. “Is Jacksen here? I mean, did she get shot, too?”

The old man stretched out his arms and shrugged. “Don’t rightly know dat. Could be, ah suppose.”

“You don’t know? Aren’t you an angel?”

“Me?” Samuel’s laughter rang in Chancy’s ears as he helped him up. “Oh wait’ll ah tell m’ mammy V

daddy dat. Ol’ Samuel a’ angel . . who-wee, if dey ain’t gonna bust a gut on dat one. Ol’ Samuel a’

angel.”

“You’re not?”

“Not by a long shot, son . . . ah jist be one o’ da many, dats all. Jist one o’ da many. Yore friend mabbe here or not, ah wouldn’t know nothin’ ‘bout dat. See, yore grandpappy, he ax me t’come fetch you on account o’ him bein’ a mite busy. But he be seein’ you shortly, don’t you worry none.”

“My . . . grandfather?”

“Dat right, he be here soon t’take you up front. Oh, my, jist look at you ... all messy ‘n’ stained like dis. Won’t do, jist won’t do. Here, let me jist brush dis off.”

Chancy watched Samuel’s gnarled fingers brush and pluck at the leggings of his uniform even though there was nothing to clean off. The old dead man was crazy.

Dead. I’m really dead. Chancy closed his eyes and tried to take a deep breath the way he always did just before going into battle to steady himself, make himself strong. But all he felt was his chest muscles going up and down. He couldn’t feel the air filling his lungs or the cool rush of it through his nose and across his upper palate. He couldn’t feel anything except the ground beneath his feet and the touch of the old man’s hands against his legs.

“I’m dead.” The words got easier to say now that he was certain. “And my grandfather’s . . . here.”

“Course he be here,” Samuel said without pausing in his task. “Where else a good man like him be ‘cept here?”

“Heaven?” Chancy stared into the swirling gray nothingness that surrounded them. When he was little, before he’d outgrown “Once Upon a Times” and “Happily Ever Afters,” his grandfather had told him all about the place where good people go when they die. All white fluffy clouds and streets lined with gold. Just another fairy tale. “This is Heaven?”

Samuel looked up at him and winked. “Dere be only one place.”

“Then he lied to me.”

“Wha’ you talkin’ about, boy? Who lied ‘bout wha’?”

“He did,” Chancy said as another flash of unseen lightning rippled overhead. “My grandfather. This isn’t anything like the Heaven he described.” He shook his head. “There’s nothing here.”

The wrinkles deepened around Samuel’s eyes as he stood up. “Wha’ you see, boy? You tell ol’ Samuel wha’ you see.”

Chancy told him and watched pity fill the old man’s eyes. When he finished they stood there—wherever in the nothing they were—silent as stones. As the grave, Chancy thought, and would have probably smiled at the thought if Samuel hadn’t spoken up first. And looked as sad as he did.

“Aw, boy, wha’ you musta been through t’change you like dat. Musta been worse’n anything.” Reaching out, he squeezed Chancy’s arm just above the United Earth insignia patch. “Yore grandpappy’ll ‘splain things. Come along now, Chancy. Oh, ah know . . . mebbe you move better wid dis.”

Another wink and smile, and the old man suddenly reached into a swirling bank of nothing. And hauled out what looked to be a stout, jointed stalk of pale green grass about two meters long. The bladelike leaves at the topmost end rustled softly when Samuel broke the stalk in half, then in half again, giving Chancy the bigger of the two pieces.

Clear liquid dripped from the ragged edge.

“Well, don’t jist stand dere, son, dis be da sweetest cane you ever did taste, even if ah says so m’self.”

Without another word Samuel stuck the ragged end of his piece into his mouth and crunched down on it with his back molars. When deep cracks appeared along the waxy surface, the old man took it out of his mouth and used his fingers to pry out the spongy white pulp, which he then popped greedily into his mouth.

“Sweet as a good-night kiss,” Samuel said as he chewed the pulp hard and spit it out, only to immediately replace it with another chunk. “Goan, boy . . . sink yore teeth inta dat cane. Jist chew it ‘til it be dry ‘n’ spit it out.”

Chancy did exactly as the old man did, reeling at the first explosions of sweetness that cascaded over his tongue as he crushed the stalk with his teeth. He’d never tasted anything like it before. None of the synthetic sweetening agents he was used to could compare to it.

The first chunk of pulp almost choked him until he got the hang of chewing and swallowing at the same time. He was laughing out loud by the time he finished his third chunk.

“This is ...” He didn’t have the words to describe the flavor. “It’s wonderful, but how? Where did you get it?”

Samuel stuffed another chunk between his teeth and jerked his head to the left. “Well, right’chere. Dis be da best cane field on da mighty Missa’sip. Sweet as hunny, ain’t it?”

It was, just as sweet as honey, but that still didn’t answer his question. Chancy let the stalk drop from his hand and watched it disappear beneath the thick mist.

“Samuel, there’s nothing here.”

“Dat where you be wrong, son. Here.” He wipe his hand off on the leg of his worn pants and held it out.

“Take ol’ Samuel’s hand.” It sounded enough like a command that Chancy took the old man’s hand without thinking. In the next second, thinking was still impossible. The mist and fog were gone, and they were standing on a rutted dirt road at the edge of a massive field of sugarcane. Tiny yellow butterflies flitted over the rushing stalks while blackbirds, trilling songs behind them like contrails, stitched wispy white clouds to the bright blue bowl of the sky.

Opposite the field, on the other side of the road, was a small cabin nestled beneath tall trees dotted with fragrant white blossoms and overhung with long strands of gray moss. Beyond that was a pond ringed wiith cattail and willow where fat, silver fish leaped after flies.

And beyond that, shimmering like a ribbon of sapphire, was the river. Da mighty Missa’sip, Samuel called it. Chancy could hear frogs croakng from the direction of the river. The whole thing—the trees, the cabin, the river—looked like a pic-ture out of one of his history books.

“This i s . . . Heaven?” “Purdy, ain’t it?” Samuel asked as he dropped Chancy’s hand and went back to working another chunk of pulp out of the stalk. “Dis be m’ Heaven. Yore grandpappy’s Heaven’s dif’rent’n mine, yore’s might jist be dif’rent still. No way o’ knowin’.”

He smiled around a wad so big it hurt Chancy’s cheek just looking at it. “But ah don’t minds sharin’ mine

‘til you figure out what yorn’s gonna look like. Lessen, o’ course, you like dat foggy, foggy dew place.”

“No!” Chancy yelled, startling a grasshopper off a leaf and onto the dusty ground. Dead or not, he could feel the ghost of a blush inch across his cheeks. “I mean, no . . . I’d like to share this with you. If you don’t mind.”

“Don’t mind a’tall, you be welcome. A’right den, you got yore cane and done munched some. You feel up t’walkin’ now?”

“Yes, sir ... Samuel.”

“Well, git on up den, Chancy.”

“How far?”

“As far as we needs t’go, ah reckon. You’ll know it when you sees it.” Chancy kept himself from asking anything else until the cane field gave way to peach orchards that lined both sides of the road and he saw the children. There must have been hundreds . . . thousands upon thousands of them playing beneath the soft rain of pink and white blossoms.

A part of him understood that children died, that death was as indiscriminate of the young as it was the old, but until he saw them— all of them—he’d never thought about it, never let himself think about it. Or about how many of the children laughing and running through the fragrant sweet air he had personally sent here.

War was war and the enemy was whoever you were told it was Whoever you were told to fight. Blindly and without question, like the good soldier you are.

Were.

The sudden pain he felt had nothing to do with the projectile that killed him.

“Dat a’right, Chancy,” Samuel said, nodding to a group of children— yellow, brown, white—who’d noticed them standing there and shouted greetings. “It be hard t’see dem so young, but you gotta know dey be happy here. Some o’ ‘em even happier den when dey was breathin’. You keep dat in mind and you be fine.”

One of the children who’d shouted, a boy of about six or seven with golden skin and hair and eyes the color of starless space, ran up to them and hugged Chancy around the waist. His touch changed the orchard into a paradise where peacocks strutted in the shadows of towering minarets. Nirvana. Another little boy pushed the first away and brought Chancy endless rolling plains, thick with grazing buffalo and deer. The air was warm and scented with sage and sweet-grass, and high overhead an eagle rode a thermal to the Land of the Sky People.

He became the new game. Children nocked around him like hungry little birds, sharing glimpses of their afterworlds with him. One after another the images came and went. The gold-paved streets his grandfather had told him about became a cloud-field where incandescent beings with dove wings flew; then shifted to a rainbow bridge that glittered across an empty sky to a cool, blue water pool beneath a red-stone arch where a king in a golden throne slept in the Dream Time and thought of giant sharks and palm trees swaying gently in the—

. . . so beautiful. . .

“Please . . . stop,” Chancy said to the little girl dancing while the feathered serpents flew rings around the sun. “Samuel, please make them stop. It’s too much. I can’t—“

“Dat be all now, chillins, you all best git back t’yore playin’. We needs t’be up t’da front.”

Samuel’s quiet orchard returned the moment the children stopped touching him.

“You are taking him to the battle? “ a pale boy in a loose-fitting robe asked. “Oh, Samuel, may I come, too? I am almost a man.”

“Ah cin see dat, Eliyahu, but iffen you come who be watchin’ over da youngens? No, you best t’stay . . . but ah’ll tell yore pappy ‘bout how you asked. He be right proud, ah bet. An dat goes for all o’ you, too. Yore pappys ‘n’ mammys be so proud knowin’ yore thinkin’ o’ ‘em. Dey be back right soon now ah think, so y’all jist do what comes nat’ral. But don’t you go eatin’ up all m’peaches now, you hear. Ahs got me a han-kerin’ t’bake up some cobbler when ahs git back.”

Only a few children, who shared Samuel’s vision of Heaven, laughed out loud before scampering away. The rest followed more slowly, with only nods to show they accepted being dismissed. Chancy watched them resume the games that his and Samuel’s presence had disrupted; each child safe within their heavenly visions but not alone. Never alone.

He would have stayed right there watching them, while the petals drifted down around him, if Samuel hadn’t tugged on his sleeve.

“Come along now, Chancy . . . da chillins be a’right and we needs t’git on.”

“To the battle?”

Samuel reached up and picked a golden peach from the tree, gently rubbing the fuzz off between his leathery palms before handing it to Chancy.

“You jist take a bite o’ dat, boy. Betcha ain’t tasted nothin’ like it in a month o’ Sundays go t’meetin’. Goan, eat it now whilst you got da chance.” Samuel laughed as he turned and headed up the dirt road.

“Yesshur, ol’ Chancy gots t’have da chance t’eats dat peach. Yesshur. Eat dat ol’ peach, Chancy, while you gots da chance. Hee-hee, ah do makes m’self laugh.”

Chancy felt his mouth water as he looked at the peach. Its pinkish-yellow skin glistened with dew drops. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a real piece of unprocessed fruit, let alone a peach freshly picked from a tree . . . but, then again, he couldn’t really remember what being alive felt like.

“Samuel?”

But when he looked up, Samuel was little more than a moving shadow far up the road. It was amazing how fast the old man could walk.

Tossing the peach to a little girl with copper hair and bright green eyes, Chancy adjusted the straps on his combat vest and fell into the prescribed steady jog designed to eat up miles at the minimum expense of physical endurance. Not that he had to worry about that now.

The orchard stretched on for miles, and the sound of children accompanied him every step of the way. Until he reached Samuel’s side.

“Where are we?” Chancy asked in a whisper. “Whose place is this?” Samuel turned toward him and licked his lips. A cold star-field surrounded them, as stark and barren as the glistening volcanic outcrop on which they were standing. The star patterns looked vaguely familiar, but Chancy couldn’t remember from where.

“Ain’t no one’s in particular,” Samuel said, “and ev’rybody’s in general, ah guess. But dis be da place we’s goan to.” “This is where the . . . battle is?”

“Yep, right over dat ways a mite.” Samuel pointed to a spot on the desolate horizon and he saw it—the faint red glow leaching into the darkness between the stars. “You jist keep walkin’ da way you been. You got folks waitin’ for you.”

Chancy nodded and readjusted his armor, the rush of adrenaline pricking the flesh at the back of his neck. He was a soldier, and this was what he’d been trained to do.

“You coming?” he asked the old man.

“Oh, ahs be along directly. Jist don’t wanna spoil yore welcomin’ s’all. Goan on now, boy, it ain’t far now . . . dey be waitin’ for you.”

Chancy didn’t ask who was waiting or how far he’d have to go, he just went. . . like the good soldier that he was. But even if he had asked, Chancy soon realized it wouldn’t have made much difference, at least to the question of distance. There were no prominent features on the brittle landscape he could gauge a visual against, no way of telling how far he’d already gone . . . no real proof that he was even moving forward except for the ever-increasing size of the glow on the horizon.

He heard the fighting before he saw it. And saw only the soldier standing between him and the battlefield before he saw the weapon aimed at his belly.

“Halt!” The voice was muffled behind the combat helmet. “Identify yourself.”

“Chancy, Robert F. Private/First Class.”

“Advance, Private.” The voice said. “Ready for some action?”

“Sir,” Chancy yelled when he got close enough to see the rank etched into the chest armor. “Yes, sir. Always ready, sir.”

The captain nodded and pushed back the helmet’s visor. She was a beautiful woman despite the broken shaft of an arrow sticking out of her right eye socket.

“Good, I like a man who’s always ready. You carrying?”

Chancy looked down and saw the weapon hanging loose and comfortable in his hand. Just like it was supposed to be. Swinging it up toward the visor opening on his own helmet, he twisted the pulse rifle one-quarter turn counterclockwise so the officer could see that the charge lights were Four-for-Four, fully loaded and ready for bear.

“Sir, yes, sir.” He nodded in appreciation when she signaled him to stand down, and he nodded toward the arrow. “You need some help with that?”

The captain’s remaining eye was bloodshot and bulged a bit from the pressure of the arrow in her brain, but it shifted over easily enough. “No, I’m getting used to it. Looks like you had a little fun, too.”

Chancy looked down at the ragged hole where his chest armor had imploded and chuckled softly.

“Yeah, just a little. It was a WP tracer. Vietnam era.” “Nasty,” the captain said, “but I’ve seen worse. Those Huns, man, now they can be brutal. I got a couple men on point right now wearing flat-tops down to their chins. They’re not much good at sniping any-more, but not having a brain never stopped a combat soldier before.”

Chancy laughed politely, knowing it was expected, and ran his hand over the pulse rifle’s flat-black housing. “Permission to speak, sir?”

The captain smiled, the jagged end of the shaft vibrating slightly as her face muscles contracted. “I appreciate it, although we don’t stand on ceremony too much anymore. Permission granted.”

Chancy turned toward the red glow and nodded. “Why don’t they understand they can’t do this?”

“Human nature,” she said. “But don’t worry, they’ll figure it out the Same way we did. Okay, Private, head on up and report to the front line. Somebody’ll direct you to your position. And one more thing, don’t refer to Sitting Bull as an Indigenous Continental.” She tapped the arrow shaft. “He doesn’t like the term.”

“Sir,” Chancy called over his shoulder. “Yes, sir.” One meter, two . . . twenty; his boots shattering the brittle ground as he walked. Twenty meters, thirty, and a shape—long and angular— slowly detached itself from the jagged horizon line.

Ten meters, five, one, and the old man in sun-bleached bib overalls and white work shirt pushed the brim of the woven straw hat back on his head. Chancy always remembered him wearing it low despite the time of day or night. . . claimed it kept the UV rays out of his eyes. “How you doing, Grandpa?”

The cancer that had killed him had taken a lot of the meat off the old man’s bones, but the smile was the same, and so was the long, loose-jointed stride.

“Not too bad for an old goat,” his grandfather said, and slapped

Chancy hard enough across the shoulders to make the clips on his armor rattle. “Good to see you, Robbie. I was wondering when you’d show up.”

“Guess it was a little farther than I thought it’d be.” He swung the rifle over one shoulder and hugged the old man until he could hear their bones creak under the pressure. “I lost it, Grandpa . . . I didn’t see anything . . . but it can be so beautiful.”

“It’s more than just beauty, Robbie. Much more,” his grandfather whispered, “and that’s why we have to protect it. It’s the only thing we have left.”

Chancy stepped back and fingered his weapon, nodding. Remembering. He’d heard it before, almost the same words, in fact. The only thing we have left. Earth’s final hope to reestablish itself on another planet. An old song made fresh in the resinging: Claim it and rename it.

Eminent domain on a planetary level.

And the unnamed, unclaimed planet was more than beautiful. It was perfect. Breathable atmosphere, fresh water, soil so rich seedlings seemed to mature overnight. A world so much like Earth and so close, in relative terms and warp speeds, that it had seemed a godsend.

An archaic term—and idea—that had been all but forgotten on Earth, but which was instantly reinstated into the vernacular when the initial telemetry images began coming in.

It was Paradise. Heaven.

Until the first colonists arrived and were killed. Murdered. One batch of hopefuls after another was found shot, scalped, butchered, disemboweled, or blown apart. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, someone had said. And it only got worse when the Defense Guard was deployed. The number of casualties rose exponentially with the number of military personnel assigned to skirmish lines, with increasing numbers of bodies showing flash residue from pulse rifles.

Paradise. Lost.

And the theologians still didn’t suspect Heaven could be literal.

“You ready, boy?”

Chancy slipped the safety off and nodded. Three steps was all it took to the edge of the ridge. Below, bathed by the light of a hundred thousand fires, the battle raged. It was something that neither Dante nor Bosch could ever have dreamed in their worst fever dream.

Two great armies—one living, one immortal—faced each other across a blood-soaked field strewn with body parts and shattered pieces of equipment. Some part of Chancy could still remember the commands, could still recognize some of the pieces . . . but even as he watched the memories of what he’d been were fading.

A. soldier dissolved from a combination hit of thermite and flaming arrows. Another spun to the ground pierced by a Roman javelin. Two more were riddled into confetti by WWI German machine guns. And each time they fell Chancy watched their souls drift across toward the opposite side of the field. Toward his side.

But they kept coming.

“They can’t win,” Chancy whispered, because it suddenly seemed too foolish a thing to say out loud.

“Why don’t they just give up?”

His grandfather grunted. “They don’t know any better. Mankind always thinks it can win, no matter what. Now, you ready, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right then. Do just like I taught you, Robbie . . . aim to kill clean. You don’t need to hurt a man more than he’s already hurt him-self..” Tugging the old hat back down over his eyes, his grandfather lifted an antique squirrel rifle that family legend said had been passed down Bom firstborn to firstborn. It would have gone to him next, when his daddy died. “Let’s go, boy.”

“Yes, sir. Can I ask you something first?”

His grandfather turned back and looked at him, smiling. Chancy could see the light from the battle fires reflected in the old man’s eyes.

“Go ahead, boy.”

“Is this—?” Chancy throat suddenly felt like it was closing in on it-self. “Is this Hell, Grandpa?”

The smile widened and deepened the wrinkles along his grand-Other’s weather-hardened cheeks. “Only for some, Robbie. Only for some.”

Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool, has degrees in mathe-matics and engineering, and applied to become a cosmonaut in 1991, with an eye toward a guest spot on Mir. Alas, he didn’t make it, but instead of keeping that creaky Russian wreck in orbit he turned to full-time writing, producing more than ten sf novels, including Raft, The Time Ships (a marvelous sequel to The Time Machine), Manifold: Time, Moonseed, and, recently, Manifold: Space. He also cowrote The Light of Other Days with Arthur C. Clarke. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award and the John W. Camp-bell Memorial Award, among others.

I tracked him down at l-Con, a science fiction convention on Long Island—and eventually, lucky for me, got him to write the following.

In the Un-Black

Stephen Baxter

On the day La-ba met Ca-si she saved his life. She hadn’t meant to. It was un-Doctrine. It just happened. But it changed everything.

It had been a bad day for La-ba.

She had been dancing. That wasn’t un-Doctrine, not exactly, but the cadre leaders disapproved. She was the leader of the dance, and she got stuck with Cesspit detail for ten days. It was hard, dirty work, the worst. And would-be deathers flourished there, in the pit. They would come swimming through the muck itself , to get you.

That was what happened just two hours after she started work. Naked, she was standing knee-deep in a river of unidentifiable, odorless muck.

Two strong hands grabbed her ankles and pulled her flat on her face. Suddenly her eyes and mouth and nose and ears were full of dense sticky waste.

La-ba folded up her body and reached down to her toes. She found hands on her ankles, and farther up a shaven skull, wide misshapen ears.

She recognized him from those ears. He was a We-ku, one of a batch of look-alikes who had come down from the Birthing Vat at the same time and had clung together ever since. If they had ever had their own names, they had long abandoned them.

She wasn’t about to be deathed by a We-ku. She pressed the heels of her hands into his eyes and shoved.

Her ankles started to slide out of his hands. The harder he gripped, the more his clutching fingers slipped. She pointed her toes and shoved harder.

Then she was free.

She pushed up to the surface and blew out a huge mouthful of dirt. She prepared to take on the We-ku again, elbows and knees ready, fingers clawing for the knife strapped to her thigh. But he didn’t come for her, not for one heartbeat, two, three. She took the risk of wiping her eyes clear. The We-ku had already found another victim. He was pressing a body into the dirt with his great fat hands. If he got his victim to the floor, his piston legs would crack the spine or splinter the skull in seconds.

The We-ku was a surging monster of blood and filth. His eyes were rimmed with blackness where she had bruised him.

Something in La-ba rose up.

At a time like this, a time of overcrowding, there was a lot of deathing. You could see there were too many babies swarming out of the Birthing Vat, the great pink ball that hovered in the air at the very center of the Observation Post. At rally hours you could look beyond the Vat to the other side of the Post, where the people marched around on the roof with their heads pointing down at you, and you could see that almost every Cadre Square was overfull.

Commissaries would come soon, bringing Memory. They would Cull if they had to. The less the Commissaries had to Cull, the happier they would be. It was the duty of every citizen of every cadre to bring down their numbers.

If you did well you would fly on a Shuttle out of here. You would fly to Earth, where life un-ended. That was worded by the cadre leaders. And if you hid and cowered, even if the amateur deathers didn’t get to you, then the Old Man would. That was worded in the dorms.

La-ba had no reason to un-believe this. She had seen hundreds deathed by others. She had deathed seventeen people herself.

La-ba was tall, her body lithe, supple: good at what she was trained for, deathing and sexing and hard physical work.

La-ba was five years old. Already half her life was gone. She leapt out of the muck and onto the We-ku’s back, her knife in her hand.

The We-ku didn’t know whether to finish the death at his feet or deal with the skinny menace on his back. And he was confused because what La-ba was doing was un-Doctrine. That confusion gave La-ba the seconds she needed.

Still, she almost had to saw his head clean off before he stopped strugglingHe sank at last into the dirt, which was now stained with whorls of deep crimson. The head, connected only by bits of gristle and skin, bobbed in the muck’s sticky currents.

The We-ku’s intended victim struggled to his feet. He was about La-ba’s height and age, she guessed, with a taut, well-muscled body. He was naked, but crusted with dirt.

She was aroused. Deathing always aroused her. Glancing down at his crotch, at the stiff member that stuck out of the dirt there, she saw that this other felt the same.

“You crimed,” he breathed, and he stared at her with eyes that were bright white against the dirt. He was right. She should have let the deathing go ahead, and then take out the We-ku. Then there would have been two deaths, instead of one. Un-Doctrine.

She glanced around. Nobody was close. Nobody had seen how the We-ku died.

Nobody but this man, this intended victim.

“Ca-si,” he said. “Cadre Fourteen.” That was on the other side of the sky.

“La-ba. Cadre Six. Will you report?” If he did she could be summarily executed, deathed before the day was out.

Still he stared at her. The moment stretched.

He said, “We should process the We-ku.”

“Yes.”

Breathing hard, they hauled the We-ku’s bulky corpse toward a hopper that was already half-full—of tangled limbs, purple guts, bits of people. The work brought them close. She could feel the warmth of his body.

They dumped the We-ku into the hopper. La-ba kept back one ugly ear as a trophy. La-ba and Ca-si sexed, there and then, in the slippery dirt.

Later, at the end of the shift, they got clean, and sexed again.

Later still they joined in a dance, a vast abandoned whirl of a hundred citizens, more. Then they sexed again.

He never did report her crime. By failing to do so, of course, he was criming himself. Maybe that bonded them.

They kept sexing, whatever the reason.

Hama stood beside his mentor, Arles Thrun, as the citizens of the Observation Post filed before them. The marching drones stared at Hama’s silvered Raoul-technology skin, and they reached respectfully to stroke the gleaming egg-shaped Memory that Arles held in his hand.

One in three of the drones who passed was assigned, by Arles’s ancient, wordless gesture, to the Cull. Perhaps half of those assigned would survive. Each drone so touched shrank away from Arles’s gleaming finger.

When Hama looked to the up-curving horizon he saw that the line of patiently queuing drones stretched a quarter of the way around the Post’s internal equator.

This Observation Post was a sphere of Woven Space, so small he could have walked around its interior in a day. The folded-over sky was crowded with Cadre Squares, dormitory blocks and training and indoctrination centers, and the great sprawls of the Post’s more biological functions, the Cesspits and the Cyclers and the Gardens, green and brown and glistening blue. Every surface was covered with instructive images, symbols and pictures of man’s long battle against the Xeelee, ten thousand years out of date. Drones walked all over the inner surface of the sphere, stuck there by manipulated gravity. The great Birthing Vat itself hung directly over his head, pink and fecund, an obscene sun. The air was thick with the stink of growing things, of dirt and sweat.

To Hama, it was like being trapped within the belly of some vast living thing. It didn’t help his mood to reflect that beyond the Woven Space floor beneath his feet, no more than a few Planck’s-lengths away, the host planet’s atmosphere raged: a perpetual hydrogen storm, laced with high-frequency radiation and charged particles.

Absently he reached into his drab monastic robe and touched his chest, stroked the cool, silvered Planck-zero epidermis, sensed the softly gurgling fluid within, where alien fish swam languidly. Here in this dismal swamp, immersed in the primeval, he could barely sense the mood even of Arles, who stood right next to him. He longed for the cool inter-galactic gulf, the endless open where the merged thoughts of Commissaries sounded across a trillion stars. . . .

“Hama, pay attention,” Arles Thrun snapped.

Hama focused reluctantly on the soft round faces of the drones, and saw they betrayed agitation and confusion at his behavior.

“Remember, this is a great day,” Arles murmured dryly. “The first Commission visit in ten thousand years—and it is happening in the brief lifetime of this creature,” and his silvered hand patted indulgently at the bare head of the drone before him. “How lucky they are, even if we will have to order the deaths of a sixth of them. There is so little in their lives—little more than the wall images that never change, the meaningless battle for position in the cadre hierarchies . . . ”

And the dance, Hama thought reluctantly, their wild illegal dance.

“They disgust me,” he hissed, surprising himself. Yet it was true.

Arles glanced at him. “You’re fortunate they do not understand.”

“They disgust me because their language has devolved into jabber,” Hama said. “They disgust me because they have bred themselves into overpopulation.”

Arles murmured, “Hama, when you accepted the Burden of Longevity you chose a proud name. I sometimes wonder whether you have the nobility to match that name. These creatures’ names were chosen for them by a random combination of syllables—“

“They spend their lives on make-work. They eat and screw and die, crawling around in their own filth. What need a candle-flame of a name?”

Arles was frowning now, sapphire eyes flickering in the silver mask of his face. “Have you forgotten the core tenet of the Doctrine? A brief life burns brightly, Hama. These creatures and their forebears have maintained their lonely vigil, here between the galaxies—monitoring the progress of the war across a million fronts—for sixty thousand years. These drones are the essence of humanity. And we Commissaries— doomed to knowledge, doomed to life—we are their servants.”

“Perhaps. But this essence of humanity is motivated by lies. Already we understand their jabber well enough to know that. These absurd legends—“

Arles raised a hand, silencing him quickly. “Belief systems drift, just as languages do. The flame of the Doctrine still burns here, if not as brightly as we would wish.”

Now two of the drones came before Hama, hand in hand, male and female, nude like the rest. This pair leaned close to each other, showing an easy physical familiarity.

They had made love, he saw immediately. Not once, but many times. Perhaps even recently. On a thong around her neck the female wore what looked hideously like a dried human ear. The fish in his chest squirmed.

He snapped: “What are your names?”

They didn’t understand his words, but comprehended the sense. They pointed to their chests.

“La-ba.”

“Ca-si.”

Arles smiled, amused, contemptuous. “We have the perspective of gods. They have only their moment of light, and the warmth of each other’s body. . . . What is it, Hama? Feeling a little attraction, despite your disgust? A little envyl”

With an angry gesture, Hama sentenced both the drones to the Cull. The drones, obviously shocked, clung to each other.

Arles laughed. “Don’t worry, Hama. You are yet young. You will grow—distant.” Arles passed him the Memory. “Carry on alone. Perhaps it will be a useful discipline for you. One in three for the Cull. And remember— love them.’”

Space tore and knit up, and Arles Thrun was gone.

Hama weighed the Memory; it was surprisingly heavy. The contents of the Memory would be downloaded into the Post’s fabric and transcribed on its walls, in images timeless enough to withstand further linguistic drift. Nothing else could be written or drawn on the surfaces of the Post—certainly nothing made by the inhabitants of this place. What had they to write or draw? What did they need to read, save the glorious progress of mankind?

The drone couple had moved on. More ugly shaven heads moved past him, all alike, meaningless. Later that night, when the Post’s sourceless light dimmed, Hama watched the drones dance their wild untutored tangos, sensual and beautiful. He clung to the thought of how he had doomed the lovers: their shocked expressions, the way they had grabbed each others’ arms, their distress. After another sleep, La-ba and Ca-si were thrust out of the Observation Post. To La-ba, stiff in her hardsuit, it was a strange and unwelcome experience to pass through the Woven Space shell of the Post, to feel gravity shift and change, to feel up become down. And then she had to make sense of a floor that curved away beneath her, to understand that the horizon now hid what lay beyond rather than revealed it.

Only one of them, La-ba or Ca-si, would come back—one, or neither.

This was the Cull.

Crimson fog glowed around La-ba.

The air was racked by huge storms. Far below she saw the smooth glint of this world’s core, a hard plain of metallic hydrogen, unimaginably strange. Above her huge black clouds jostled, squirming like We-kus in the mud. Lightning crackled between and beyond the clouds.

Rain slammed down around her, a hail of pebbles that glowed red-hot. They clattered against the smooth skin of the Post, and her hard-suit. The clouds were a vapor of silicates. The rain was molten rock laced with pure iron.

The Post was a featureless ball that floated in this ferocious sky, a world drifting within a world. A great cable ran up from the floor before her, up into the crowded sky above her, up—it was said—to the cool emptiness of space beyond. La-ba had never seen space, though she believed it existed. La-ba, used to enclosure, wanted to cringe, to fall against the floor, as, it was said, some infants hugged the smooth warm walls of the Birthing Vat. But she stood tall.

A fist slammed into the back of her head.

She fell forward, her hardsuited limbs clattering against the Woven Space floor. There was a weight on her back and legs, pressing her down. She felt a scrabbling at her neck. Fingers probed at the joint between her helmet and the rest of the suit. If the suit was breached she would death at once. She did not resist.

She felt the fingers pull away from her neck.

With brisk roughness she was flipped on her back. Her assailant sat on her legs, heavy in his hardsuit. Rock rain pattered on his shoulders, red-gleaming pebbles that stuck for a second before dropping away, cooling to gray.

It was, of course, Ca-si.

“You un-hunted me,” he said, and his words crackled in her ears. “And now you un-resist me.” She felt his hands on her shoulders, and she remembered how his skin had touched hers, but there was no feeling through the hardsuits. He said, “You crime if you un-death me. You crime if you let me death you.”

“It is true.” So it was. According to the Doctrine that shaped their lives, it was the duty of the strong to destroy the weak.

Ca-si sat back. “I will death you.” But he ran his gloved hands over her body, over her breasts, to her belly.

And he found the bulge there, exposed by the contoured hardsuit. His eyes widened.

“Now you know,” she screamed at him.

His face twisted behind the thick plate. “I must death you even so.”

“Yes! Death me! Get it over!”

“.. . No. There is another way.”

There was a hand on Ca-si’s shoulder. He twisted, startled. Another stood over them, occluding the raging rock clouds. This other was wearing an ancient, scuffed hardsuit. Through a scratched and starred faceplate, La-ba made out one eye, one dark socket, a mesh of wrinkles.

It was the Old Man: the monster of whom infants whispered to each other even before they had left the Birthing Vat.

Ca-si fell away from her. He was screaming and screaming. La-ba lay there, stunned, unable to speak. The Old Man reached down and hauled La-ba to her feet. “Come.” He pulled her toward the cable that connected the Post to space.

There was a door in the cable.

Hama kept Ca-si in custody.

The boy paced back and forth in the small cell Hama had created for him, his muscles sliding beneath his skin. He would mutter sometimes, agitated, clearly troubled by whatever had become of his lost love. But when Ca-si inspected the Commissary’s silvered epidermis and the fish that swam in his chest, a different look dawned on his fleshy, soft face. It was a look of awe, incomprehension, and—admit it, Hama!— disgust.

He knew Arles disapproved of his obsession with this boy.

“The result of your assignment of them to the Cull was satisfactory. Two went out; one came back. What does it matter?”

But Hama pointed to evidence of flaws—the lack of trophies from the body being the most obvious. “All these disgusting drones take trophies from their kills. There’s something wrong here.”

“There is more than one way of manifesting weakness, Hama. If the other let herself die it is better she is deleted from the gene pool anyhow.”

“That is not the strict Doctrine.”

Arles had sighed and passed a glimmering hand over the silver planes of his cheek. “But even our longevity is a violation of the Doctrine—if a necessary one. It is a hundred thousand years since Druz, Hama. His Doctrine has become—mature. You will learn.”

But Hama had not been satisfied.

At last the translation suites cut in, rendering the drones’ linguistically impoverished jabber into reasonably acceptable Standard.

Hama faced the boy. He forced his silvered face into a smile. “You have been isolated here a long time.”

“A thousand births,” the boy said sullenly.

That was about right: ten thousand years since the last Commission visit, a thousand of these drones’

brief generations. “Yes. A thousand births. And, in enough time, languages change. Did you know that?

After just a few thousand years of separation two identical languages will diverge so much that they would share no common features except basic grammatical constructs—like the way a language indicates possession, or uses more subtle features like ergativity, which ...”

The boy was just staring at him, dull, not even resentful.

Hama felt foolish, and then angry to be made to feel that way. He said sternly, “To rectify language drift is part of our duty. The Commission for Historical Truth, I mean. We will reteach you Standard. Just as we will leave you the Memory, with the story of mankind since you were last visited, and we will take away your story to tell it to others. We bind up mankind on all our scattered islands. Just as it is your duty—“

“To death.”

“Yes. The machines here watch for the enemy. They have watched for sixty thousand years, and they may watch for sixty thousand years more. If the enemy come you must do everything you can to destroy them, and if you cannot, you must destroy the machines, and the Post, and yourself.”

The boy watched him dully, his powerful hands clenched into fists.

Ca-si was no more than a backup mechanism, Hama thought. A final self-destruct, in case this station’s brooding automated defenses failed. For this sole purpose, six thousand generations of humans had lived and loved and bred and died, here in the intergalactic waste.

As he gazed at the planes of the boy’s stomach, Hama felt an uncomfortable inner warmth, a restlessness.

On impulse he snapped, “Who do we fight? Do you know?”

“We fight the Xeelee.”

“Why do we fight?”

The boy stared at him.

Hama ordered, “Look at me.” He pulled open his robe. “This silver skin comes from a creature called a Silver Ghost. Once the Ghosts owned worlds and built cities. Now we farm them for their skin. The fish in my belly are called Squeem. Once they conquered man, occupied Earth itself. Now they are mere symbiotes in my chest, enabling me to speak to my colleagues across the galactic Supercluster. These are triumphs for mankind.”

The look on Ca-si’s face made Hama think he didn’t regard his condition as a triumph. Angry, oddly confused, Hama snapped, “I know you didn’t kill the girl. Why did you spare her? Why did she spare you? Where is she?”

But the boy wouldn’t reply.

It seemed there was nothing Hama could do to reach Ca-si, as he longed to. La-ba had been raised into strangeness.

The hollow cable had a floor that lifted you up, and windows so you could see out. Inside, she rode all the way out of the air, into a place of harsh flat light.

When she looked down she saw a floor of churning red gas. Auroras flapped in its textured layers, making it glow purple. When she looked up she saw only a burning, glaring light. The Old Man tried to make her understand. “The light is the sun. The red is the world. The Post floats in the air of the world.”

She couldn’t stop staring at his face. It was a mass of wrinkles. He had one eye, one dark purple pit. His face was the strangest thing of all, much stranger than the sun and the churning world. The cable ended in another giant ball, like the Post. But this ball was dimpled by big black pits, like the bruises left by the heels of her hands in the face of the We-ku. And it floated in space, not the air. Inside the ball there was a cavity, but there were no people or Cadre Squares and no Birthing Vat: only vast mechanical limbs that glistened, sinister, sliding over each other.

“No people live here,” she said.

He smiled. “One person does.”

He showed her his home. It wasn’t a dorm. It was just a shack made of bits of shining plastic. There were blankets on the floor, and clothes, and empty food packets. It was dirty, and it smelled a little. She looked around. “There is no supply dispenser.”

“People give me food. And water and clothes. From their rations.”

She tried to understand. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Because life is short. People want—“

“What?”

“Something more than the war.”

She thought about that. “There is the dance.”

He grinned, his empty eye socket crumpling. “I never could dance. Come.”

He led her to a huge window. Machines screened out the glare of the sun above and the glower of the overheated planet below.

Between sun and planet, there was only blackness.

“No,” the Old Man said gently. “Not blackness. Look.”

They waited there for long heartbeats.

At last she saw a faint glow, laced against the black. It had structure, fine filaments and threads. It was beautiful, eerie, remote.

“It is un-black.”

He pointed at the sun. “The sun is alone. If there were other suns near, we would see them, as points of light. The suns gather in pools. There are not even pools of suns nearby. The un-black is pools of suns, very far away.”

She understood that.

“Others lived here before me,” he said. “They learned how to see with the machines. They left records of what they saw.” He dug into a pocket and pulled out a handful of bones: human bones, the small bones of a hand or foot. They were scored by fine marks.

“They speak to you with bones? ”

He shrugged. “If you smear blood or dirt on the walls it falls away. What else do we have to draw on, but our bones, and our hearts?” He fingered the bones carefully.

“What do the bones say?”

He gestured at the hulking machinery. “These machines watch the sky for the trace of ships. But they also see the un-black: the light, the faintest light, all the light there is. Some of the light comes from the suns and pools of suns. Most of the light was made in the birthing of the universe. It is old now and tired and hard to see. But it has patterns in it....”

This meant nothing to her. Bombarded by strangeness, she tried to remember the Doctrine. “I crimed. I did not death, and I wanted to be deathed. Then you crimed. You could have deathed me. And here—“

“Here, I crime.” He grinned. “With every breath I crime. Every one of these bones is a crime, a record of ancient crimes. Like you, I was safed.”

“Safed?”

“Brought here.”

She asked the hardest question of all. “When?”

He smiled, and the wrinkles on his face gathered up. “Twenty years ago. Twice your life.”

She frowned, barely comprehending. She leaned against the window, cupping her hands and peering out.

He asked, “What are you looking for now?”

“Shuttles.”

He said gently, “There are no Shuttles.”

“The cadre leaders—“

“The cadre leaders say what is said to them. Think. Have you ever known anybody to leave on a Shuttle? There are no Shuttles.”

“It is a lie?”

“It is a lie. If you live past age ten, the cadre leaders will death you. They believe they will win a place on the Shuttles. But they in turn are deathed by other cadre leaders, who believe they will steal their places on the Shuttles. And so it goes. Lies eating each other.”

No Shuttles. She sighed, and her breath fogged the smooth surface of the window. “Then how will we leave?”

“We un-can leave. We are too remote. Only the Commissaries come and go. Only the Commissaries. Not us.”

She felt something stir in her heart.

“The Shuttles are un-real. Is Earth real? Is the war real?”

“Perhaps Earth is a lie. But the war is real. Oh, yes. The bones talk of how distant pools of suns flare up. The war is real, and all around us, but it is very far away, and very old. But it shapes us.” He studied her.

“Soon the cadre leaders will pluck that baby from your belly and put it in the Birthing Vat. It will life and death for one purpose, for the war.”

She said nothing.

The Old Man said dreamily, “Some of the Old Men have seen patterns in the birthing un-black. They have tried to understand them, as the cadre leaders make us understand the Memory images of the war. Perhaps they are thoughts, those patterns. Frozen thoughts of the creatures who lived in the first blinding second of the universal birth.” He shook his head and gazed at the bones. “I un-want death. I want more than the war. I want to learn this.”

She barely heard him. She asked, “Who gives you food?”

He gave her names, of people she knew, and people she un-knew.

The number of them shocked her.

Hama and Arles Thrun drifted in space, side by side, two silver statues. Before them, this hot-Jupiter world continued its endless frenetic waltz around its too-close sun. The sun was a rogue star that had evaporated out of its parent galaxy long ago and come to drift here, a meaningless beacon in the intergalactic dark.

Hama was comfortable here, in space, in the vacuum, away from the claustrophobic enclosure of the Post. Alien creatures swam through his chest cavity, subtly feeding on the distant calls of Commissaries all over the Supercluster. To Hama it was like being in a vast room where soft voices murmured in every shadowed corner, grave and wise.

“A paradox,” Arles Thrun murmured now.

“What is?”

“Here we are, peering out at the Supercluster, a cluster of clusters of galaxies ...”

“The drones call it the un-black. The glow of the Supercluster, the relic light.”

Arles ignored him. “All across the Supercluster mankind battles the Xeelee, a vast organic war. All that conflict is far from here. But this is a noisy place—the sun, this wretched overheated planet—the noisiest place in all this dreaming gulf. And yet it is here that we established our listening post.”

“We had to camouflage it.”

“Yes. And we had to provide matter and energy for the humans who would live here. Thus, in all our designs, we compromise with the needs of the human. Isn’t that true, Hama?”

Hama glared, sensing an edge in his voice.

Arles said, “You know, your new Raoul rebuilding has extended beyond the superficial. You have been reengineered, the layers of evolutionary haphazardness designed out of you. The inner chemical conflicts bequeathed by humanity’s past do not trouble you. You do not hear voices in your head, you do not invent gods to drive out your internal torment. You are the most integrated human being who ever lived.”

“If I am still human,” Hama said.

“Ah, yes, the great question. Certainly we are needed. It is impossible to begin to grasp the scale and complexity of an intergalactic war in a human lifetime. And yet the brevity of human life is the key to the war; we fight like vermin, for to the Xeelee we are vermin— that is the central uncomfortable truth of the Doctrine. We, who do not die, are a paradoxical necessity, maintaining the attention span of the species

...” “We have no art. We are not scientists. We do not dance.” “No,” said Arles earnestly. “Our reengineered hearts are too cold for that. Or to desire to make babies to fill up the empty spaces. But we know our flaws, Hama. We know that those brutish creatures down there in the Post, busily fighting and fornicating and breeding and dying, they are the true heart of humanity. And so we must defer to them.” He eyed Hama, waiting for him to respond.

Hama said with difficulty, “I am not—happy.”

“You were promised integration, not happiness.”

“I failed to find the girl. La-ba.”

Arles smiled in the vacuum. “I traced her. She escaped to the sensor installation.”

“The sensors?”

“Another renegade lives up there. To what purpose, I can’t imagine,” Arles murmured.

“This place is flawed,” Hama said bitterly.

“Oh, yes. Very flawed. There is a network of drones who provision the renegade. And there are more subtle problems: the multiple births occurring in the Vat, the taking of trophies from kills, the dancing . . . These drones seek satisfaction beyond the Doctrine. There has been ideological drift. It is a shame. You would think that in a place as isolated as this a certain purity could be sustained. But the human heart, it seems, is full of spontaneous imperfection.”

“They must be punished.”

Arles looked at him carefully. “We do not punish, Hama. We only correct.”

“How? A program of indoctrination, a rebuilding—“

Arles shook his head. “It has gone too far for that. There are many other Observation Posts. We will allow these flawed drones to die.”

There was a wash of agreement from the Commissaries all over the Supercluster, all of them loosely bound to Hama’s thinking and Arles’s, all of them concurring in Arles’s decision. Hama found he was appalled. “They have done their duty here for sixty thousand years—Lethe, a third of the evolutionary history of the human species—and now you would destroy them so casually, for the sake of a little deviance?”

Arles gripped Hama’s arms and turned him so they faced each other. Hama glimpsed cold power in his eyes; Arles Thrun was already a thousand years old. “Look around, Hama. Look at the Supercluster, the vast stage, deep in space and time, on which we fight. Our foe is unimaginably ancient, with unimaginable powers. And what are we but half-evolved apes from the plains of some dusty, lost planet? Perhaps we are not smart enough to fight this war. And yet we fight even so.

“And to keep us united in our purpose, this vast host of us scattered over more galaxies than either of us could count, we have the Doctrine, our creed of mortality. Let me tell you something. The Doctrine is not perfect. It may not even enable us to win the war, no matter how long we fight. But it has brought us this far, and it is all we have.”

“And so we must destroy these drones, not for the sake of the war—“

“But for the sake of the Doctrine. Yes. Now, at last, you begin to understand.”

Arles released him, and they drifted apart.

La-ba stayed with the Old Man.

She woke. She lay in silence. It was strange not to wake under a sky crowded with people. She could feel her baby inside her, kicking as if it were eager to get to the Birthing Vat. The floor shuddered.

The Old Man ran to her. He dragged her to her feet. “It begins,” he said.

“What?”

He took her to the hatch that led to the hollow cable.

A We-ku was there, inside the cable, his fat face split by a grin, his stick-out ears wide. She raised her foot and kicked the We-ku in the forehead. He clattered to the floor, howling. The Old Man pulled her back. “What did you do?”

“He is a We-ku.”

“Look.” The Old Man pointed.

The We-ku was clambering to his feet and rubbing his head. He had been carrying a bag full of ration packs. Now the packs were littered over the floor, some of them split.

The Old Man said, “Never mind the food. Take her back.” And he pushed at La-ba again, urging her into the cable. Reluctantly she began to climb down.

She felt a great sideways wash, as if the whole of this immense cable was vibrating back and forth, as if it had been plucked by a vast finger.

She looked up at the circle of light that framed the Old Man’s face. She was confused, frightened. “I will bring you food.”

He laughed bitterly. “Just remember me. Here.” And he thrust his hand down into hers. Then he slammed shut the hatch.

When she opened her hand, she saw it contained the scrimshawed bones.

The cable whiplashed, and the lights failed, and they fell into darkness, screaming. Hama stood in the holding cell, facing Ca-si. The walls were creaking. He heard screaming, running footsteps.

With its anchoring cable severed, the Post was beginning to sink away from its design altitude, deeper into the roiling murk of the hot Jupiter’s atmosphere. Long before it reached the glimmering, enigmatic metallic-hydrogen core, it would implode.

Ca-si’s mouth worked, as if he was gulping for air. “Take me to the Shuttles.”

“There are no Shuttles.”

Ca-si yelled, “Why are you here? What do you want’?”

Hama laid one silvered hand against the boy’s face. “I love you,” he said. “It’s my job to love you. Don’t you see that?” But his silvered flesh could not detect the boy’s warmth, and Ca-si flinched from his touch, the burned scent of vacuum exposure.

“.. . I know what you want.”

Ca-si gasped. Hama turned.

La-ba stood in the doorway. She was dirty, bloodied. She was carrying a lump of shattered partition wall. Fragmentary animated images, of glorious scenes from humanity’s past, played over it fitfully. Hama said, “You.”

She flicked a fingernail against the silver carapace of his arm. “You want to be like us. That’s why you tried to death us.”

And she lifted the lump of partition rubble and slammed it into his chest. Briny water gushed down Kama’s belly, spilling tiny silver fish that struggled and died.

Hama fell back, bending over himself. His systems screamed messages of alarm and pain at him—and, worse, he could feel that he had lost his link with the vaster pool of Commissaries beyond. “What have you done? Oh, what have you done?”

“Now you are like us,” said La-ba simply.

The light flickered and darkened. Glancing out of the cell, Hama saw that the great Birthing Vat was drifting away from its position at the geometric center of the Post. Soon it would impact the floor in a gruesome moist collision.

“I should have gone with Arles,” he moaned. “I don’t know why I delayed.”

La-ba stood over Hama and grabbed his arm. With a grunting effort, the two drones hauled him to his feet.

La-ba said, “Why do you death us?”

“It is the war. Only the war.”

“Why do we fight the war?”

In desperation Hama said rapidly, “We have fought the Xeelee for half our evolutionary history as a species. We fight because we must. We don’t know what else to do. We can’t stop, any more than you can stop breathing. Do you see? “

“Take us,” said La-ba.

“Take you? Take you where? Do you even know what it is I do when I . . . jump?” He tried to imagine explaining to them the truth about space—telling them of filaments and membranes vibrating in multiple-dimensional harmony, of ruptures in space and time as the fundamental fibers, at his command, rewove themselves . . .

In La-ba’s set face there was ruthless determination, a will to survive that burned away the fog of his own weak thinking.

The Doctrine is right, he thought. Mortality brings strength. A brief life burns brightly. He felt ashamed of himself. He tried to stand straight, ignoring the clamoring pain from his smashed stomach. The girl said, “It is un-Doctrine. But I have deathed your fish. Nobody will know.”

He forced a laugh. “Is that why you killed the Squeem? . . . You are naive.”

She clutched his arm harder, as if trying to bend his metallic flesh. “Take us to Earth.”

“Do you know what Earth is like?”

Ca-si said, “It is a place where you live on the outside, not the inside. It is a place where water falls from the sky, not rock.”

“How will you live? “

La-ba said, “The We-ku helped the Old Man live. Others will help us live.”

Perhaps it was true, Hama thought. Perhaps if these two survived on some civilized world—a world where other citizens could see what was being done in the name of the war—they might form a focus for resistance. No, not resistance: doubt.

And doubt might destroy them all.

He must abandon these creatures to their deaths. That was his clear duty, his duty to the species. There was a crack of shattering partition. The Post spun, making the three of them stagger, locked together.

Ca-si showed his fear. “We will be deathed.”

“Take us to Earth,” La-ba insisted.

Hama said weakly, “You broke my link to the Commission. I may not be able to find my way. The link helps me—navigate. Do you see?”

“Try,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against the cold of his silvered chest. Hama wrapped his arms around the two drones, and space tore.

For a single heartbeat the three of them floated in vacuum.

The close sun glared, impossibly bright. The planet was a floor of roiling gas, semi-infinite. Above, Hama could see the sensor installation. It was drifting off into space, dangling its tether like an impossibly long umbilical. It was startlingly bright in the raw sunlight, like a sculpture. From beneath the planet’s boiling clouds, a soundless concussion of light flickered and faded. Sixty thousand years of history had ended, a subplot in mankind’s tangled evolution; the long watch was over. La-ba squirmed, stranded in vacuum. Her hands were clasped over the bump at her belly. She opened her mouth, and the last of her air gushed out, a hail of sparkling crystals, glimmering in the fierce sunlight. Hama held the lovers close, and the three of them vanished.

Paul Di Filippo was custom-made for an anthology like this. With his wit and wild invention, evidenced in such wacky books as The Steampunk Trilogy and Lost Pages (in which a costumed Franz Kafka—yes, I said Franz Kafka—roams the night of Manhattan as the avenger Jackdaw) he’s proved himself an able postpunk successor to the likes of the great Philip Jose Farmer. His story for this book is one of those I d point to when asked what I was looking for for Redshift—it’s sick, hilarious, and viciously apt.

If you don’t think the media is really heading this way—think again.

Weeping Walls

Paul Di Filippo

“I want those fucking teddy bears, and I want them yesterday1.” Lisa Dutch bellowed into the telephone as if denouncing Trotsky in front of Stalin. Tectonic emotions threatened to fracture the perfect makeup landscaping the compact features of her astound-ingly innocent yet vaguely insane face. Eruptions of sweat beaded the cornsilk-fme blond hairs layered alongside her delicate ears. Seeking her attention, Jake Pasha was waving a folded newspaper under Lisa’s charmingly pert nose and toothpaste-blue eyes, and this impudence from her assistant infuriated her even more. She glared at Jake like a wrathful goddess, Kali in a Donna Karan suit, but—aside from swatting the paper away—she chose to vent her evil temper only on the hapless vendor holding down the other end of her conversation.

“Listen, shithead! You promised me those goddamn bears for early-last week, and they’re not here yet. Do you have any idea how many orders I’m holding up for those bears? I run a time-sensitive business here. We’re talking thousands of bereaved husbands and wives, mourning parents and red-eyed grandparents, all hanging fire. They can’t process their grief thanks to your goddamn incompentence. Not to mention the fucking kids! You can’t find your nose’? Are you fucking crazy”? Oh, the bears’

noses! Well, I don’t care if you draw the goddamn noses on by hand with a racking pen! Just get me those motherfucking bears!”

Lisa smashed the phone into its plastic cradle, where fractures revealed a history of such stresses. Now she was free to concentrate on her assistant.

“Unless you stop shoving that paper into my face this instant, Jake, I will tear you a brand-new asshole. And while your boyfriends might well enjoy that feature, I guarantee that it will make wearing your thong at the beach an utter impossibility.”

Jake stepped warily back from Lisa’s desk and nervously brushed a fall of wheat-colored hair off his broad brow. “My God, Lisa, you don’t have to be such a frightening bitch with me! I’m already scared every morning when I walk through the door of this madhouse! Anyway, I was just trying to do my job.”

Lisa visibly composed herself, her stormy expression ceding to a professional mask of good-natured calm. She forced out an apology that evidently tasted sour. “I’m sorry. But these vendors drive me nuts. Our whole business relies on them, and they’re nothing but a bunch of sleazy asswipes. Balloons, stuffed animals, flowers, wreaths, banners, candles, suncatchers—you’d think the people who sold such things would be nice, maybe New Agey people. But they’re not. You know who the most up-front guys are?

The construction guys. Not enough manners to fill a thimble, but if they can’t deliver a wall, they let you know right away. They don’t string you along like these other pricks.”

“Be that as it may, dear, you’ve got something a tad more crucial to worry about now.” Jake flourished the newspaper in a less aggressive manner, and Lisa took it from him. Folded back to the business section, the paper glibly offered its salient headline: