A SPACESHIP BUILT OF STONE

AND OTHER STORIES

Lisa Tuttle

First published in Great Britain in 1987 by The Women's Press Ltd.

This ebook edition published in 2013 by

Jo Fletcher Books
An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright © 1987 Lisa Tuttle

The moral right of Lisa Tuttle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ebook ISBN 978 1 78206 874 7

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

For Sarah Lefanu

NO REGRETS

In fifteen years, Miranda Ackerman hadn’t changed her style. She still looked as she had as a student in her blue jeans and Indian blouse, with her long straight hair, and spectacles so large and round they seemed a comic affectation. But behind the glasses were webs of fine lines, and strands of silver glittered in her brown hair. She was thirty-six years old, not a student but the university’s guest, the visiting poet.

As she left the aeroplane, Miranda imagined the person who would have been sent to meet her. She could see her already, a senior or first-year graduate student, heart-breakingly young and earnest, skittish in her shyness. She would have forsaken her customary denims for a dress or a suit in an attempt to look mature, and she would be surprised by the poet’s youthful, casual air. Hearing the student’s somewhat breathless, Texas-accented voice, in her struggle to be articulate, Miranda would be able to recognise herself at twenty-one and feel an almost painful tenderness.

She knew them well, these faithful students; she met them wherever she went on the lecture circuit. And as she came down the red-carpeted hall into the main concourse of the airport, Miranda saw a girl so precisely as she had imagined that she might have created her.

Sleek, shoulder-length dark hair; a soft, oval face with the prettiness of youth; an alarmingly new and businesslike three-piece grey suit. Dark eyes widened as Miranda approached: she seemed a horse about to bolt.

‘Miranda Ackerman?’

‘Yes.’ Miranda smiled. ‘You must be—’

‘Sarah Wells. From Burnham University … I’ve come to drive you there.’

Miranda pitied her nervousness and wished she could banish it with a word. But it would take time. The sixty-mile drive to Burnham would provide that.

Soon, as Miranda had expected, Sarah’s admiration for the poet – for the life, revealed in a teasingly autobiographical novel, and for the poems – spilled out in a rush of words.

‘Changing the Universe is probably my favourite book. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it. Some of those poems I really identify with. Especially “No Regrets”. That one made me cry. It made me think about my own future, about the choices I’ll have to make. But I don’t think I could be as brave as you!’

Knowing the answer already, Miranda asked, ‘Do you write poetry?’

Sarah gave her a shy, sideways look before returning her attention to the road. ‘Well, yes. It’s not very good. Sometimes I despair! You’ll have to read it and tell me the truth about it – I really want you to. I’ve already signed up to take your course, so there’s no escape. Actually, it’s not all so bad – I’ve had some of it published. But only in the school magazine, so that doesn’t mean much. If you saw some of the garbage they publish – well you will see it, of course. I can hardly believe it. Whatever made you – I mean, it’s incredibly lucky for me, for all of us, of course, but I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were coming here. I mean, Burnham University, of all places! Hicksville, USA!’

Miranda felt herself prickling defensively, but she said mildly, ‘I didn’t come for a vacation, you know. I came to teach.’

‘Yes, but why? Wouldn’t you rather be writing?’

‘Of course, but poets have to eat, too. I’m used to living cheaply, but no one can live on air. You must know how little the magazines pay, when they pay at all.’

‘But you’ve had books published.’

‘One of my classes will be about the economics of being a poet in present-day America,’ Miranda said. ‘I can’t live on my royalties. I depend on readings and lectures and special courses. I make my living from schools and universities, not my poetry. Although, of course, if it wasn’t for the poems they wouldn’t be interested in me.’

‘Mmm,’ said Sarah dubiously. ‘Still, Burnham. It must seem awful, after San Francisco and New York.’

‘San Francisco and New York weren’t offering,’ Miranda responded rather tartly. ‘Burnham made me a very good offer: two semesters teaching, a light course load, with accommodation. I’ll have lots of time to write, and I can save a lot of money. I was very lucky to get the job.’

It was the truth – she had told herself just that to counter the sinking feeling in her stomach as she looked at the return address on the letter from the head of the English department. Because the rest of the truth, which she had no intention of telling this admiring student, was that this was the year when she’d had no choice. This was the year of wage freezes and changes in hiring policy, the first time her applications had been answered with form rejection letters. The happy days of balancing the drawbacks of Ohio against those of Kansas, the attractions of Ithaca versus Austin were ended. It was Burnham, or it was back to waitressing, and Miranda didn’t like to admit that both choices had felt like defeat.

‘I only meant – well, of course, you couldn’t know what Burnham is like,’ Sarah said. ‘I hope you don’t find it too awful. I don’t mean the University, anyway, that’s not so bad. But the town – it’s such a smug, boring, rednecked little place. I don’t guess you’ve ever been there before.’

Briefly, Miranda was tempted to lie. But lies had a way of catching up with you. And what did it matter? She had made her escape, years ago. She said, ‘Actually, I have. I lived in Burnham once, for about a year.’

‘You did!’ Sarah sounded at once appalled and delighted: Miranda could see her storing away this bit of information for future examination and comfort, perhaps to take courage from the poet’s example. ‘But I thought – you didn’t get your degree there?’

‘No, I wasn’t at the University. My boyfriend was a student. I went to Burnham to be with him.’

‘What happened?’

‘You know what happened. You’ve read my novel, and my poems,’ Miranda said. ‘I ran away. I wanted to write, and I had to be free to do that. He wanted me to marry him, to give up my dreams and take on his, to be his wife and the mother of his children, to spend all my time taking care of him. I chose to live for myself. To be a poet.’

She had made her choice, and that was all there was to be said, Miranda thought. She knew that Sarah, unlike others before her, would not doubt the necessity, would not plead for her own future by demanding, ‘Why couldn’t you have both? Can’t poets marry? Not all men are like that – why should we have to choose?’

Sarah said only, ‘Do you ever think about it? Do you ever wonder how it might have been if you’d stayed, if you’d never left Burnham?’

Miranda looked out of the window at the highway sign. Five miles to Burnham.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I do. “No Regrets” – that’s what the poem is all about.’

Outside already were the first signs of civilisation: billboards advertising restaurants and motels. There, where Miranda remembered green fields and grazing cattle, she saw hard white concrete glittering in the sun, glass storefronts and evergreen shrubs in stone troughs, a rustic wooden sign proclaiming CEDAR CROSS VILLAGE.

And then they were in the town. But it wasn’t the sleepy, rural village Miranda remembered – it might almost have been a city, or at least a prosperous suburb of Houston or Dallas. The road they were on had been widened to five lanes (a centre lane for turning) and on either side stretched restaurants, supermarkets, office buildings and clusters of shops, all looking clean, shiny and new.

Miranda held on to her astonishment. Of course it had changed. Even Burnham had marched into the present along with the rest of the world. The old steak house – once the only real restaurant in town – was a familiar landmark with its rough-hewn limestone walls and circling neon wagon-wheel sign, but sharing a parking lot with it now were a Chinese restaurant and a Baskin-Robbins.

‘Same old dump,’ said Sarah, sighing.

‘You should have seen it fifteen years ago,’ Miranda said. ‘I see you’ve got a movie theatre now.’

‘Oh, that’s the Twin. They show real junk there. The one I like is on the other side of campus – they get in some good foreign films. But there were some threats that the city council might force them to close down after they screened “In the Realm of the Senses”. I never saw it – one showing and boom! There went the print. Still, I guess it could be worse.’

‘It could be worse,’ Miranda agreed. ‘In my day – listen to me, I sound ancient! – in my day, young lady, we had to drive to Houston if we wanted to see a movie, and forget that pornographic stuff, because it didn’t exist in this State.’ She caught sight of a sign advertising a wet T-shirt contest. ‘Is that a bar? You mean this isn’t a dry county any more? Movies, booze, what more could you want?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sarah. ‘Sophistication, intellectual conversation, enlightenment, live theatre, a decent local newspaper, better bookstores, fewer rednecks.’

‘You’re talking about Paradise, kid. People in New York want all that, too.’ Then the tension inside her squeezed her throat shut as the familiar ugly buildings and beautiful landscaping of the campus came into view. This was the part of town she knew best; these the visual images that came to mind when she thought of Burnham, and fifteen years and a few extra buildings couldn’t hide or change it. The squat concrete blocks surrounded by brilliantly green grass and old oak trees hung with Spanish moss, the auditorium that looked like a flying saucer, the tacky jumble of stores and fast-food joints that made up ‘the Strip’ – then past the ugly barracks of married student housing, still there although Miranda recalled they had been called ‘temporary’ from the time they were erected, twenty years before.

As if tracing the path of Miranda’s memory to its inevitable conclusion, Sarah turned down a side road, and then turned again onto Goddard Lane. It was all so familiar that it did not seem odd, even when Sarah turned in at the driveway of the corner house and switched off the engine.

‘Here we are,’ she said.

The house itself was still the same, although the pecan trees around it were larger and leafier, and the deep-set porch, always its most attractive feature, now boasted the wooden bench-swing which Miranda and Richard had never been able to afford. It was a single-storey wooden house, painted grey with white trim, a comfortable, old, welcoming home.

Feeling a prickle of unease, Miranda looked at the smiling girl beside her. ‘How did you know?’

‘This is where you’re going to be living,’ Sarah said.

The unease changed to fear. It wasn’t a joke. Miranda reached to touch the door handle, ready to bolt, and turned on Sarah sharply. ‘Who told you to bring me here? Tell me the truth.’

Sarah drew back. ‘What’s wrong? It’s all yours – the whole house. It’s really great, I’ve been inside.’

‘Is this where all the visiting lecturers stay?’

‘I don’t know. The University owns it, but there are also guest quarters attached to a couple of the dorms. This is just as close to campus, and it’s a whole house. Of course, if you don’t like the house, I guess—’

‘Oh, I like the house,’ Miranda said. She detected no dishonesty in Sarah, and knew her own reaction must have seemed odd. It must be coincidence. It was only a house. ‘I’ve always liked it. It was hard to walk away from it fourteen years ago, very hard.’ She watched the understanding appear in Sarah’s eyes. ‘I sure never thought I’d come back.’ She laughed, ruefully. ‘I suppose, like this, it’s all right. Victory, not retreat. Come on, show me around. I want to see if it has changed as much as I have.’

The first thing she noticed as she came through the door was the smell. Even after fourteen years of different occupants, different furniture, fresh coats of paint and floor polish, the house retained its own, faint, distinctive scent. Despite her unease the recognition stirred her. It was like coming home.

She walked slowly, quietly through the house, as if afraid of disturbing someone. The furniture was all new and strange to her, but that wasn’t important. The basics remained the same. The walls were still a pinkish shade of white, the floors were still bare, polished boards gleaming golden-brown between the scattered rugs. More than that, the shape and size of the building was what she remembered, what had always impressed her most. A series of high, spacious, airy rooms, living room opening into dining room opening into kitchen. In contrast, behind them, was what she thought of as the spine of the house, the dark hallway which twisted from the front door to the back, connecting the three bedrooms on the east side with the three living rooms on the west side of the house. The hallway reminded Miranda of a secret passage. It seemed to her that it ran parallel to, but separate from, the real life of the house. It was the surprise hidden behind those so-open rooms, concealing and revealing. It had stirred the child in Richard, Miranda recalled. He had loved to play impromptu games of hide and seek, sometimes startling, sometimes annoying, sometimes delighting her with his ability to keep out of sight, ducking from room to room, into the hall and out of it again, evading her pursuit.

‘Is it the way you remember it?’

Sarah’s voice startled her, coming from behind. Hadn’t she just heard footsteps ahead, echoing down the hall from the kitchen? A trick of acoustics, Miranda decided.

She hadn’t thought of Richard in years, but now, in this house …

‘Have you heard of someone named Richard Terrell?’ she asked Sarah.

‘Doctor Terrell? Sure, I take his course. Is he the one who invited you to teach at Burnham?’

Of course he was. His name had never been mentioned in correspondence – someone else was the Head of the English Department – but of course. Miranda was frozen by the sudden certainty that she had walked into a trap. Richard’s trap. He had waited for fourteen years, and now she couldn’t move as she felt the house close in on her, and knew she had only dreamed of escaping. She had never really left.

Sarah was talking – something about bus schedules and telephone books and groceries. Miranda could hardly hear her. She was struggling, running around inside her head like a rat in a maze, unable to see the exit. She’d signed a contract. She was stuck here. She could run away, hitch to Houston and use her return ticket to fly home tonight. But she’d sub-let her apartment – she had no home. She had friends she could stay with in New Orleans – or Denver – she could fly anywhere in the world, there was no one to stop her. She’d done it before. She would survive, get a job as a waitress and write in her spare time. The sales, the readings would come. It would be tough, but she could manage.

‘Miss Ackerman? Is there anything else? I mean, do you want me to drive you somewhere? Or stay here and help you unpack?’

Sarah’s fresh, young face brought her back to reality. Yes, of course she could leave. But she didn’t have to. There was no trap. The past fourteen years were no dream. She wasn’t an untried girl anymore. She was Miranda Ackerman, the visiting poet. She had escaped from Burnham and returned to tell the tale.

‘No, thank you, Sarah,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. I’ll be all right now. I think I’ll just spend the evening unpacking and get myself settled in.’

But when Sarah had gone and Miranda began unpacking, she found herself with a problem. The small bedroom at the back of the house, opposite the kitchen, had been furnished as a study with desk, filing cabinet and bookshelves. It was obviously intended for her use. And yet she froze in the doorway, an intruder, unable to enter, seeing Richard there working at the table.

The old card-table had been folded up and taken away long ago, along with Richard’s books and files. Miranda forced herself to enter, to sit in the black office-chair, to add her own books to the few standard reference works already on the shelves.

The sound of footsteps in the hall made her whirl around. She held her breath, listening, then called, ‘Sarah, is that you?’

No reply, but someone might be standing in the hall, listening to her, perhaps hiding a smile.

‘Sarah?’

There was no one when she leaned into the hall, but she walked down the corridor to check. In the kitchen she stood very still, listening, straining her ears against the silence until it ceased to be silence and fragmented into sound: voices from a distant room.

The feeling that she was not alone in the house did not leave her, and when she finally fell into bed, exhausted and confused by the events of the day, it was to the remembered sound of Richard’s voice.

‘Miranda,’ he said. ‘You … tell … I’ll … later … when … you … never … why … who … where …’

The words jangled and reverberated within the walls of the house, within the walls of her skull, but she couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell her, where or why he was hiding, until at last she slept.

*

The next day, Miranda had to face Burnham, to come to terms with it as her home for the next year. She longed to be able to set out in the spirit of adventure, to discover the town as she had discovered others, but that was impossible. There was nothing new for her imagination to work on: Burnham, for her, had already been invented. The many changes of the past fourteen years were superficial. They did not alter the basic character of the town any more than the new furniture had her old house. Recollections snagged her and old emotions threatened to trip her up wherever she walked. There, on that bench beneath one of the campus oaks, Richard had proposed to her. And on that corner she had stood weeping with fury, refusing to go home to him. The old student union was gone, replaced by a new building, but Miranda remembered hours spent in the coffee bar and the game room on that site.

The head of the English Department, a distracted, strawcoloured man called Coker, gave her a stack of forms to read and took her to lunch at the Faculty Club. She was too tense to eat much, worried that Richard was around and might see her before she saw him.

‘What about the rest of the staff?’ she asked.

‘Good people,’ said Coker automatically. ‘Good people. You’ll meet them tonight. Party at my house, BYOB. Well, no, you don’t have to – you’re guest of honour, at least this time. We’re very informal around here, you’ll find. Some of the students will be there, too. Good chance for you to meet them before classes start.’

Waiting, she was strung taut. She was annoyed with herself for worrying, for being obsessed with an old boyfriend, a man she hadn’t seen for fourteen years. She hoped that seeing him would break the spell. On her way to the party she tried on attitudes as if they were dresses, and prepared herself with a few witty lines.

She tried to take in the whole room at a glance, her nerves quivering, her ears fine-tuned to pick up the faintest sound of his voice amid the room full of conversation. She peered closely at strangers, barely registering their names as she tried to find some resemblance to the man she had once known, as she tried to imagine how greatly he might have changed in fourteen years. Would he be bald, fat, bearded – homosexual?

When it grew later and the guests began to leave, Miranda finally had to ask Coker.

‘Terrell? Oh, yeah, Emily said he’d phoned – said he was real sorry he couldn’t come, but one of his kids was sick, his daughter had a fever and he didn’t like to leave her.’

His daughter. The word sliced through her. So Richard had children. Of course he did. Why should that thought disturb her? Why was it so painful? It felt like jealousy – and she didn’t like to think about that.

She found the porch light shining when she went home, just as if someone had left it on for her. She had no memory of having turned it on herself, and when she entered the house she had the strong impression that someone had just slipped down the hall ahead of her.

She went through every room in the house, turning on all the lights, but found no one.

‘Miranda …’

His voice shivered the air, sent a chill down her spine. ‘Richard, damn you, show yourself!’ she called, and ran, ducking in and out of the hall, weaving as complex and rapid a path as she could, but she couldn’t catch him. She couldn’t even glimpse him, although she heard his laughter, very close.

‘Damn you,’ she muttered. She stopped, and listened to the thudding of her own heart, realising she was drunk. There was no one in the house. The doors were locked, the windows closed. Central air-conditioning had been installed since her day, so she switched it on and turned off all the lights and went to bed.

She slept badly. It was to be expected. The first few nights in a strange bed were always difficult. That this was a familiar house only added to the problem. Instead of waking disoriented, as she usually did, she woke knowing exactly where she was, puzzled by the fact that she was alone. She should be used to sleeping alone by now – she hadn’t had a steady boyfriend in more than two years. Whom was she reaching for, whose absence surprised her into wakefulness time and again when her arms closed on emptiness? She knew, and tried to pretend she didn’t.

The last time she woke the bedside clock said seven. It was earlier than she usually rose, but it was morning, and she was glad to end her battle with sleep. For a while she simply lay in bed listening to the sounds of the house, listening to voices from another room.

It took some time for her to register that something was wrong. She was so accustomed to life in rented rooms, in cheap, thin-walled apartments where the sounds of other lives provided counterpart to her own, that she did not at first remember that she was in a house now. And alone. Then the blood pounded so hard in her ears that she couldn’t hear the voices.

An automatic clock-radio, she thought. Or an open window, children playing on the lawn. She pulled on her robe and went into the hall. Above the soft hiss of the air conditioning she heard two voices, not loud, but clearly coming from the other bedroom. A man’s voice, and a child’s. The man speaking softly, the child laughing with pleasure.

Some mistake. A man and a child in her house? Nothing to fear, only some mistake.

‘Excuse me—’

Her voice sounded harsh in the empty room. Sunlight came through the glass. Dust motes rose from the golden floor. The room was empty. The guest-room. Once her work-room, it would have been the nursery if she’d married Richard and had his child.

That thought carried with it a sense of loss so powerful that it frightened her more than the imaginary voices. Miranda turned blindly from the emptiness and walked.

The smell of coffee tickled her nose and drew her on, and when she came to the doorway of the kitchen she smiled at the common, everyday sight of Richard tending the bubbling percolator.

Then she grabbed the doorframe to steady herself, and Richard was gone as if he had never been. But the fragrance lingered, teasing her with its insubstantial reality.

She marched across the checkered linoleum floor, but the stove was cold, and the percolator did not exist. She had been imagining things, reliving the past. She had, in other words, seen a ghost.

Miranda went through the motions of preparing a cup of instant coffee, moving stiffly and cautiously, afraid of colliding with the invisible. Hairs prickled at the back of her neck, and she stared fixedly at her own hands as she worked, trying not to see the movements which teased at the corners of her sight. She bore her cup of coffee back to bed, gliding down the hall with eyes fixed straight ahead, refusing to be tempted by visions.

But by the time she had finished drinking her coffee, sitting cosy in bed and watching the room fill up with sunlight, Miranda was no longer afraid. Instead, she was interested, and rather pleased with herself. It wasn’t everyone who could see ghosts, after all. It was a gift, like poetry. No ghastly spirits haunted her – it was her own past. Miranda did not usually think of herself as having a past. She was still young, an itinerant poet of no fixed address, and a past was something that she would acquire with age, like a house, a husband, children …

Miranda looked at her hands, wondering if they were the hands of a young woman. It wasn’t too late, was it? In four years she would be forty. She had never, despite all the speeches she’d made, resolutely turned away from the possibility of a husband, even children. She had not thought, when she ran away from Richard and what he offered, that she was making the choice for all eternity. Did she really want to be single all her life? Would the day ever come when she admitted it was too late? And would she know, then, that she had made a mistake?

She got up and went down the hall to her office. As an exercise, a beginning in a new place, Miranda set herself to write a poem about the house. The words came quickly, and she took it down like dictation. But when she had finished a draft she frowned in dismay. It was too easy; it was too familiar. Hadn’t she written this before? It wasn’t very good, in any case. She crumpled the paper in her hand and threw the ball at the waste-basket just as a wave of déjà vu made her dizzy.

*

Her first class, that afternoon, restored her self-esteem. The students were bright, eager, interested and impressed to be in the presence of Miranda Ackerman. Afterwards, almost singing, she went along to the English Department, and there was Richard, leaning against a wall.

For a moment she stared and said nothing, taking him for his ghost. Then he shifted, and grinned, and said, ‘Hello, Miranda. I’m sorry I had to miss your party.’

She saw then that he had put on weight, and his hair was cut short. He had changed in many small ways, but he was the same and she knew him. ‘It’s nice to see you again.’

‘You too. I thought maybe, if you have some time, we could have a cup of coffee together? Just chat? I have a class an hour from now, but if you’re free – would that be okay?’

She realised he was nervous, and suddenly everything was easy. She smiled. ‘Yes, I’d like that.’

He took her, apologising, to the Faculty Club, and Miranda exerted herself to be as charming and friendly to him as she would have been to any agreeable stranger. The past was between them like a pane of glass. It kept them apart, but it allowed them to see each other.

‘You’ll have to come over for dinner one evening,’ he said.

‘Yes, I’d like that.’ It was true. This man was a stranger to her, and it might be possible to become his friend. ‘Where do you live?’

‘Oh, not far from you, on the corner of Live Oak and Glen Valley, just a few blocks north of Goddard—’ he stopped, looking uncomfortable, and Miranda remembered her earlier suspicions.

‘You know where I’m living.’

She knew that guilty expression. ‘Look, please don’t think I had anything to do with it—’

‘Why should I think that?’

‘The Housing Department made all the arrangements. They don’t consult the English Department. There’s no way I could – Honestly, you can’t think—’

The pane of glass was gone; he was too close. Miranda said sharply, ‘Of course I don’t think you had anything to do with where I live. Why should you? It was just a funny coincidence – like my coming back to Burnham at all. I’m not the person I was when I left here, and neither are you.’

‘Then you don’t mind living there?’

‘Why should I?’

He shrugged, not meeting her challenge. ‘It was a long time ago.’

He couldn’t be mourning her still. He was married now, he had children. Miranda thought of how much stronger unhappy memories were than happy ones. Ghosts were traditionally unhappy. On impulse she said, ‘How long did you live in that house after I left?’

He sighed, giving in. ‘Three years.’

‘Alone?’

Richard nodded. ‘Except for the ghosts.’

‘Ghosts!’ She felt betrayed. She’d thought they were her ghosts.

He gave her a thoughtful look. ‘In a manner of speaking. I was haunted by you after you went away. I’d hear your voice in another room, or your footsteps down the hall. When I went to look, I’d find no one. In a way I couldn’t believe you’d gone. The house never felt empty. Sometimes I’d catch glimpses of you smiling at me from across the room, or walking past the bedroom door.’

Miranda shivered. ‘What do you mean? Do you mean you couldn’t stop thinking about me, or do you mean my ghost was actually there in the house?’

‘Is there a difference? Does it matter? I don’t know if anyone else could have seen you, because I led a pretty reclusive life and there was hardly ever anyone else in the house. I never thought I was imagining it – it was too real. Even though I knew you’d left, it was as if a part of you had stayed behind, because I needed you. Why? Have you seen anything since you’ve been back?’

Miranda smiled and drew back, shaking her head. ‘You expect me to see my own ghost?’

‘I guess not … but you might see mine.’

She lost her smile. ‘Is that why you had me put in that house? To haunt me?’

Richard looked at his watch. ‘I told you, I didn’t have anything to do with where they put you. And I have a class now; I’ve got to go.’

Now he was running, she thought, just as she had always run rather than argue with him. She stood up as he did and said, ‘I’d like to forget the past and start over again with you, Richard. Can’t you?’

He smiled at her. ‘I already have.’ The pane of glass was back, solidly in place between them.

*

Miranda didn’t expect to see the ghost again. Seeing Richard had been an exorcism, she thought. His present self drove out the past, and she could no longer believe in the Richard of fourteen years ago. But later that day, sitting at her desk, writing in her journal, Miranda felt herself being watched. When she looked around she heard faint sounds outside, as if someone had scurried away.

Trying to remember if she had locked the door behind her, Miranda rose, calling, ‘Is someone there?’

As she stepped into the hall she saw a flash of colour as someone ducked into the dining room. Her heart thumped and she ran forward. The dining room was empty when she got there, and so, too, the living room. But there was someone in the house. Someone was playing with her.

After a moment’s thought, she let herself collapse into a deep, padded chair in the living room, one which commanded a view of the door into the hall as well as the door into the dining room.

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ she called above the noise of her own heart. Her fingers dug grooves in the chair arms as she looked tensely back and forth.

From the hall a faint sound: shoes squeaking on polished boards. And then, quite distinctly, a giggle. While Miranda held her breath, a little girl peeped shyly around the door from the hallway. She was tiny, surely no more than three or four years old, with sparkling grey eyes and brown hair pulled tightly into two stubby pigtails.

Miranda smiled and let out her breath in relief, but before she could say a word the little girl had vanished.

Miranda jumped up and ran into the hall to look for her but she already knew it was hopeless. The girl had not run away; she had disappeared. The house was empty.

The house was haunted. She wasn’t alone. Miranda began to shake, no longer charmed by the idea of her own private ghosts. There were others in the house, invisible, insubstantial people leading lives parallel to her own, in other times. Other times just as real as this present in which she was anchored. Perhaps it was the same everywhere, invisible crowds of people moving through one another unknowing, but here in this house the veil of time which should have kept things separate had torn. Things slipped through, people. Miranda feared a collision.

Claustrophobic, oppressed by other lives, Miranda left the house, needing an escape from all the invisible people trapped within the walls of her house. It was time for dinner, so she went to a sandwich bar near campus, one which Sarah had told her was a preferred student hangout, and brooded over her pastrami on rye.

Could anyone else see the ghosts? She thought of Richard, but then dismissed him. He had been speaking in metaphor, talking about memory and regrets. She didn’t like the idea that she and Richard shared this special sensitivity; she preferred to believe seeing ghosts was her own individual talent.

She looked around the bar at students eating, drinking, talking together and playing video games, and realised she was the oldest person there by at least fifteen years. She felt a surge of disappointment and then annoyance: first at Sarah for recommending this as a good place to meet people, and then at herself for expecting something else. People her age didn’t hang around in student snack bars. She still thought of herself as young, a girl, and gravitated to student hang-outs from long habit. But the slim, hard bodies and blank young faces around her made her feel ancient. She realised she had come looking for someone, hoping she wouldn’t have to go home tonight. But there was nothing here for her: she was too old, and not old enough, to have a liking for boys.

So she went back to her haunted house. Walking through the warm, quiet evening, Miranda had time to reflect. The ghosts she had seen were not threatening – perhaps they even had something to offer. She wondered how many ghosts there were, how many former residents lingered on in spirit, and was tempted by the idea of getting to know them all, of becoming the woman who lived with ghosts.

Turning down Goddard Lane Miranda walked more quickly, eager to get home. She saw the house ahead, picked out of the darkness by the lights shining from the windows, and she stopped.

It had not been dark when she left the house. She was certain she had turned on no lights. Walking again she was more cautious, and left the sidewalk to approach the house from an angle, from the side, all the white staring at the bright squares of the windows.

A figure appeared like an image cast upon a screen: a man in profile. It was Richard.

Not her own, remembered, long-haired boyfriend, but short-haired Dr Richard Terrell of the English Department. Stilled by shock, Miranda stared. Something moved past another window, and then the child appeared.

Richard knelt: Miranda saw his head close to the child’s, nose to nose. She could imagine the little girl’s giggling, pleased by her father’s attention.

Richard and his daughter, playing at being ghosts.

Miranda began stalking towards the house, but then her fury turned her around. She would not walk into his trap, not this time. He was too good at playing hide-and-seek in her house.

No. She knew where he lived; she would go and wait for him. Let him walk into her trap.

‘Does your wife know where you are?’ she muttered, and grinning, broke into a run.

When she reached the corner of Live Oak and Glen Valley she was out of breath and starting to waver in her determination. She had no idea what she would say when Richard’s wife answered the door.

But Richard’s wife did not answer the door – Richard did.

Miranda stared at him. Even if he’d had a car waiting, even if he had leaped into it seconds after she’d started running, how could he have arrived without passing her, without her seeing him?

‘Miranda! What a surprise. Please come in.’ He stepped back, but she didn’t move.

‘How’d you get here so fast?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean! From my house!’

He frowned. ‘I’ve been here all evening.’

‘You were in my house not twenty minutes ago, with your daughter.’

‘My daughter is in bed. She has chicken pox. Look, Miranda …’

‘Richard, I saw you! In my house, with a little girl, not ten minutes ago. I saw you there as plainly as I see you now. I’m not buying the haunted house story. It was you.’

‘You’d better come in.’

As Miranda entered, a slim, dark-haired woman came into the hall.

‘This is my wife,’ Richard said. ‘Doris, this is Miranda Ackerman, the visiting poet.’

‘Oh, yes, of course! How nice to meet you. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to the party, only Beth had a raging fever and neither of us liked to leave. Richard didn’t tell me you were coming tonight.’

‘I’m glad to meet you,’ Miranda said, beginning to feel embarrassed. ‘Richard wasn’t expecting me – I just dropped by.’

‘We have something to talk over,’ Richard said to his wife. ‘I thought I’d take her into my study. Maybe you could join us a little later with some coffee?’

He led Miranda into a room comfortably filled with books, showed her to a chair and closed the door. ‘Now, what’s the problem?’

‘You tell me.’

They stared at each other. Miranda said, ‘I saw you in my house, Richard.’

He shook his head.

‘I know what I saw.’

‘You can ask Dorie. I haven’t been out all evening. And I haven’t been in the house on Goddard Lane for at least ten years. You saw my ghost.’

‘And the ghost of your daughter?’ she asked sarcastically.

He gave her a level look. ‘Our daughter. The child you never had.’

A chill went down her spine. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We never had a child. Even if I’m seeing apparitions of the past, I couldn’t see someone who never existed.’

‘You were pregnant when you left me. You think I don’t know? You went away to have an abortion. You knew that if you stayed and told me I wouldn’t have let you. I’d have talked you into marrying me, and having the child.’

‘You’re crazy. I didn’t need a reason like that to leave you. I left you because I was miserable. I hated living in Burnham, I had to escape, I had to write my poems—’

‘Like “No Regrets”,’ he said. ‘That’s about deciding to have the abortion, and leaving me.’

‘Oh, yes, I suppose you think all my poems are about you! The great literary scholar, figuring me out from my poems. What an ego!’

‘It was nearly fourteen years ago. It’s in the past. You don’t have to justify yourself to me now. Surely you can admit that you had an abortion rather than have our child?’

‘It was fourteen years ago, yes, so why does it matter to you? Why do you need me to confess? Why dig it up?’

He sighed and sank back in his chair, running a hand through his hair absently, watching her as if he really knew her, the way a father knows a stubborn child.

‘Of course it still matters,’ he said quietly. ‘Everything matters, always. You’re the one who has dug it up. You’re the one seeing ghosts.’

She felt herself giving in. She had always given in, or run away from him. He still had that power over her – and how she resented it! – to make her feel childish and in the wrong.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Maybe I had an abortion – but why should I see a four-year-old child? How can I see the ghost of someone who was never born?’

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said. ‘Those ghosts are fragments of the past, but not the past we know. Of another, possible past, one that might have happened as easily as what we actually remember. The past I wanted – what would have happened if you hadn’t left me.’

He stopped her protest with a look and went on, ‘After you left, all I could think about was you, and what I’d lost, and whether or not you might come back, and what would have happened if I’d done things differently, if I’d been able to talk you into staying.

‘I became obsessed. I suppose, in a way, I went a little crazy. I started seeing you. I began living in an alternative reality, a kind of waking dream. In it, you’d never left. You married me and had our baby. You settled down to life in Burnham at last, and you stopped complaining.’

‘Oh, terrific. I suppose I gave up writing poetry, too?’

‘Of course not. I don’t know why you ever thought I wanted that. I was proud of you, always. You wrote – motherhood seemed to release new wells of creativity in you. You learned how to use your time, becoming far more disciplined. You won a prize, which included publication of your first book. You dedicated the collection to me and to our daughter, Helen.’

‘That’s crazy!’ Miranda said, but she recognised what he was doing. It had been a game with them, once. They made up stories about their neighbours, about strangers glimpsed on the street or in the news, great epics of ‘What would have happened if …’ they’d never met, or their parents had led different lives. She had enjoyed it because she’d been very good at it. Better than Richard, which was the problem. It had become a competition he had to win, and to make him happy she had agreed with him, repressed or altered her own best flights of fancy.

‘Maybe,’ said Richard. ‘Maybe I was crazy. But maybe I was seeing another kind of truth. I know I believed it then, and it helped me survive. The amazing thing is that I had this rich, detailed fantasy life going on, and yet I continued to function in the real world. I got to work on time, I went to class and kept my grades up, I wrote my papers, did research and paid the bills. It was almost as if what I imagined was true, that I did have a loving wife who supported me by keeping my spirits high and making sure I ate well, keeping me from slacking, never doubting—’

‘I suppose I typed your papers, too.’

He smiled fondly. ‘Well, yes, you did, although how you managed to fit it in with looking after the house, caring for the baby, cooking meals and writing poems I never could work out.’

‘Richard, honestly! You typed those papers yourself. There was no baby – there was no wife! You sound as if you believe it really happened!’

He shrugged. ‘For me, it did. I’m just telling you what I remember.’

‘You’re remembering things that only happened inside your head.’

‘Ah, no. They happened inside that house. You’ve proved that, by seeing the ghosts yourself. How could you see my fantasies? They must have some sort of objective reality.’

‘I don’t believe it. Are you saying that all my memories are wrong? That the past fourteen years, and all I’ve got to show for them, never happened?’

‘Don’t look at me like that, Miranda.’ That chiding, rational voice compelled her belief, and infuriated her. Why should his dreams be more true than her own? ‘Of course I’m not saying that the past fourteen years aren’t real. You had an abortion, you built up your career as a poet, I met Dorie, got married, had two kids … That’s history. But there’s another history – lots of other histories of things that might have happened. Alternate worlds, other realities. You think that after you left me I was spinning fantasies in my head. But I think I was catching glimpses of another line of probability, of a “what if” world, another time-line running parallel to this one, in which you didn’t leave me.

‘There could be an infinite number of these probability worlds running parallel to our own, each one the result of some small change in history, even personal histories. For every choice made, another branches away, leading to a whole new set of decisions, a new series of alternate histories. One of these branching points came when you got pregnant. In one world you ran away and got an abortion. In another world you told me about it and stayed to bear our child. Those two worlds are so close they actually touch in the house on Goddard Lane. And something – my misery, my obsession with you, my refusal to accept reality – made me especially sensitive so that I could see and hear bits of that other world. At times I merged with my other self and experienced my life as it would have been if you’d stayed. You know it’s true – you’ve heard the voices; you’ve seen the child.’

Maybe he was trying to upset her; maybe it was real to him. It’s just the old game again, Miranda told herself. She had her own life now and nothing he could say would change that. She should say goodnight and leave.

But she had run away from him in the past because she couldn’t stand up to him. She was older now, and stronger, and there were old scores to settle. She wanted to win this game, to make him believe in her story.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s say there are alternate worlds. Let’s say we’ve both glimpsed another time-line in that house.

‘Yes, I was pregnant when I left you, and yes I had an abortion. I knew if I told you, you’d have talked me out of it. You always wore me down. I did love you, but I couldn’t stay in Burnham and have a baby. So I had to sneak away.

‘If there are alternate worlds, there must be one where you found out I was pregnant and talked me into marrying you. Maybe I had a daughter, and we named her Helen, after my mother.’

She drew a deep breath, looking at his self-satisfied smile. ‘But everything else you say is wrong, wrong, wrong. You had no idea what was going on in my mind, what I was feeling, or what it would have done to me to stay. All that stuff about our happy marriage – you just made that up to ease your conscience. You’d have loved to have me typing your papers and cooking your meals, but I would have hated it.’

‘Having a baby changed you,’ he said. ‘Once you realised it was what you really wanted—’

Miranda clung to the thread, fighting off his smugness with the passion of her knowledge.

‘Of course it changed me! But it didn’t turn me into a good little housewife without a brain. I loved my baby, no doubt about it; loved her even before she was born. I never regretted having her, not even when I lost the inclination to write. I was too tired to write, but giving up poetry for my own baby didn’t seem like such a great expense.

‘I couldn’t resent her for the way I’d changed. So I resented you. I blamed you, because you didn’t understand. You thought it should be enough for me to be your wife and Helen’s mother. You patronised me, offering to get up early to look after Helen so I could write, offering to make dinner. It was my own fault if I didn’t write – after all, I was home all day with nothing to do but cook and wash and clean and type your papers – how long could it take to write eight or nine lines?

‘You didn’t understand, so I hated you, and you never noticed. In your eyes, I was happy and fulfilled, because I didn’t scream. Even after three years, when I’d written nothing, you still told people that your wife wrote poetry – it was a nice hobby.’

Her arms ached. Miranda realised her fists were clenched, her whole body ready to fight. She trembled with the effort of restraining herself. Richard watched her, eyes wary and mouth ungiving as he prepared his defence. But there could be no defence. Miranda knew that she was telling the truth, the only truth there was.

‘Eventually I left you. Of course I did! You wanted another child, another stone to weigh me down and keep me in my place. After you made me get my IUD removed – I’m sure you couldn’t really feel it – I went on the Pill, even though I knew it was bad for me. I knew you’d sabotage me if you could. I looked around for another lover, someone to rescue me, but in the end I just left, taking Helen.

‘I was a woman of thirty burdened with a child, without a man, without a job, without skills or talent, a failed poet, useless. Gradually I realised how unfair it was to blame you for all that – no one really stopped me writing but myself. I could blame myself for not leaving you sooner, but then I wouldn’t have had Helen. It was the hardest thing in the world, to start writing again, without hope or encouragement.’

‘I always encouraged you,’ Richard said.

‘I know you did,’ she agreed dully. She wondered why it hurt to look at his gentle, bland, well-fed face. She had not loved him for many years. ‘And you gave me money, more than just child-support. Most men wouldn’t.’ She stopped, confused. When had he ever given her money? But he was nodding, agreeing. Yes, he was a good man. He’d done all he could.

‘Don’t look so sad,’ he said. ‘You’re happy now, aren’t you? You’re doing what you want to do. You’re an established poet, with books to your name and good reviews, and you make your living with the lecture circuit and teaching courses like this one.’

He smiled, encouragingly, and suddenly she knew that she owed her year at Burnham to Richard. He had fixed it. Not a trap, as she had first thought, but a way of soothing his guilty conscience, of putting her further in his debt.

When at last she could speak around the anger in her throat she said, ‘I never asked for your help, you know. I didn’t need your help.’

There was a sudden, soft flurry of knocks at the door and then it flew open and in came a little girl, giggling. She was about five or six years old, with a mass of dark curls and a pretty, flushed face. She wore pyjamas.

‘The dreams won’t let me sleep,’ she said. Miranda saw her resemblance to Richard’s dark-haired wife. Then she looked at Richard and saw his love for the child, and felt her anger drain away.

Richard left his chair to scoop the little girl into his arms and nuzzle her neck, making her squeal with delight.

Watching, Miranda felt bereft. She had denied Richard this joy; she had denied herself. But this was the only possible world. She rose, and Richard looked at her, across the body of his child.

‘I’ll put Miss Wiggles here back to bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask Doris to make us some coffee. You will stay, won’t you?’

She suspected he had already forgotten their conversation, drawn back into his own world by the demands of his real daughter. She said, ‘You can’t measure books against lives.’

He frowned. Did he disagree, or hadn’t he understood? ‘Just wait,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’

As he went out the door, Miranda began counting. When she reached ten, she left the house and went back into the night.

An infinity of possible worlds whirled about her head, as bright and distant as stars. If there were two different lines of probability, there were a hundred, a million. For every word spoken. For every choice, every chance. Richard’s happy marriage to her just as possible as her desertion of him, the mother as real as the poet.

Miranda stopped on a corner, confused. Her usual sense of direction had deserted her, and she couldn’t remember which way to turn. Where did she live? Goddard Lane? But that was years and years ago.

She walked on. She could only be what she imagined, and for years Miranda had imagined herself a loner, a drifter, a failure at relationships who made up her life in words.

She knew what her life would have been if she’d stayed with Richard – wrong, a failure, a trap. She knew it just as if it had actually happened. And perhaps it had.

No regrets, she thought, meaning the opposite. Because there were always regrets, always second thoughts and questions. But you couldn’t travel two roads at the same time, and each road took you further away. You tried, as you travelled, not to think about what might have been. You tried not to hear the ghosts calling your name.

There was her house. The living room curtains had been drawn, so that only a soft glow of light showed. The porch light had been turned on to welcome her home. Miranda stared up at it from the street.

I could run away, she thought, and this time not look back. Or I can go home.

There were two paths before her now, just as there had been fourteen years ago, and they were almost the same two paths. One of them was the cracked white pavement which led to the front door.

She slipped the key into the lock, and the door opened to her with its familiar click and groan. She stepped into the darkened hall, eyes on the light which spilled from the living room. Her heart was beating hard and fast. She didn’t ask herself what she was afraid of. She didn’t know if she would be more frightened if the house was empty this time, or if it was not.

‘Helen?’ she called, and waited.

WIVES

A smell of sulphur in the air on a morning when the men had gone, and the wives, in their beds, smiled in their sleep, breathed more easily, and burrowed deeper into dreams.

Jack’s wife woke, her eyes open and her little nose flaring, smelling something beneath the sulphur smell. One of those smells she was used to not noticing, when the men were around. But it was all right, now. Wives could do as they pleased, so long as they cleaned up and were back in their proper places when the men returned.

Jack’s wife – who was called Susie – got out of bed too quickly and grimaced as the skintight punished her muscles. She caught sight of herself in the mirror over the dressing table: her sharp teeth were bared, and she looked like a wild animal, bound and struggling. She grinned at that, because she could easily free herself.

She cut the skintight apart with scissors, cutting and ripping carelessly. It didn’t matter that it was ruined – skintights were plentiful. She had a whole boxful, herself, in the hall closet behind the Christmas decorations. And she didn’t have the patience to try soaking it off slowly in a hot bath, as the older wives recommended. So her muscles would be sore and her skintight a tattered rag – she would be free that much sooner.

She looked down at her dead-white body, feeling distaste. She felt despair at the sight of her small arms, hanging limp, thin and useless in the hollow below her ribs. She tried to flex them but could not make them move. She began to massage them with her primary fingers, and after several minutes the pain began, and she knew they weren’t dead yet.

She bathed and massaged her newly uncovered body with oil. She felt terrifyingly free, naked and rather dangerous, with the skintight removed. She sniffed the air again and that familiar scent, musky and alluring, aroused her.

She ran through the house – noticing, in passing, that Jack’s pet spider was eating the living room sofa. It was the time for building nests and cocoons, she thought happily, time for laying eggs and planting seeds; the spider was driven by the same force that drove her.

Outside, the dusty ground was hard and cold beneath her bare feet. She felt the dust all over her body, raised by the wind and clinging to her momentary warmth. She was coated in the soft yellow dust by the time she reached the house next door – the house where the magical scent came from, the house which held a wife in heat, longing for someone to mate with.

Susie tossed her head, shaking the dust out in a little cloud around her head. She stared up at the milky sky and around at all the houses, alien artefacts constructed by men. She saw movement in the window of the house across the street and waved – the figure watching her waved back.

Poor old Maggie, thought Susie. Old, bulging and ugly; unloved and nobody’s wife. She was only housekeeper to two men who were, rather unfortunately Susie thought, in love with each other.

But she didn’t want to waste time by thinking of wives and men, or by feeling pity, now. Boldly, like a man, Susie pounded at the door.

It opened. ‘Ooooh, Susie!’

Susie grinned and looked the startled wife up and down. You’d never know from looking at her that the men were gone and she could relax – this wife, called Doris, was as dolled up as some eager-to-please newlywed and looked, Susie thought, more like a real woman than any woman had ever looked.

Over her skintight (which was bound more tightly than Susie’s had been) Doris wore a low-cut dress, her three breasts carefully bound and positioned to achieve the proper, double-breasted effect. Gaily patterned and textured stockings covered her silicone-injected legs, and she tottered on heels three centimetres high. Her face was carefully painted, and she wore gold bands on neck, wrists and fingers.

Then Susie ignored what she looked like because her nose told her so much more. The smell was so powerful now that she could feel her pouch swelling in lonely response.

Doris must have noticed, for her eyes rolled, seeking some safe view.

‘What’s the matter?’ Susie asked, her voice louder and bolder than it ever was when the men were around. ‘Didn’t your man go off to war with the others? He stay home sick in bed?’

Doris giggled. ‘Ooooh, I wish he would, sometimes! No, he was out of here before it was light.’

Off to see his mistress before leaving, Susie thought. She knew that Doris was nervous about being displaced by one of the other wives her man was always fooling around with – there were always more wives than there were men, and her man had a roving eye.

‘Calm down, Doris. Your man can’t see you now, you know.’ She stroked one of Doris’s hands. ‘Why don’t you take off that silly dress and your skintight. I know how constricted you must be feeling. Why not relax with me?’

She saw Doris’s face darken with emotion beneath the heavy make-up, and she grasped her hand more tightly when Doris tried to pull away.

‘Please don’t,’ Doris said.

‘Come on,’ Susie murmured, caressing Doris’s face and feeling the thick paint slide beneath her fingers.

‘No, don’t … please … I’ve tried to control myself, truly I have. But the exercises don’t work, and the perfume doesn’t cover the smell well enough – he won’t even sleep with me when I’m like this. He thinks it’s disgusting, and it is. I’m so afraid he’ll leave me.’

‘But he’s gone now, Doris. You can let yourself go. You don’t have to worry about him when he’s not around. It’s safe, it’s all right, you can do as you please now – we can do anything we like and no one will know.’ She could feel Doris trembling.

‘Doris,’ she whispered and rubbed her face demandingly against hers.

At that, the other wife gave in, and collapsed in her arms.

Susie helped Doris out of her clothes, tearing at them with hands and teeth, throwing shoes and jewellery high into the air and festooning the yard with rags of dress, stockings and undergarment.

But when Doris, too, was naked, Susie suddenly felt shy and a little frightened. It would be wrong to mate here in the settlement built by men, wrong and dangerous. They must go somewhere else, somewhere they could be something other than wives for a little while, and follow their own natures without reproach.

They went to a place of stone on the far northern edge of the human settlement. It was a very old place, although whether it had been built by the wives in the distant time before they were wives or whether it was natural, neither Susie nor Doris could say. They both felt that it was a holy place, and it seemed right to mate there, in the shadow of one of the huge, black, standing stones.

It was a feast, an orgy of life after a season of death. They found pleasure in exploring the bodies which seemed so similar to men but which they knew to be miraculously different, each from the other, in scent, texture and taste. They forgot that they had ever been creatures known as wives. They lost their names and forgot the language of men as they lay entwined.

There were no skintights imprisoning their bodies now, barring them from sensation, freedom and pleasure, and they were partners, not strangers, as they explored and exulted in their flesh. This was no mockery of the sexual act – brutishly painful and brief as it was with the men – but the true act in all its meaning.

They were still joined at sundown, and it was not until long after the three moons began their nightly waltz through the clouds that the two lovers fell asleep at last.

*

‘In three months,’ Susie said dreamily, ‘We can …’

‘In three months we won’t do anything.’

‘Why not? If the men are away …’

‘I’m hungry,’ said Doris. She wrapped her primary arms around herself. ‘And I’m cold, and I ache all over. Let’s go back.’

‘Stay here with me, Doris. Let’s plan.’

‘There’s nothing to plan.’

‘But in three months we must get together and fertilise it.’

‘Are you crazy? Who would carry it then? One of us would have to go without a skintight, and do you think either of our husbands would let us slop around for four months without a skintight? And then when it’s born how could we hide it? Men don’t have babies, and they don’t want anyone else to. Men kill babies, just as they kill all their enemies.’

Susie knew that what Doris was saying was true, but she was reluctant to give up her new dream. ‘Still, we might be able to keep it hidden,’ she said. ‘It’s not so hard to hide things from a man …’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ Doris said scornfully. Susie noticed that she still had smears of make-up on her face. Some smears had transferred themselves to Susie in the night. They looked like bruises or bloody wounds. ‘Come back with me now,’ Doris said, her voice gentle again. ‘Forget this, about the baby. The old ways are gone – we’re wives now, and we don’t have a place in our lives for babies.’

‘But some day the war may end,’ Susie said. ‘And the men will all go back to Earth and leave us here.’

‘If that happens,’ said Doris, ‘then we would make new lives for ourselves. Perhaps we would have babies again.’

‘If it’s not too late then,’ Susie said. ‘If it ever happens.’ She stared past Doris at the horizon.

‘Come back with me.’

Susie shook her head. ‘I have to think. You go. I’ll be all right.’

She realised when Doris had gone that she, too, was tired, hungry and sore, but she was not sorry she had remained in the place of stone. She needed to stay a while longer in one of the old places, away from the distractions of the settlement. She felt that she was on the verge of remembering something very important.

A large, dust-coloured lizard crawled out of a hole in the side of a fallen rock, and Susie rolled over and clapped her hands on it. But it wriggled out of her clutches like air or water or the wind-blown dust and disappeared somewhere. Susie felt a sharp pang of disappointment – she had a sudden memory of how that lizard would have tasted, how the skin of its throat would have felt, tearing between her teeth. She licked her dry lips and sat up. In the old days, she thought, I caught many such lizards. But the old days were gone, and with them the old knowledge and the old abilities.

I’m not what I used to be, she thought. I’m something else now – a ‘wife’, created by man in the image of something I have never seen, something called ‘woman’.

She thought about going back to her house in the settlement and of wrapping herself in a new skintight and then selecting the proper dress and shoes to make a good impression on the returning Jack; she thought about painting her face and putting rings on her fingers. She thought about boiling and burning good food to turn it into the unappetising messes Jack favoured, and about killing the wide-eyed ‘coffee fish’ to get the oil to make the mildly addictive drink the men called ‘coffee’. She thought about watching Jack, and listening to him, always alert for what he might want, what he might ask, what he might do. Trying to anticipate him, to earn his praise and avoid his blows and harsh words. She thought about letting him ‘screw’ her and about the ugly jewellery and noisome perfumes he brought her.

Susie began to cry, and the dust drank her tears as they fell. She didn’t understand how this had all begun, how or why she had become a wife, but she could bear it no longer.

She wanted to be what she had been born to be – but she could not remember what that was. She only knew that she could be Susie no longer. She would be no man’s wife.

*

‘I remembered my name this morning,’ Susie said with quiet triumph. She looked around the room. Doris was staring down at her hands, twisting them in her lap. Maggie looked half asleep, and the other two wives – Susie didn’t remember their names; she had simply gathered them up when she found them on the street – looked both bored and nervous.

‘Don’t you see?’ Susie persisted. ‘If I could remember that, I’m sure I can remember other things, in time. All of us can.’

Maggie opened her eyes all the way. ‘And what would that do,’ she asked, ‘except make us discontented and restless, as you are?’

‘What good … why, if we all began to remember, we could live our lives again – our own lives. We wouldn’t have to be wives, we could be … ourselves.’

‘Could we?’ said Maggie sourly. ‘And do you think the men would watch us go? Do you think they’d let us walk out of their houses and out of their lives without stopping us? Don’t you – you who talk about remembering – don’t you remember how it was when the men came? Don’t you remember the slaughter? Don’t you remember just who became wives, and why? We, the survivors, became wives because the men wouldn’t kill us then, not if we kept them happy and believing we weren’t the enemy. If we try to leave or change, they’ll kill us like they’ve killed almost everything else in the world.’

The others were silent, but Susie suspected they were letting Maggie speak for them.

‘But we’ll die,’ she said. ‘We’ll die like this, as wives. We’ve lost our identities, but we can have them back. We can have the world back, and our lives, only if we take them. We’re dying as a race and as a world, now. Being a wife is a living death, just a postponement of the end, that’s all.’

‘Yes,’ said Maggie, irony hanging heavily from the word. ‘So?’

‘So why do we have to let them do this to us? We can hide – we can run far away from the settlement and hide. Or, if we have to, we can fight back.’

‘That’s not our way,’ said Maggie.

‘Then what is our way?’ Susie demanded. ‘Is it our way to let ourselves be destroyed? They’ve already killed our culture and our past – we have no “way” anymore – we can’t claim we do. All we are now is imitations, creatures moulded by the men. And when the men leave – if the men leave – it will be the end for us. We’ll have nothing left, and it will be too late to try to remember who we were.’

‘It’s already too late,’ Maggie said. Susie was suddenly impressed by the way she spoke and held herself, and wondered if Maggie, this elderly and unloved wife she had once pitied, had once been a leader of her people.

‘Can you remember why we did not fight or hide before?’ Maggie asked. ‘Can you remember why we decided that the best thing for us was to change our ways, to do what you are now asking us to undo?’

Susie shook her head.

‘Then go and try to remember. Remember that we made a choice when the men came, and now we must live with that choice. Remember that there was a good reason for what we did, a reason of survival. It is too late to change again. The old way is not waiting for our return, it is dead. Our world has been changed, and we could not stop it. The past is dead, but that is as it should be. We have new lives now. Forget your restlessness and go home. Be a good wife to Jack – he loves you in his way. Go home and be thankful for that.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. She looked around the room, noticing how the eyes of the others fell before hers. So few of them had wanted to listen to her, so few had dared venture out of their homes. Susie looked at Maggie as she spoke, meaning her words for all the wives. ‘They’re killing us slowly,’ she said. ‘But we’ll be just as dead in the end. I would rather die fighting, and take some of them with us.’

‘You may be ready to die now, but the rest of us are not,’ Maggie said. ‘But if you fought them, you would get not only your own death, but the death of us all. If they see you snarling and violent, they will wake up and turn new eyes on the rest of us and see us not as their loving wives but as beasts, strangers, dangerous wild animals to be destroyed. They forget that we are different from them; they are willing to forget and let us live as long as we keep them comfortable and act as wives should act.’

‘I can’t fight them alone, I know that,’ Susie said. ‘But if you’ll all join with me, we have a chance. We could take them by surprise, we could use their weapons against them. Why not? They don’t expect a fight from us – we could win. Some of us would die, of course, but many of us would survive. More than that – we’d have our own lives, our own world, back again.’

‘You think your arguments are new,’ said Maggie. There was a trace of impatience in her usually calm voice. ‘But I can remember the old days, even if you can’t. I remember what happened when the men first came, and I know what would happen if we angered them. Even if we managed somehow to kill all the men here, more men would come in their ships from the sky. And they would come to kill us for daring to fight them. Perhaps they would simply drop fire on us, this time being sure to burn out all of us and all life on our world. Do you seriously ask us to bring about this certain destruction?’

Susie stared at her, feeling dim memories stir in response to her words. Fire from the sky, the burning, the killing … But she couldn’t be certain she remembered, and she would rather risk destruction than go back to playing wife again.

‘We could hide,’ she said, pleading. ‘We could run away and hide in the wilderness. The men might think we had died – they’d forget about us soon, I’m certain. Even if they looked for us at first, we could hide. It’s our world, and we know it as they don’t. Soon we could live again as we used to, and forget the men.’

‘Stop this dreaming,’ Maggie said. ‘We can never live the way we used to – the old ways are gone, the old world is gone, and even your memories are gone, that’s obvious. The only way we know how to live now is with the men, as their wives. Everything else is gone. We’d die of hunger and exposure if the men didn’t track us down and kill us first.’

‘I may have forgotten the old ways, but you haven’t. You could teach us.’

‘I remember enough to know that what is gone, is gone. To know that we can’t go back. Believe me. Think about it, Susie. Try—’

‘Don’t call me that!’

Her shout echoed in the silence. No one spoke. Susie felt the last of her hope drain out of her as she looked at them. They did not feel what she felt, and she would not be able to convince them. In silence, still, she left them, and went back to her own house.

She waited for them there, for them to come and kill her.

She knew that they would come; she knew she had to die. It was as Maggie had said: one renegade endangered them all. If one wife turned on one man, all the wives would be made to suffer. The look of love on their faces would change to a look of hatred, and the slaughter would begin again.

Susie felt no desire to try to escape, to hide from the other wives as she had suggested they all hide from the men. She had no wish to live alone; for good or ill she was a part of her people, and she did not wish to endanger them nor to break away from them.

When they came, they came together, all the wives of the settlement, coming to act in concert so none should bear the guilt alone. They did not hate Susie, nor did she hate them, but the deadly work had to be done.

Susie walked outside, to make it easier for them. By offering not the slightest resistance, she felt herself to be acting with them. She presented the weakest parts of her body to their hands and teeth, that her death should come more quickly. And as she died, feeling her body pressed, pounded and torn by the other wives, Susie did not mind the pain. She felt herself a part of them all, and she died content.

*

After her death, one of the extra wives took on Susie’s name and moved into her house. She got rid of the spider’s gigantic egg-case first thing – Jack might like his footballsized pet, but he wouldn’t be pleased by the hundreds of pebble-sized babies that would come spilling out of the egg-case in a few months. Then she began to clean in earnest: a man deserved a clean house to come home to.

When, a few days later, the men returned from their fighting, Susie’s man Jack found a spotless house, filled with the smells of his favourite foods cooking, and a smiling, sexily-dressed wife.

‘Would you like some dinner, dear?’ she asked.

‘Put it on hold,’ he said, grinning wolfishly. ‘Right now I’ll take a cup of coffee – in bed – with you on the side.’

She fluttered her false eyelashes and moved a little closer, so he could put his arm around her if he liked.

‘Three tits and the best coffee in the universe,’ he said with satisfaction, squeezing one of the bound lumps of flesh on her chest. ‘With this to come home to, it kind of makes the whole war-thing worthwhile.’

THE FAMILY MONKEY

William

I was sitting with Florrie on the porch of her Daddy’s house, watching the night get darker and wondering about making a move. I was at that time living in a boarding house in Nacogdoches, and Florrie’s father had made me an offer to work for him that came complete with a house to live in. I didn’t know if I wanted to be that much obligated to the man: I still thought I might want to go back to Tennessee, and maybe I’d be better with nothing to keep me here.

But then there was Florrie. I still can’t figure why I was so interested in that scrawny little old girl, but I was. I guess there weren’t too many women in Texas then, but still – most of the time Florrie didn’t seem more than a child. But it was those other times that made me wonder, and made me wait, staying on in Texas, a place I didn’t much like and didn’t at all belong in.

I was just deciding that moving a little closer to her there on the porch couldn’t do no harm when there was a sudden flash in the sky, much brighter than any falling star ever was. It began to drop, leaving a streaky, glowing trail behind as it blazed brighter and then disappeared into the pines.

‘What was that?’ Florrie asked, already standing.

‘Falling star?’ I got up beside her.

‘If it was, it must have fallen right over in the graveyard, it was so big and bright,’ Florrie said. Then, ‘Let’s go see! I’d love to see a star up close!’

I thought I’d like to see a star up close myself, not that Florrie gave me any time to agree or disagree. She just took off into the woods and I followed after as best I could. I ran into a lot of things in those dark woods. I tried to take hold of Florrie’s hand, but she was impatient with me and pushed me off, saying there wasn’t room for but one on this path, and that was true. It wasn’t much of a path, and it must have been made by children, or elves, because below the shoulders I was fine, but I kept running head-on into hanging vines and protruding branches. I scratched my face up pretty good, and I guess I was lucky not to lose an eye. And Florrie really trotted through those woods, although I kept calling to her to slow up.

Halfway there it suddenly dawned on me. ‘Hey, Florrie, how’re we goin’ to see anything? It’ll be pitch black in that old graveyard, and we didn’t bring a lantern.’

‘If you’ll hurry we can get there before the star burns itself out. We’ll see by the light of that.’

So I saved my breath for keeping up with her, not wanting to be lost in the woods without a light or a girl.

‘There – is that it?’

I came up close behind her and looked where she was pointing. Whatever it was had sure enough landed right in the graveyard, but if it was a star or not we couldn’t tell, for it had burned itself out. The night grew thicker around us and about all you could make out was a big, odd-angled, collapsed shape, like a barn some giant had pitched across a pasture. Whatever it was, it had no business being in that graveyard.

‘What is it?’ Florrie whispered, but I had no inclination to find out. Because suddenly, maybe foolishly, I was wondering if something might not come crawling out of the wreckage.

‘Let’s leave it be,’ I whispered back. ‘We can come out in the morning and have a good look. It’s too dark now.’

‘If we wait till morning something might happen to it,’ she objected. ‘I’ll just run back and fetch a lantern. You stay here and watch it.’

‘Why don’t I go for the lantern?’

‘You might get lost. I can go quicker’n you.’

‘Why don’t we both go?’

‘You afraid?’ she asked, suddenly understanding.

‘Of course not!’ I said real quick.

‘Then just wait here.’ And she took off running, and what could I do but stay? I didn’t want her to think me a coward, and besides, she was right – I would have got lost in those woods.

Now, I am not the type who gets nervous about graveyards, after dark or otherwise. I don’t believe in ghosts, and back in Tennessee there was a girl I used to take to a graveyard to court, so I have a kind of fondness for the places. The thing that was bothering me was that thing which didn’t belong there, that chunk of star or whatever it was that had fallen out of the sky.

And as I sat there, staring at it (I couldn’t see anything, but I didn’t like the idea of turning my back on it) I started to hear something – a scratchy, grating sound that seemed to poke at the roots of my teeth and needle me just under my skin – and yet, although it didn’t seem to make any sense at the time, I wasn’t at all sure that I was hearing anything. It was a noise my body sensed more than heard, a noise that was somehow a part of me, inside, like the sound of my own blood pounding in my ears when everything else is silent.

I wanted to break and run, but there was something – and it was something more than fearing Florrie’s scorn, it was a kind of compulsion – that wouldn’t let me. So I stood there sweating, and argued with my feet, which seemed to want to drag me over closer to that thing.

‘Mr Peacock?’ Florrie, with a light, burst out of the brush. ‘Oh, you weren’t going to explore it without me?’

I saw that my feet had done a pretty good job despite my arguments.

‘Why, no ma’am,’ I said, but she wasn’t paying attention to me. She held the lantern up and we looked.

The thing which had fallen from the sky was of some dull metal. We could feel the heat from it, and the ground around was charred. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I thought: It’s a flying machine, and it’s come from far away. And then forgot.

‘What’s that?’ Florrie asked, whispering again.

There was a hole in the thing, deep blackness the lantern-light didn’t touch, gouged out of the silvery metal. Then I saw what Florrie meant. Something was moving inside the darkness, inside the metal thing. Something was trying to get out.

You might have expected a woman to go crazy then, and Florrie did, but not at all in the way you’d expect. She didn’t grab me, and she didn’t scream, and she didn’t faint or cry or run for home. She said, ‘We gotta help him, Billy.’ Her voice was urgent, and she started walking towards the hole without fear or hesitation.

Most of all I noticed that she called me Billy. Then I noticed she’d said ‘him’ – ‘We gotta help him’ – and with all that noticing, I hardly paid any attention to the fact that I was agreeing and going with her, reaching in (carefully, avoiding the edges) and catching hold of something, someone, and pulling it out. I was scared, but I couldn’t stop doing the thing that scared me. The flesh beneath my fingers didn’t feel like the flesh of any man, but it was no animal we grappled with. He was stuck, and we knew we were hurting him, but we knew we had to get him out. It had to be done: the urgency was as great as if this had been my mother pinned beneath a rock-slide.

And then we got him out and stretched on the grass. He looked enough like a man – in that he wasn’t a dog or a horse – but even in the lantern-light it was plain he wasn’t human. He was some kind of freak or monster. His skin was too big on him. It hung like a sheet draped over his bones, the way the skin of a fat man, suddenly starved, might hang. It was rough and pebbly to the touch, and later, in daylight, we saw that he was a greenish-grey colour all over. His eyes were too round, and there was something funny about the eyelids, and he didn’t have a regular nose but only a couple of slits with flaps of flesh over them in the centre of his face. It gave me a real creepy feeling all over when I saw what he was doing with his throat – blowing out a sort of transluscent bubble of skin, the way a certain kind of lizard does.

I wished we hadn’t come. I wished like anything we hadn’t come.

‘We’ll have to get him to shelter so we can look after him,’ Florrie said. She stared down at the creature. I looked at her, not wanting to look at it. I wondered why she sounded so sure of herself, and why she wasn’t scared.

Her face was tight, like she was hurting and trying not to let it bother her. ‘I wish I knew rightly what to do,’ she said quietly. ‘I know what’s wrong, and I know what would make him worse, but … maybe there isn’t anything I can do to make it better, maybe there isn’t anything anyone here can do for him now. But we can try – we can make him more comfortable, at least. We’ll have to fix up some kind of stretcher, to bring him up to the house. I’ll go—’

‘You? Why don’t I?’

She looked at me scornfully. ‘Because you can’t just go and get things out of my house without a lot of questions, that’s why.’

‘What does it matter? If we’re going to take him up there anyway—’

‘We’re not.’

‘You said—’

‘Your house, not mine.’

‘My house! We can’t carry him all the way to town, to a boarding house—’

‘The guest house. That’s what I meant. You’ll be moving in soon, and we can keep him hidden there until he gets better.’

‘What makes you so sure I’m going to move in?’

‘Now, Billy, don’t be like that. We’re just wasting time. Somebody might come and see.’

‘Well, so what if somebody does come?’ I was getting pretty exasperated with her. ‘So what? Why can’t we take him to your house? We could get the doctor, since you’re so concerned about his health.’

I stopped short of saying what else I thought – that this thing would be better off dead, that it didn’t belong. Something like it would be easier explained away and forgotten once it was dead. Tuck him down in the graveyard among bodies too far gone to have any complaints about their company.

Florrie straightened slightly and said flatly, ‘My daddy shot a nigger once for comin’ round on his property. He doesn’t hardly think niggers are people, so you can guess what he’d have to say about this one. He’d kill him like an animal and feel less guilt. Now you just wait right here while I go get some things.’

‘Why should I? Why should I wait here with this old monster?’

‘Billy, you just have to.’ She looked at me with her grey eyes shining in the lantern-light, and I saw she wasn’t a child at all. So I put my arm around her and made to kiss her, and she punched me in the gut.

Then she went off into the woods again while I was still hunched over. I started swearing, but I didn’t go after her, and I didn’t go off on my own. I stayed there with that thing, just like she wanted me to. Just like it wanted me to.

And we took it up to the guest house, and she tended it and nursed it, and just as she’d said, I moved into the house and went to work for her father and never made it back to Tennessee. And in time I married her, despite that gut-punch, and despite the way she had of bossing me. Pete – as we called the monster after the only sound, the only real sound, we ever heard him make, a sort of pppppttttt sound in his throat – became a part of the family and no longer seemed like such a monster. In time, he looked just as natural to us as any other person did, although he never stopped making me uneasy. It really unsettled me the way he and Florrie seemed to understand each other, whereas he and I were always strangers to each other. Our kids, when they came in time, loved Pete, and he was good with them.

I guess in all it’s been good, it’s worked out. I’ve made a home for myself here, and a name, friends and family. I think about the Tennessee hills sometimes – it’s too flat here, and too dusty, even in the piney woods, for my taste – and I miss them, and the people I used to know. But they’re all dead now probably, or gone away, and if I was to go back there wouldn’t be anyone that knew me. This is my place now, even if I still don’t much like it.

Adaptation

At first it seemed only an oddity that they left him alone during the hours of darkness. At first, he was too immersed in his pain to notice how life around him slowed and consciousness moved to another level.

There was much to learn, once he had mended (as much as he would ever mend) and could turn his attention to things outside his body. Sleep intrigued him – it was strange to him.

Life was very boring here for him, injured and out of touch with his own people. He searched hungrily for new interests, knowing that he must keep himself going, keep himself intrigued, or die. Something had happened to him in the crash which made it harder for him to think. His mind seemed wrapped in gauze now; he was limited. He could not communicate with these creatures, could not understand nor be understood except on the fuzziest, most imprecise and primitive levels. He was frustrated by the multitude of things he could no longer do, some of them simple things learned in childhood. There were ranges and heights now forever barred to him.

He continued work with the limited mental equipment left to him. He tried to go on being a scholar, to give his life some meaning.

Sleep: it fascinated him. Here was something which might be important, a mental-spiritual state alien to his people. All of these creatures slept: what did it mean? What did they take from their journey through it every night?

To find out, he set about trying to fall asleep, to study the phenomenon at first hand. But he had no experience and no knowledge to draw upon. How to attain it? How to abandon oneself to it? It took him years to learn – but he had years. And when, finally, he had it:

He couldn’t get back. It rushed upon him, swallowed him whole; he was wrapped, weighted and sinking, and it was beyond all fighting. He had wanted this: why then did he now want so desperately to fight it? What instinct was this which prompted him to hold off?

But it was too late. He was lost to sleep, swathed in it like the humans who had rescued him.

If sleep were frightening, the dreams were worse. He could not control them, and they were not his. He’d fallen into a pit, the abyss mankind kept hidden behind the curtain of sleep.

He wandered through the dreams of others, not even of his own kind, was caught in them and forced to play them out. Gave nightmares as well as received them as he shambled through the sleeping world.

Woke to the sun, terrified. Felt pity for the human race, a rush of gratitude for his own mental structure. He would never, he vowed, sleep again.

But the next night the battle began again. Sleep had him now. He’d made the mistake of learning it, and once learned it would not be unlearned. It gripped him already with the force of undeniable habit.

Every night he fought it as long as he could, but it always overpowered him, submerged him, and every morning he dragged himself, shivering, out of the strange and terrifying sea of human sleep.

He was not, and could not be, human. The sharing of humanity’s nightmares did not make him more human, yet it made him less than what he had once been. He forgot things; memories were lost, replaced by new learnings and by the useless memories, grafted on during sleep, of others. He changed and adapted, worn down by the numbing effects of day after day of living in this new, limited and limiting world.

Emily

I looked through the dust-streaked window at the sunlit pine forest and could almost smell the baked resinous scent of the country where I had grown up. New York was far away now. I was bone-weary and longing for the jouncing train ride to end. Just then I didn’t care that it was Texas I was going to, not Paris; I simply wanted to be at rest.

My fingers brushed the cover of the book in my lap. The poems of Byron. Paul had given me that book. I heard his voice again, and wondered if anyone would ever again say my name the way he had said it.

I put the book inside the brown valise at my feet. In the bottom of that valise lay two hundred pages written out in my best hand: my unfinished novel. Unfinished, because I felt the hypocrisy of writing about love when I knew nothing about it, yet I wanted to write about nothing else.

The train was crawling along now. The Nacogdoches station would not be far away. It was good that I had come to Texas; it would be better for me – more real and less romantic – than Paris could have been.

In Texas I would learn to write about something other than love. I would relearn the important things, forgotten since childhood.

*

When Florrie embraced me, holding me close in her strong, capable arms, it seemed Mama was alive again, and I could become a little girl. Was this my little sister?

‘Emma Kate! Oh, honey, how are you? It’s so good to have you back home again!’

I hugged and kissed her a little awkwardly through being out of practice. ‘I’m just fine; I’m just fine, Florrie.’ I felt like crying, and saw there were tears shining in Florrie’s eyes, too.

‘It’s just so good to have you back!’ One more squeeze and she moved reluctantly. ‘Now, where’s the porter with your bags? Oh, Billy’s got them. Come on, now – we’ll get you home and out of those stiff clothes.’ It did me good to hear Florrie rattling on. ‘Now, we’ll have a good long talk once you’re settled in. I hope you’re going to stay a good long while? No, no; we’ll talk about all that later.’

Billy hugged me, and it seemed strange to me that he was family now. I’d not set eyes on him since the day he and Florrie wed. And their children! It startled me a bit to see their four children. Florrie had been getting on with her life while I had been up in New York, teaching and playing at being an intellectual.

Billy loaded my things into the wagon with the children and helped me into the seat up front, between himself and Florrie. Then he clucked to the horses and we started off, slow and swaying. I looked out at the dusty road, the scrubby pines, the clapboard houses, the poorly dressed people, the animals. It seemed foreign to me after the manmade world of New York City.

The road wound through the forest and the trees gave shelter from the sun and hid the straggling remains of the town. But the forest wasn’t as deep as I remembered it. There were vast bare patches, ugly and denuded of trees: the harvest of the family lumber mill. The land was scarred, as by a forest fire, with tiny saplings pushing up bravely to stitch closed the wound. The old landmarks were gone and I couldn’t be certain how far we were from home.

Florrie continued to talk and sometimes I listened. Finally she patted my knee. ‘Here. Almost home.’ The horse tugged us wearily around one last bend. Home. ‘Ain’t it nice?’

I had imagined, somehow, that they would still be living in the old bride’s house, although Florrie’s letters had been rich with details of the building of their new home.

‘It’s lovely, Florrie,’ I said, and hugged her.

The house was large and sturdy, yet managed to have some style, a certain gentle elegance. It was painted white and the windows, upstairs and down, were decorated with green shutters like many of the houses in New Orleans. The little bridal house, a log cabin, still stood, not far across the sloping lawn. It had been Billy and Florrie’s first home, but once the children started coming it must have quickly become more cramped than cosy.

A coloured woman came out of the side door as we rolled up the looping ribbon of driveway, hurrying towards us and beaming. This was Mattie, who hugged me while Florrie told me what a great help Mattie was with the children and the chores.

I looked suddenly from Mattie’s dark face to my sister’s smile. ‘Where’s Daddy?’

Florrie’s smile tightened. ‘We’ll go see him as soon as you get cleaned up.’ She took my arm and walked me up towards the house, Billy following behind with my bags, the children scattering like a flock of birds uncaged.

‘I thought he might have come up here to meet me,’ I said.

‘Well, we asked him to supper, of course, but he won’t come up here. He’s as stubborn as he ever was. He don’t like niggers around the place.’

Of course. Why had I thought he would mellow with age?

‘It’s not so much Mattie and Tom,’ Florrie said. ‘They’re help – he might get used to ignoring them. But it’s Pete he won’t forgive us for.’

‘Who’s Pete?’ I didn’t want to see my father. Every word Florrie said made me more certain.

‘Pete,’ said Florrie. Her voice was odd. ‘Didn’t I tell you about Pete? I suppose I never did. Well, you’ll meet him by and by.’

We entered by the back door, walking into a warm, good-smelling kitchen. But Florrie didn’t give me time to gaze around, walking me quickly through a dark-wood hall and up uncarpeted stairs. ‘Right now you’d best get freshened up and go over to Daddy’s. You know how cranky waiting makes him.’

I did know, and I didn’t like discovering that I still feared his anger.

My room was fresh and airy-feeling, from the white curtains sprigged with green to the patchwork quilt on the big brass bed. But I couldn’t lie down on that bed for a nap; I couldn’t even take a bath. Now that I knew Daddy was waiting for me I became rushed and clumsy, knocking over the china pitcher after I had poured water into the washbowl – almost breaking it, but it landed on the rag rug instead of the floor, spilling out the rest of the water but not cracking.

I washed my face, neck, hands – trembling and trying not to as I changed my travel-stained dress for a clean one. I was a grown woman. Say what he liked, he could not make me a girl again.

‘Emily?’ It was Florrie, peeking around the door. She hurried in and embraced me. ‘Oh, honey, don’t be nervous!’

‘Isn’t it silly?’ I said, trying to laugh. ‘I’ve faced down angry parents, and the headmaster at my school, but I’m afraid to see my own father. You were always the only one of us who could stand up to him, Florrie. I had to leave the state to be free of him.’

We hugged again, and I clung to her a moment, trying to absorb some of her courage before I went to face our father.

He was waiting for me on the porch of the house I had grown up in. It was smaller in life than in memory, but he was not.

‘It’s about time you got here. Gossiping up there with your sister, I suppose.’

‘Hello, Daddy.’

He got up to embrace me. We held each other awkwardly. I tried to kiss him, and his cheek rasped against mine.

‘Come in and take dinner with me.’

The kitchen too was smaller than I remembered it, and it was dirty, as it had never been when my mother was alive. Dinner was cornbread, beans and ham, eaten sitting at the wooden table my father had built. It was much too large for the two of us, but I suppose he didn’t see any need to build himself a smaller one when this one would do. He cooked and cleaned for himself now – Florrie might have done more for him, but I suspected it came down to a battle of wills between them.

We didn’t speak much while we ate. That was my father’s way. But the weight of the things we would say lay heavily on my tongue and I didn’t eat much.

He commented on that, of course.

‘Find a taste for fancy foods while you were up north?’

‘I’m just not very hungry.’

He wiped up the last few beans and sauce from his plate with a hunk of cornbread, washed that down with a gulp of iced tea, and settled back heavily in his chair, the wood complaining at his weight.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘So you’ve come home. You given up on schoolteaching?’

I had known the question would come, but I had hoped for more time to think about it, time to talk with Florrie.

‘I don’t know if I’ve given up,’ I said. ‘I might just be here on a visit. Maybe I could see about getting a job near here – maybe do some tutoring.’ His eyes mocked me. He didn’t believe me. He demanded some further explanation of myself and, unnerved, I made a mistake. I blurted out something I had meant to keep secret from him. ‘I thought I would do some writing while I’m here. I’m writing a novel.’

His reaction was what I had known it would be: laughter, an outraged snort of laughter. ‘So now you want to be a writer. Why didn’t you stay in New York with all those other writers, with all those intellectuals?’

‘I may go back,’ I said. ‘I told you I hadn’t really decided yet. I …’

But he wasn’t listening; he never listened to me. ‘You thought that since the life you chose for yourself didn’t work out you’d come back here where your family would take care of you and you could play at writing without having to worry about getting a living from it. You could play at being an intellectual without having to prove yourself. You’re like your mother, Emmie.’

There were tears in my eyes, and I concentrated on not letting them fall.

He was silent, as I was – perhaps because he was sorry, or because he was thinking of my mother. Then he sighed and shook his head. ‘You shoulda got married, Emmie. You scared ’em all off with your learning and your books. Now you know you need a husband – but you might have done better to stay in New York, because there aren’t any men in Texas who are gonna want a thirty-two-year-old spinster with too much book learning.’

I wanted to refute him. I wanted to be cool and precise and witty – to laugh in his face as I told him how wrong he was, that I had never wanted to marry and that I had known far more of life than he ever had. That I had seen great actors on the New York stage, had been driven about in a motor car, had conversed once at a party with Dr William James and his brother, the novelist, Mr Henry James, had heard Samuel Clemens lecture, and had won the love of a fine man who would, I was certain, be known as a writer some day.

But actors, according to my father, were immoral; he wouldn’t know who William James or Henry James or Samuel Clemens were; motor cars were a silly fad; and this fine, undiscovered writer who loved me was a married man.

And I was a spinster, as he said, and I was getting old, and I had come back to Texas where my book learning meant nothing and my father was still my father and could preach to me as he chose. I was silent for a long while, on the verge of tears as I stared down at the cold lumps of food on my plate.

He began to feel more kindly towards me in my defeat. ‘Well, Emmie,’ he said. ‘There have been spinsters that led worthwhile lives before you. Now that you’re back home you can make yourself useful by looking after me and caring for this house. It needs a woman’s hand – I can’t do woman’s work, myself. And your sister and I, we just can’t get along in the same house together. She’s too strong-willed for a woman.’ He chuckled, rather pleased. ‘She’s too much like me, I guess.’

I no longer wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. Terror crept into my throat, choking me. Take my mother’s place? Be bullied and bossed by my father until that far distant day when he allowed himself to die?

‘What d’you say, Emmie? You can move right into your old room – have it to yourself now that Florrie has a house of her own. You can even work on that novel of yours in your spare time if you like.’ He was growing benevolent, almost jolly, with the prospect of capturing me once again.

I shook my head wildly, unable to speak, and raised my face to his. I suppose the wild animal look in my eyes, my terror, must have shocked him: the smile slid right off his face.

‘Now see here, Emily Kate, you’re not a child anymore. You’ve got some duties, and since you never married, your duties are still to me. You can’t just flutter through life like a butterfly – for one thing, you haven’t got the looks or the spirit to get away with it. And your sister don’t have room for you and she don’t need you. She’ll have another child one of these days and need your room for it. You don’t know nothing about babies, so you won’t be any help there.’ He spoke ponderously, leaning and bumping against me with his words, sure of wearing me down, just as a horse will hit against a door with a worn latch until the door falls open before the animal’s dumb persistence.

I clung to the thought that this time I must not give in, I must not let him wear me down. I was not demanding anything from him, only trying to keep my freedom. I would not come back under his roof and be imprisoned; I did not owe him that much.

‘Or maybe you plan on trying to teach in town? Well, you could try, but they like to have men – a woman can’t handle some of these rough country boys. Also, I think they’ve got enough teachers already – they don’t need to hire somebody who’s practically a stranger. And people will talk, they’ll sure wonder why this nice maiden-lady is letting her old daddy live alone and uncared for. Maybe, they’ll say, she ain’t really such a nice—’

I suddenly recalled my last major confrontation with my father. How I had wanted to go to school, to go East and earn a degree, and how my father had cornered me and knocked down every one of my reasons for going, telling me what a fool I was to consider it, telling me there wasn’t enough money, telling me I was needed at home, telling me it wasn’t fair to my sister, telling me I would never be any good, telling me women didn’t need to know much, telling me if I liked to read I could read at home, and I, numbed into silence simply by the power of his presence, had begun to nod along with him, seeing my dreams char and burn to ash. And then—

‘Harold.’

We had both turned at the unfamiliar sound of the name, and the unfamiliar steel in the familiar soft voice. My mother had been unsmiling. ‘Harold,’ she said again, she who always called him Darlin’ or Husband or Hal-honey. ‘I want to talk to you. Emma-honey, go help Florrie out back.’

I was slow in doing what I was told, lingering to hear what my gentle mother could do against my powerful father.

‘Harold, the girl is going to school. That is already settled. She is going to have a chance. She’s smart, and we can well afford to send her and we aren’t going to deny her this one thing that she wants. It’s her life and I won’t let you ruin it.’

I could hardly believe that was my soft, wheedle-tongued mother speaking. Perhaps my father was as startled as me, for instead of bullying her into tears as I had seen him do many times before, he let her have her way. I did go to school; my mother had freed me.

But now my mother was dead. She couldn’t fight my battles for me any longer.

‘And if you want to write a book – why, honey, you can go right ahead and write it. I won’t stop you. All I ask is that you keep the house clean, do my mending, and cook meals for the two of us. That’s certainly not much to ask.’ My father was sure this battle was already won.

‘It is too much to ask,’ I said grimly. I moved, rather shakily, out of my chair and away from the table. I had to get out; I was terrified that he would raise his voice to me and I’d start crying. ‘I won’t keep house for you, Daddy. I’ve got to live my own life – I’m grown up now.’ I didn’t feel grown up at all. ‘You can get yourself a maid if you want someone to cook your meals. I didn’t come back to Texas to be your slave.’

‘Now, Emma Kate, that’s no way to talk to your father—’ There was the barest trace of uncertainty beneath the bluster. My rebellion, small as it was, had shaken him.

‘I’ve got to go now,’ I said. ‘I told Florrie I’d come right back. We have a lot to discuss.’ I backed toward the door, keeping out of his reach, afraid he might try to stop me physically.

But he had decided to let me go this time. Shaking his head like an old dog bothered by flies, he said, ‘We’ll talk about this some more when you’ve settled down. You’re still tired from your journey and you need a chance to rest and give some thought to your life. There’s plenty of time to work things out – you can move in here whenever you like. This is always your home, Emma Kate.’

The trace of gentleness – which I knew to be a trap – almost undid me, but I managed to get out onto the porch before I tossed my quavering goodbye at him.

And then I ran back through the woods – ran like my father’s little girl, and not at all like the ageing spinster who had just defied him.

*

Florrie looked up from the game she played on the lawn with two of her children, concern on her features at the sight of me as I burst through the trees: red-faced, panting, hair straggling like a hoyden’s. She got up at once, with a word to her children, and hurried to my side.

‘Emmie, honey,’ she said, gripping my arm.

‘I’m all right. I – ran – through the woods – all the way – back.’ My panting slowed as we walked up the lawn to the house.

‘What happened?’

I shook my head.

Upstairs in my room I washed my face and combed out my hair while Florrie began to unpack my bags, laying out fresh clothes for me.

‘Florrie, he wants me to move in with him again. He wants everything to be just as if I had never escaped from him, as if I didn’t have all my learning. He thinks I owe my life to him simply because I’ve never married.’ I began to pant again, this time with emotion.

Florrie took me in her arms and held me tightly. ‘Hush now, honey.’

‘He – he said you don’t have room for me here and no one else wants me—’

‘Emmie, stop it. You know we love you and you’ll always be welcome here, just as long as you want. Don’t let him scare you so. You’re doing just fine with your life and it’s foolish for you to worry about what he thinks.’

I pulled away from her and busied myself unpacking. ‘I – I know that, Florrie. But he goes on at me so – I’m afraid that one day I’ll agree with him – he’ll bully me into moving into his house – and then I won’t ever be free again. I can’t take it, Florrie. I think I’ve got a life of my own and a mind of my own, but then he yells at me and I go all over like a little child again.’

‘You’re tired,’ Florrie said gently. ‘Just tell yourself that you have your own life to live and it doesn’t matter what he says. You’ll start believing it after awhile.’

‘It’s hard to do,’ I said. ‘I’m not like you, Florrie. I never could stand up to him – I could only run away. I haven’t got your backbone. I’m more like Mama – I let him wear me down.’

‘Emily.’ I looked at her. ‘Don’t underestimate yourself or Mama. You are more like Mama than I am, but Mama was never weak. She was gentle, and she let Daddy have his way when it would keep peace, but for anything important – she wouldn’t stop fighting until she had won. Remember how she stood up for you when you wanted to go to college? She faced Daddy down because—’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought of that today. But she fought Daddy for me. She fought to protect us because she loved us. But she would never fight for something on her own behalf. She’d go without anything, put up with anything, unless it hurt us. And then she’d go to war. But for herself, she wouldn’t raise a finger. And I’m afraid that I’m like that. Perhaps I might protect my child, if I had one, but I don’t know how to fight to save myself.’

Florrie looked at me with love and pain in her eyes, and I looked back. In a moment we might dissolve into tears, I thought, and to break the tension I said briskly, ‘Come now, Florrie. I need to get these things put away and then I would love a nice hot bath.’

‘You could take your bath now,’ she suggested. ‘And I could put away the rest of your things.’

I shook my head. ‘No. If we work together, it will give us a chance to talk. Oh, Florrie, I’ve missed talking with you so! There’s so much that never gets said in a letter.’

‘You’re right,’ Florrie said a little ruefully. ‘Why, I somehow never could tell you about Pete. But you’ll meet him later.’

‘Florrie, don’t tease me! Who is Pete? When will I meet him?’

‘In the morning. But now you tell me something. What made you decide to leave New York? You always sounded so happy there, from your letters, at least. Busy, working, meeting people. Did something happen, to change that? Why did you leave?’

As she spoke, by coincidence, I had in my hand the book of Byron’s poems Paul had given me, and was casting about for a way of introducing him into the conversation. I turned to face her, and perhaps it was in my expression.

‘A man, Emily?’ she asked softly.

‘He was married.’

‘Oh, Emily …’ Her arms went around me and again she held me tightly, comforting me. She drew back and looked at me tenderly. ‘Poor darling. Do you want to talk about it?’

We sat down side by side on the bed, holding hands, and I was reminded of confidences exchanged in childhood. Many years had passed since then and now, married and the mother of children, Florrie seemed the older.

‘He was a teacher,’ I said. ‘We had similar interests. We met to talk about our work, about poetry and philosophy. We both wanted to be writers ourselves someday, and we showed each other work we didn’t dare show anyone else. We criticised each other, both honestly and gently, and helped each other become better writers.

‘I thought it was a platonic friendship. I met his wife and she didn’t like me – she was jealous of what I shared with her husband. I thought she was foolish to be jealous: Paul and I had the sort of friendship two men would be fortunate to have.’

‘And then you realised you were in love with him?’

I looked at her without surprise – it was the natural assumption – and shook my head. ‘No. One evening he confessed his love for me. Of course, I told him I did not return his feelings.’

Florrie squeezed my hand.

‘I thought we could continue to be friends,’ I said. ‘I thought that if I discouraged him, and kept talk away from romance, we could still be friends. Perhaps I should have refused to see him, but I didn’t want to lose his friendship, and since I didn’t love him, somehow I didn’t believe he really loved me.’ I didn’t feel proud of myself, telling Florrie. My own excuses sounded feeble in my ears. Perhaps I had been leading him on, afraid he might be my last chance for a different kind of life, afraid to let him go.

‘Finally he – he offered to leave his wife for me. He wanted to take me with him to Paris. Morality is different there, and it would be easier for us to live together. And of course, he knew I longed to see Europe. So I left. I had to. I gave up my job and came back here because otherwise he would have talked me into it. Otherwise I would have given in, and let him ruin his life.’

Florrie sighed. ‘Oh, Emily, how noble of you.’

Noble. That was a word Paul had used, too – misunderstanding. I thought coward would be more apt.

‘But I didn’t love him,’ I said to Florrie. ‘I wasn’t being noble. If I had really loved him’ – loved, in the way of a novel heroine – ‘really, wholeheartedly loved him, then I wouldn’t have hesitated. I would have given myself to him, Florrie; I would have run away with him at once.’

*

That is what I believed. And, later, when I was alone, I thought more on my ideal of love, and wondered if I would ever experience anything I would think worthy of the name. There would be – could be – no questions and no doubts, as there had been with Paul. Neither law nor morals would keep me from the man I loved; I would stop at nothing, I would do anything he asked, give myself utterly.

I sat up in bed, brooding on the question of love. The house was quiet, everyone asleep. I had thought I would sleep, but although I was bone-weary, my body eager to slide into the healing lake of sleep, my mind was still active, jumping between thoughts of my father, thoughts of the career I had left behind, thoughts of Paul, thoughts of what love would mean to me.

I got up, then, and went to the bottom drawer of the dresser, where I had stored my unfinished novel. I lifted out the manuscript, remembering all the time that had gone into the writing and rewriting of the pages. I carried it to the bedside table and perched on the bed with it in my lap and began to read it by the light of the lamp.

It was the story of a perfect love between a man and a woman: the man an idealised Paul, the woman an idealised Me. I had been halted in my writing because, since I did not intend the novel to be a tragedy, I did not know where to go with this perfect love.

As I read over the pages of my novel, these pages that were the best I could write, my cheeks began to blaze. I felt feverish and unhappy, embarrassed by the prose. I imagined my father coming upon the manuscript and reading it, and laughing. I imagined Florrie being kind. I felt a sudden revulsion toward Paul, who had encouraged me in this sickly, silly fantasy about love.

I knew nothing about love, and probably never would. I was, as my father had said, a thirty-two-year-old spinster, and my ideas about love had come from books. How many of those books had been written by others who knew as little as I?

I put the pages aside, my hands trembling, feeling sick at heart. I could not go on with it. I had thought to build a new life in these pages, and they would be better as ash.

This thought firmly in mind, I rose and took the pile of paper to the washstand and there I burnt it, page by page. The sight of the flame licking at the first page, the curling of the paper, the way the writing changed colour and disappeared, word by word, invigorated me. I would start fresh, write about something new, but not until I knew something to write about. I would forget this novel as if it had never existed. I would not write something my father could laugh at – until I could write something good and strong and true I would write nothing at all. I would give up my pretensions.

The second page went quickly. I burnt my finger on the third. On the fortieth I felt a sudden sick surge of regret: what if I was wrong? But the fortieth burned, too, and the forty-first – which I paused to read – made me certain again.

Halfway through, a wave of exhaustion made me sway, and I feared I might swoon. But I was determined to see it through. I burnt my fingers again, several times, but I saw every page of my novel become ash.

I woke in the morning feeling hollow inside, with the certainty that something that was important to me was gone forever. I opened my eyes and remembered the novel. It was for the best, I thought. I did not regret it.

I had slept late, being so exhausted from the events of the preceding day, and breakfast had already been cleared away when I came downstairs.

‘Mattie will fix you whatever you like for breakfast,’ Florrie said, kissing me on the cheek. ‘I thought you needed all the sleep you could get.’

‘I feel much better,’ I said, although I didn’t. I felt drained and wished I were still asleep.

Florrie joined me in the kitchen for a cup of tea while I ate the scrambled eggs and sausage Mattie had fried up for me. I was just beginning to relax, to consider telling Florrie what I had done with my novel, when the door flew open and Florrie’s eldest boy, Joe Bob, burst in.

‘Young man, is that any way to come into a house?’ Florrie said indignantly.

He grinned and looked at me. ‘Grandaddy says he wants you to go over and have a talk with him.’

I lost all my appetite. Florrie looked at me sharply. ‘Now, Emmie. You eat a good breakfast first. You don’t have to go hoppin’ over there every time he says “frog”. You need a chance to relax and get your strength up. And I want you to meet Pete first, anyway.’

‘Very well,’ I said dully. I could not face my father so soon. First I had to adjust to my life without the novel – my life without writing. I had to rebuild. It would be fatal if my father began arguing at me again while I was without supports. I had nothing left to help me resist: I could only cling with determination to the idea of not giving in, of not going to live in my father’s house again, and hope that would be sufficient to carry me through all his attacks.

I pushed my eggs around on the plate, then looked at Florrie. ‘I can’t eat,’ I said. ‘Really, I’m too nervous.’

She bit her lip, then nodded. ‘All right. I’ll take you to meet Pete. He’ll make you feel better.’

I laughed out of nervousness. ‘Really? I’m intrigued. Does this Pete-person have another name?’

‘No,’ she said with a mysterious smile. ‘Come.’

We went down the wide stretch of lawn dotted with pine trees and scrub oaks to the little cabin where Florrie and Billy had lived when they were first wed.

Florrie rapped sharply on the door once, then opened it, and we stepped into the dark cabin. The sudden change from daylight dimmed my sight and I could only make out somebody moving slowly and uncertainly in the far corner.

‘Pete, it’s Florrie. I’ve brought my sister Emily to meet you.’

At that first meeting I thought him very old. He moved with difficulty, shuffling and awkward as if plagued by pain and weakness. He was too small, the way an old man will seem shrunk down to his bones, although he was no shorter than me. I gave him my hand when Florrie pronounced my name, and felt the long, hard, thin fingers move lightly over my palm, as if reading it, the way a blind person might. But I didn’t think he was blind, for the big round eyes shone, and looked directly into mine.

Except for those eyes – which were beautiful, but not normal in a human face – he was, I thought, very ugly. I thought at first he had no nose, and revulsion rose in me, only to be smothered at once by pity, or something like it, flowing smooth and heavy as molasses into my mind and drowning the revulsion before it was fully formed. I realised then that he did have a nose, but it wasn’t like the noses I was used to: nothing more than a couple of slits with flaps of flesh over them.

The three of us went to the big table beside one window. Florrie and I sat and Pete disappeared into the kitchen. I looked at Florrie but I said nothing. I had questions, but for the moment they didn’t matter.

Pete returned with a teapot and three cups and saucers, setting the tray down carefully on the table before Florrie, who poured out the tea and served us all.

I had a chance to examine Pete more closely now. His skin hung in folds and wrinkles from his slight frame, like an exaggeration of the shrinkage of age, but I no longer thought he was old, nor did I think he was ugly. He could not be compared with anyone else within my experience, so he was neither ugly nor beautiful, but only himself.

We sipped our tea and smiled at one another, and after a quarter of an hour Florrie rose and indicated that it was time for us to go. It was only then that I realised we had none of us spoken since the greeting, and Pete had never spoken at all. And yet never had I felt so comfortable and so instantly at ease with a stranger as I had these past fifteen minutes.

Florrie and I said goodbye, and Pete nodded at us and blinked his bright eyes.

‘You liked him,’ Florrie said as we started back up to the house.

‘Yes. Florrie … who is he?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, as if it did not matter. ‘I think Billy and I saved his life. And after that … he’s just stayed with us.’ She was silent then, as we passed the two older children who were tumbling about on the grass. Just before we reached the house she spoke again.

‘I would hate to have him leave. He’s closer than kin.’

I took a nap before supper and Florrie came upstairs to wake me, sitting beside me on the bed and gently touching my face.

I opened my eyes, feeling the dream fading past recall already. ‘I dreamed about Pete,’ I said, struggling to hold it.

Florrie nodded. ‘We all do. Good or bad?’

‘Good.’ The dream was gone, not even an image remained, but I was left with a feeling of warmth towards him.

‘My dreams about him are good ones, too. Sometimes I think—’ she broke off.

‘That he dreams about us, too?’ I ventured.

Florrie nodded. ‘Mostly our dreams are good – sometimes the others have nightmares. I never do. But Sarah Jane’ – that was her four-year-old – ‘has nightmares all the time about him. For some reason she is terrified of him. The other children love him and always want to play with him, but Sarah Jane cries whenever she sees him. I don’t know why that is.’

I couldn’t understand it either. Pete might be frightening to a child only at first sight – he radiated such an air of harmlessness, of gentleness, that his looks soon became unimportant.

‘I wonder if we give him nightmares,’ I said.

The next morning I did something I had not done since my college days: took out my sketchpad and went outside to draw. Later, perhaps, I might return to my watercolours, I thought. Since I had abandoned my novel I needed something to fill the gap.

I took a canvas chair and set it beneath a large shade tree, not far from Florrie and the baby. I chose to sketch them: mother with child in sunlight.

I had not been long at work when I saw Pete travelling towards me in his slow, painful hobble – as if he fought against great weights with every step. He stood beside me and watched with interest as my fingers – now somewhat crippled by his regard – created pencilled figures on the page.

Mysteriously aware of his presence, the other two children (but not, of course, Sarah Jane) came running around the side of the house to play at being mountain goats upon poor Pete. I saw one of the dogs, a hunting hound who had been running with the children, turn tail at the sight of Pete and slink off out of sight.

Wondering a little uneasily why dogs should fear Pete, I continued my sketch until it was done. It was crude, and I was annoyed by my clumsiness, but Pete seemed pleased. He indicated that he wanted the pad and pencil, and when I gave them to him he hunkered down in the grass and set to work.

He was not especially skilled, yet I knew the first face for mine; next, Florrie’s; then his own. They were not technically very good, yet there was a spark of life in them, something which made it obvious whom they represented.

Now, as I watched, he began to draw a story. Florrie – a very young Florrie – and a younger Billy; a starry night; a falling star; a crumpled, crashed vehicle – a flying machine, grounded in a graveyard.

I was so absorbed by what he was showing me that I scarcely noticed when Florrie took the baby back up to the house. He drew me pictures of another land and, with a sudden shock, I recognised the landscape of my dreams the night before. I stopped his hand with mine and made him look at me, but his eyes were not human, and I could read nothing in them.

‘Emily Katherine!’ Like a whip cracked above my head. I jerked up and saw my father standing some yards away. There it was again, that fear out of childhood. My stomach contracted and my mind, in old habit, nervously tried to recall what I had done that he would consider wrong.

‘Come here, missy, I want to talk to you.’

Whatever I had done, it was very bad indeed. My hands and feet felt like blocks of ice as I rose and walked to him. He grasped my arm, not gently, and marched me away.

‘I know they preach nigger-loving up north,’ he said. ‘But you’re a daughter of mine and I won’t … I’d a damn sight sooner see you cuddlin’ up to the biggest, blackest nigger in Texas than what I just saw.’ His voice was thick with fury, and his fingers gouged my arm.

‘Daddy, don’t!’ I tried to pull away. ‘What are you talking about?’ I knew my voice was weak and shrill, and I couldn’t stop shaking. I hated him then, for making me so afraid.

‘I’m talking about that monster. It’s bad enough that Florrie and Billy keep it – it’s too much to see you nose to nose and making cow eyes at it. Can’t you see that thing ain’t human? It’s an animal, and it doesn’t belong here. It should be killed, just like you’d kill a snake, so it can’t spread its poison around.’

‘Don’t you call Pete a monster,’ I said, nearly in tears. ‘And don’t you insinuate—’

‘I ain’t insinuating. I’m telling. That monster is trouble, and you’d better keep away from it. If I ever see you cuddlin’ up to that thing again—’

‘Stop it!’

He let go of my arm. ‘Emily, you just do what your Daddy says and keep away from that thing. Don’t talk to it, don’t touch it, and don’t sit with it. Or you’ll be sorry. I’ll make sure you’re sorry.’

Tears blinded me. He always reduced me to that, the child’s refuge. I had never been able to defy my father except by running away. I was certain he thought I’d gone to New York only to run away from him, because I would never be an adult in his eyes.

When I walked back to the house I wasn’t thinking of Florrie but of Pete. I wanted the peace his presence could give me, and I wanted to disobey my father. So I changed direction, and went towards the little house where Pete lived, and saw him waiting for me on the porch. And when I saw him – the dear, already familiar, not-human ugliness of him – something like a bolt of pain went through me. And, although I have never fainted in my life, I thought that I would faint then, standing on the wooden porch, staring at Pete.

He touched my arm and we went into the house together. I felt dazed and clumsy – I felt too large, as if all my skin had suddenly swollen, and my clothes were painfully constricting. Pete led me out of the main room and into the back room, his bedroom. It was small and familiar. As children, Florrie and I had come here to play games with our dolls. It seemed very bare now, empty of the personal possessions one would expect to find. There was only the bed against one wall, and a chair beside the window, and an old rag rug on the floor. I looked at the window which, although screened with vines, let in filtered sunlight. Sensing my concern, Pete crossed to the window and closed the shutters. I heard the small, wooden click as they closed together.

I wanted to speak to him. He seemed suddenly a stranger, standing across the room in the dim light. He came closer, and I could see his features again, and they were as well known as if I had seen them every day of my life. I no longer wanted to spoil our shared silence with words.

He placed his hand, palm down, against my bosom, on the stiff, smooth fabric of my dress, meaning: let me feel what you are.

I turned my back on him to disrobe. The rustling of our clothing as we removed it filled the room with the sound of birds taking flight.

And my heart was one of those birds, trapped and left behind, fluttering in terror as I climbed naked into bed. Pete lay his head against my breast, listening, and then he knelt and stroked me slowly with the flat of one hand, soothing me as if I’d been a horse.

When I had stopped shivering (although I was still breathing fast and deep) he climbed into bed and pressed himself close to me. His skin was peppered roughly all over with what seemed to be goosebumps, and he was so cool to the touch that I wondered if he was frightened, too. The possibility made me feel better. It made us seem more alike.

I closed my eyes, expecting to be kissed. I had been kissed before. But his lips never touched mine: instead, I felt his breath warm against the skin of my face and a gentle, fluttering touch which I later realised were the flaps of his nostrils moving in and out as he sniffed me.

Gradually, I warmed to him, and began to crave the friction of his cool, pebbly flesh against mine. I kept my eyes tightly shut, not daring to open them. I had glimpsed something, his male member, sprouting from the juncture of his legs, a frightening purplish vegetable. I felt it, warmer than the rest of his flesh, graze my leg now and then as he sniffed me and stroked me and rubbed his body against mine.

I could do nothing. I wanted to touch him, but I was afraid. I lay very still, hands clenched at my sides, clenched with wanting and with terror. I wished that I could faint, that it would end, that I would understand what to do. I thought I might cry, and made a soft sound in my throat. I was excited, desperate, and dreadfully confused, in a turmoil of conflicting desires. I moaned again, asking for his help.

Then he moved away from me, and my eyes flashed open. ‘Pete.’

He looked at me and I couldn’t read his eyes. What did he want? What was he thinking? I noticed how green his skin looked in the dim, filtered light, and saw how the hairless skin hung from his bones. I saw what he was. And I didn’t faint, or scream, or roll away from his touch. Instead, most improbably, I felt a surging up of love. It ran through my veins like blood, heating me, making me brave enough to half sit up and lean forward. I caught his hand and pulled him closer. I tried not to think of my nakedness, and tried not to see the thing growing between his legs. When he took me in his arms I closed my eyes again, my mind rioting with senseless dream images, my thoughts a pathless jungle.

He parted my legs with his hands and I thought my heart would leap through my mouth. No – I didn’t want this – I only wanted – I wanted to be alone – I wanted him – I did want this, the physical joining as well as the spiritual – but I didn’t, yet –

I cried out in pain, although it was really only discomfort, and he stopped hurting me at once.

When he shifted position, my legs fell back together. Tears trickled from beneath my tightly-shut lids, tears of fear and shame, and he licked them away.

He began stroking me again, and I realised his fingertips had warmed. They were raspily pleasant, like the tongue of a cat. They moved between my legs, caressing me more and more intimately until my legs fell apart and my body moved and I moaned and thought in strange, rapid jagged images, and my breath came as quickly as my thoughts, and I forgot about him and about my fear, it was as if I were alone with myself in my own bed, and so I clenched my teeth, my back arched, and I screamed silently, silently inside my head, bursting all the brilliant balloons of my thoughts.

Far away, yet very close, I felt him moving, and then the cool, rough length of his body was pressed along the length of mine and as I rocked towards sleep I was content. I seemed to feel Pete with my mind as well as with my body – we approached sleep together and his mind was joined to mine in a way our bodies had not been. His mind, I thought, was soothing mine as his hands had soothed my body. I was very sleepy and it was pleasant, even if utterly foreign to me, to be so close to another. So close, falling asleep together.

Then my father’s face – a memory or a dream – shattered the moment, and I struggled to wake.

But I could not move, could not even open my eyes. As I fought it, I was drawn more deeply into the dream.

I saw my father sitting in his kitchen, cleaning out the gun he used for shooting squirrel and rabbit. But I knew, with the absolute certainty we have in dreams, that he did not intend to go hunting for his dinner this evening. His thoughts were open to me: I knew that he would go to some of the local men he knew, men ready to be frightened by the threat different coloured skin posed to their property and their women. My father thought of me: a spinster whose virginity had made her crazy, easy prey for the monster he now intended to kill, or at the least, to torture and geld and drive out of the county.

I was humiliated by the vision my father had of me and, for a moment, I blazed with hatred.

His fingers tightened on the gun in his lap, and his face twitched. Had my hatred done that? He tried to set the gun aside, but could not. Rejoicing in my power, I made him stand.

My father got the bullets and loaded the gun – not at my direction but of his own accord. I watched, knowing that he was thinking of Pete. His face was ugly with hate and anger, and his eyes whipped around the kitchen in restless search, as if he felt Pete’s presence.

The gun moved like a live thing in his hands. My father began to struggle, straining against the will of the gun to point at his own legs.

I fought against him, silently and fiercely. I had Pete’s force to magnify my own. I won’t let you shoot him, I told my father. I’ll kill you before I let you kill Pete.

The gun barrel shifted and for a moment I thought my father had won and taken control. Then I made him raise the gun. The position he held it in was unnatural and uncomfortable.

‘Emily!’ He said my name as if it were a curse. He was demanding, not pleading. He still thought he could command me, and he would not acknowledge my power.

The gun was at his heart. I could have killed him if I chose.

‘Emily!’ The tone that could make me tremble, even in dreams. The barrel shifted slightly, caught between his will and mine, caught by my indecisiveness.

I shot him, and felt, for one impossible moment, the bullet tearing through his flesh.

I fainted then, or slept.

When I woke, feeling sick and miserable, Pete was dressed and sitting beside the window. I dressed myself and left the house without speaking. He did not once turn to look at me.

I was the one who found my father lying in a pool of his own blood. It is likely that no one else would have stopped by to visit, and if I had not gone when I did, he would have died.

It was natural that I should be the one to stay with him and look after him until he was completely well again. Everyone said how fortunate it was that I had come home. And, after my father was healed, it seemed for the best that I continue to live in his house. After all, the house was too much work for a man alone, and Florrie, with another baby on the way, could use the room I had occupied.

My father said that he had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun – not knowing it was loaded. He never spoke, to me or anyone else, of our struggle, so perhaps it was only a dream. I still get dreams sometimes from Pete, but that’s the only time I am close to him. He makes me uncomfortable now, and I avoid him, except in my dreams. And no one would say that we can control what we do in our dreams.

Living and Dying

The new woman, Florrie’s sister, was a surprise. She was open and vulnerable, beaming her needs, her wants, her fears at him with more intensity than he’d ever felt from a human being. He didn’t have to search – she gave him herself.

And, he realised within moments of meeting her, he was capable of fulfilling her needs.

The understanding shook him out of his dullness. Was it possible that he would not remain a stranger forever? That he could know communion with one of these beings?

He both desired and feared the possible union. Like sleep, which had so fascinated him at first, might this not also prove a trap? To grow closer to one of them was to risk becoming too human, to risk losing what he really was. He would not be human, then, but only a freak.

But it might be worth the risk. If he were doomed to spend the rest of his life among humans, he must make the most of it. He must try to become involved with human society since his own kind was lost to him, and not remain on the edges of life. He could read them now with ease and he could send feelings to control them, but the idea of real communication tempted him strongly. Emily’s own open hunger struck a responsive chord in him. How lonely he was. How he missed his own kind. Were he home, he would be choosing his lifemate now.

With that thought came such a strong urge that he made himself ignore all the things which made her strange, almost repugnant, to him, and concentrated on the likenesses.

He began by making himself known to her. First he sent a dream, and then followed that up with pictures when she was awake, telling her, however crudely, that he had come from another world.

But there was no time for the slow, leisurely courtship he had planned. She came to him in desperate need, projecting the idea that he was in danger from her father. Everything else had to wait. There was no time for the slow understanding which might lead eventually and naturally to a physical union. It was now or never.

Things moved so rapidly on this world! He would try to adjust to this different pace and hope that later they could be mated mind-to-mind. First, he would give her what she wanted.

It might have worked, but for Emily’s fear. The fear rolled off her in a dreadful stench, bewildering him and making his genitals shrink in dismay. Fear had no place in lovemaking, and although with the room dim and his vision relaxed she might almost have been one of his own kind, her fear incapacitated him.

Yet she still desired him. She needed him – he could feel that – and when she reached out for him he tried, limbs trembling with confusion, to ignore her fear. He tried to give her what she wanted. And then he hurt her, and the pain and fear undid him completely.

What sort of creature was this to feel pain and fear and still desire? He suddenly saw her as if in a blaze of light, body and feelings both hideously clear. She was an animal, an alien, a beast, a monster, unnatural and loathesome.

But although he no longer had any desire for her, he could feel her needs, and he reacted almost instinctively to satisfy them. He brought her to orgasm with his hand, meanwhile holding his emotions firmly in check, knowing that despite his urge to run, there was nowhere he could go.

He pushed her into deep sleep, knowing that he would have to follow and cast about in search of the danger her thoughts had warned him of. He didn’t want to think about what he had done, what he had, however briefly, wanted to share with this creature. He would never again consider mating with a human being. He was a castaway, and had better get used to the life of a hermit and not think of coupling with beasts.

And so the years passed in solitude of his own devising. He saw few humans and cared for none of them. Billy died, and Florrie after him, and he mourned neither. Others were born who continued to let him live in the little house and brought him food and occasional company, thinking of him as a strange old family servant – an odd but uninteresting responsibility. So he lived out his life like a prison sentence and struggled against the involvement of dreams – knowing more about these people than he cared to, more involved than he wanted to be – and the nightly tyranny of sleep.

And then one was born who, even in infancy, was different, who made herself felt. She had a potential he had found in none of the humans he had encountered. She stirred something in him, an interest he had thought safely dead. And perhaps because he was of an age to be raising a child of his own, were he home, he took an interest in this child, and began to teach it and to nurture its strange talent.

He wove dreams for the child. He gave of himself to her, spending his nights in her dreams, becoming teacher and spiritual father to a child who became, under his care, something less or more than human.

Jody

As soon as I got off the bus I threw my thoughts on ahead to Pete, to see where he was and what he was feeling. And because it was a beautiful, blue-skyed day and I felt itchy and cramped and grouchy from sitting in school with a bunch of stupid kids and teachers, none of whom knew the things I knew, I started running just as soon as my feet hit the dusty side road which led off the highway through the woods toward home.

But something was different. I found Pete’s mind, like always, but this time he pushed me away. His thoughts were all rolling around. I couldn’t understand, and he wouldn’t help me. Was it fear? Anger? Suddenly I realised that he was feeling joy. Joy – an almost unbearable excitement – and he didn’t want to share it with me.

I realised I had stopped stock-still in the road, my mouth probably hanging open, and I started myself up again. My heart was lurching around like a dying fish. I didn’t know what was going on, but it had to be something terrible. I couldn’t even remember the last time Pete had pushed me out of his mind.

The walk down that interminable dusty road, striped with pine shadows and blazing sunlight, was the most painful I ever took. I don’t think I was reacting just to his pushing me away – I think I knew already, knew without understanding why, that this was the end of Pete and me.

There were a whole bunch of strange cars pulled up on the circular gravel drive and when I walked into the front hall the air was blue with smoke and ringing with voices.

They were all in the living room. They went on with their talking at first, not noticing me in the doorway. My folks were there, and my sister and her junior politician boyfriend had driven in from Austin, and there were reporters with cameras and tape recorders and some senior politicians and some very quiet men who couldn’t be anything but plainclothed police. And Pete was there, the centre of it all, sitting in the antique Italian chair that nobody but company ever got to sit in, with reporters buzzing like flies around a cow pattie.

I sent a cry out to Pete, but his wall was still up. My sister Mary Beth quit chatting to some woman, turned and saw me.

‘Jody! Thank goodness you’re finally here. I was thinking of sending Duane in his car up to school to fetch you.’ Even while she was glad to see me, I could feel her automatic assessment and disapproval of the way I looked. She couldn’t understand how I could be so tacky as to wear baggy blue jeans, a shirt with a rip under one arm, and dusty boots to school. I made a face at her for her thoughts, and she looked a little shaken. She gripped my arm too tightly and whispered at me, ‘Jody, behave! There are some very important people here today and they’re interested in Pete.’

‘So what?’ I felt sick. This was it. This was finally it. Somehow the government had found out and come to take Pete away. And Pete was just sitting there like a stone, ignoring me. He was going to let them take him away.

‘Honey, are you all right?’

I must really have looked terrible for Mary Beth to overlook my rudeness. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

Instead of answering me, Mary Beth spoke to the whole room. ‘Everybody,’ she said brightly, the sorority girl at a club meeting, ‘Jody’s come home from school. She’ll be able to help us out – you see, she’s always been able to communicate with Pete better than anyone else can. It’s a special talent she has.’

They were all staring at me. A flash bulb flared.

‘You can all go to hell,’ I said, but I said it so low, my chin down, blinking from the flash, that I don’t think anyone but Mary Beth heard. Her long nails pressed warningly into my flesh.

I stared at the ground. I wasn’t going to let them take Pete away. Mary Beth would have to do a lot more than pinch me to get me to talk.

‘Jody’, said my mother, her voice threatening in the most civilised manner. ‘No one is going to hurt Pete. We have just learned that Pete comes from another planet. And his friends—’

‘You aren’t his friends!’ I cried. ‘None of you are! Pete doesn’t have any friends except me!’

My mind was running around like a hamster on a wheel, trying to think of a way to get Pete and myself away. I knew how to drive even though I wasn’t old enough for a licence, so if I could get somebody’s keys –

Pete came into my mind then. Maybe he’d been paying attention to me all along, even though I couldn’t feel him. He ended my fantasy with a bang. He showed me himself surrounded by others who looked like him: his own people. They were his friends, not us, and they had found him at last, and come to take him home. And Pete was happy. Overwhelmingly, unbearably relieved to leave his exile and go home again.

He was leaving me, though. Not simply this world which had been his prison for so long, but me. And he was happy.

Pete laid a comfort-touch on me, but I evaded it easily. His heart wasn’t really in it. He was so consumed by his own joy that my sadness was a minor irritation to him, that’s all. He no longer had any time for me.

My mother and Mary Beth’s boyfriend were taking it in turns to tell me what I already knew, but I was too numb to tell them to save their breaths. I didn’t care about the details of ‘first contact’, the landing and the discovery. I didn’t care what had been on TV or what was happening anywhere else in the world.

‘Mary Beth and I just happened to have the television on while we were having breakfast this morning—’ Duane stopped suddenly, blushing. The biggest event in history had just happened and that fool thought people still cared if he and Mary Beth had spent the night together.

‘And there they were,’ said Mary Beth quickly filling in for him. She would make a good little wife. ‘We couldn’t believe it at first. Duane thought it was a hoax, but I said, “Why, that looks like Pete! Our own funny old Pete!”

‘So Duane, after I’d told him about Pete, and after what the announcer said about these alien visitors looking for their lost comrade, well, Duane said maybe he should call up his friend in the governor’s office, and maybe also call the TV station, and …’

I turned around to leave. I wanted to be by myself.

‘Jody, we haven’t finished,’ Mary Beth said.

‘I already know all that,’ I said.

‘But everyone’s been waiting for you,’ said Duane. ‘Can’t you tell us what Pete’s thinking about all this?’

I looked at them all, and at Pete who was bobbing gently in the good chair like a slightly dotty old man. The membrane at his neck was billowing gently and flaring orange. Since the photographer wasn’t going crazy I guessed this was nothing new to him, although it was to me. It was a sign of extreme emotion, I knew, but I had never seen it before.

‘He’s very happy,’ I said finally. ‘He’s very, very happy that his friends have come for him at last, and he can’t wait to go home again. That’s all. He doesn’t have anything he needs to say, except to his friends.’ Then I went upstairs to my room and closed the door.

My mother came up a few hours later with some sandwiches and a piece of cake and glass of milk on a tray.

‘I thought you’d like something to eat,’ she said, setting the tray down on my dresser.

‘Thanks,’ I said, scooting across the bed to reach the food on the dresser. I was hungry and wished I wasn’t. It didn’t seem right that my whole life could be breaking up and I was still getting hungry at the usual times. I broke off a piece of the cake and tasted it.

My mother sat down on the bed beside me. ‘Jody,’ she said carefully. ‘You understand Pete awfully well. Do you – that is, I heard that his friends all speak, uh, with their minds. They don’t make any sounds, but it seems that we are able to hear them anyway … at least, that’s what I’ve heard it’s like. Can you do that? When you know what Pete wants, are you reading his mind?’

‘When he lets me,’ I said. My mother has been frightened of me since I was just a baby, although that’s not something she can admit even to herself.

‘Can you—’ she stopped. She would never believe me if I answered her now, so I waited. ‘He speaks to you through, um, telepathic conversation?’ She gave the word an odd emphasis, so I suspected she was imitating someone else.

‘Yeah, I guess. Sort of,’ I said.

‘Why can’t he talk to the rest of us like that, then? These other aliens talk to everyone mind-to-mind. Why do you suppose Pete can’t?’

I looked at her in surprise. I’d always taken it for granted that I was special in being able to understand Pete.

She steeled herself. ‘Jody, can you read our minds, too?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Look, I can only read Pete’s mind when he lets me. He sort of gives it to me. I send my thoughts back to him. I don’t know how I do it – I guess he taught me how when I was such a little baby that I can’t remember. But when he doesn’t want me to, I can’t. And I can’t read anyone else. It’s like I can hear Pete, but nobody else is talking the way he is.’

‘I see.’ My mother bent her dark head to examine her well-kept nails. ‘I thought – well, you sometimes seem to know what I’m thinking or what I’m going to say, and I thought maybe—’

‘I can’t read your mind,’ I said. ‘I guess I’m just real observant. I sort of put things together from how you move and what I know about you.’ This was true, but I didn’t tell her about the dreams. I wasn’t going to tell her I could go into her dreams at night, or that it was her dreams which let me know so much about her, so much more than she knew about me.

‘These aliens,’ I said, wondering about these creatures who could, unlike Pete, make themselves so widely understood, ‘When are they getting here?’

‘They’ll arrive sometime tomorrow,’ she said. ‘They’re being flown in with some government people, reporters, secret service, the whole lot. This is a big deal, you realise.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘Have you always known what Pete is?’

‘Sure.’

‘And you never told anyone. Why?’

‘Why should I?’

She looked at me in silence. ‘Poor Jody. Pete’s always been very special to you, hasn’t he?’

That didn’t deserve an answer.

My mother looked as if she wanted to put her arms around me, as if she wanted to get into my mind. ‘Try not to take it so hard,’ she said. ‘Of course you’ll miss him, but you know it will be best for him. He wants to go home, where he belongs, to be among his own people. Think of how he must feel.’

I closed my eyes and tried to block out her voice. I wished she would just shut up and go away. She didn’t know anything. She couldn’t possibly understand. I almost hated her.

I heard her sigh and get off the bed. ‘Okay. Try to get some sleep, Jody. You’ll feel better.’

I twisted my head away when she bent down to kiss me, and she left without another word. I was already going away myself, reaching out for Pete. He was in his house and, I thought, by himself. His thoughts were strung taut and vibrating slightly. I couldn’t get ahold of anything. He wasn’t pushing me away this time, he just wasn’t paying attention.

Then there was something – a bit like static, and like a small electric shock – and I sat up in bed, trembling and alone. I was nowhere near Pete. And I knew what had happened, what it meant. Pete had been talking with someone else.

I didn’t want anyone to see me and stop me, try to interfere or try to help, so I was very careful as I crept down the back stairs and out the kitchen door. To get to Pete’s little house I had to pass in front of the lighted living room window. It was nearly twilight, and I might be seen, so I ran and cast the image of a dog about me so that anyone looking out of the window would think one of the dogs had run past.

I found Pete in his bedroom, sitting on the cane-bottom, straight-backed chair beside the useless window. The window was a mass of vines and I could barely make out Pete’s shape in the darkness.

‘Pete?’ I didn’t try to touch his mind, knowing he might still be locked in communication with one of his people. I hadn’t liked the feeling when I bumped into it before. I hadn’t liked it one little bit.

I waited in the dark for Pete to respond. I didn’t mind the wait. I was starting to feel better, calmer. I was fooling myself, of course, since nothing had changed, but just being with Pete was a tremendous relief after the confusion and loneliness of the afternoon.

He touched my mind with a question. A familiar touch, but strange. He was different: he was happy. I felt uncomfortable, wondering if what I had always thought normal for him had been a constant state of unhappiness, or loneliness, or sickness. I felt guilty. I had never been able to make him happy.

But that wasn’t my fault; I couldn’t be expected to do that – he sent the impressions rapidly. He had been lonely, and physically sick as a reaction to our atmosphere, and psychically sick with longing for home and friends. I had made him as happy as it was possible for him to be on this strange planet. But that wasn’t enough. He was going home now, to be among his own kind again.

‘What about me?’ I was so upset I spoke aloud. ‘I’m like you – you made me be like you. I’m different from everybody else. I can’t stay here if you’re gone. You know what it’s like – imagine how lonely I’ll be! It isn’t fair, it isn’t right for you to go off and leave me after you’ve made me into a freak.’

He tried to calm me – this was always his first defence against the destructive emotions of humankind. But I wasn’t just another human; I knew how to evade his touch.

‘Don’t leave me,’ I said. ‘I can’t stand it if you go. I won’t have anybody, and I won’t even have the hope you had, that someday my people might come for me, because you are my only people. There’s only you and me, Pete. We belong together. Don’t leave me here with strangers. Take me with you, please, Pete. We have to be together.’

He did love me; I know he did. And he must have seen what it would be like for me if he left me. He couldn’t condemn me to a worse loneliness than his own – he had too much compassion. True, I would be a stranger among his people, but I was a stranger among my own. At least I could have him.

Pete agreed. He would take me home with him.

*

By first light the place was like a fairground or the site of a rock concert. Newspeople and security littered the grounds around the house, and there were plenty of gawkers who had to be run off by the police. I was up early after spending the night with Pete. He had shared memories of his home planet with me, and although this was something he had done before, there was a new meaning and excitement to them now, because I would see all those things for myself, very soon. When at last I slept I dreamed alone. Pete held me in his arms, but he lay wakeful through the night.

I hung around with my mother in the kitchen while I waited for the motorcade bearing the aliens to arrive from the airfield. I helped her and Mary Beth make coffee and sandwiches and hoped they wouldn’t realise the mood I was trying to subdue had changed from sorrow to excitement. I couldn’t let them suspect or they would try to stop me. I would have to watch for my chance and escape. I might not even be able to say goodbye.

I saw the short strand of black cars from the kitchen window and dashed out the door, running hard through the woods, afraid of being left behind despite Pete’s promise.

The porch and grounds around Pete’s house were swarming with people, and just as I got there I felt them focus their attention as the motorcade pulled up in a fine mist of dirt and gravel.

I craned as eagerly as anyone else to see the first alien step out of the car, but of course to me they were not aliens, but my own, adopted, people.

Pete, I thought, at the sight of the first one, and my mind leaped forward in greeting. But it was not Pete. Instead of his familiar mass, my mind touched something cold and unintelligible and was rebuffed.

There were three of them, and they all looked exactly the same. They wore form-fitting, skin-like suits which hid their sexual differences and protected them from the poisons which irritated Pete’s skin.

Pete came out of the house, moving slowly as always, his neck-membrane flaring brightly with his emotions. The onlookers moved away as he came down the porch steps, and his alien brothers (or sisters?) came forward. All four merged in a long, silent embrace. It went on for minutes, and as I watched I felt miserable: uncomfortable, unhappy, abandoned and repelled.

Then one of the aliens spoke. It was strange, because although I knew I was hearing it in my mind, the way that I heard Pete, I knew that this communication was not private. Everyone there heard it, too.

‘We thank you people for your hospitality and kindness in caring for our injured brother. We will take him home with us now, and trouble you no further.’

I felt a hand on my shoulder and twisted around to see my parents, Mary Beth and Duane. I shrugged off my father’s protective touch.

‘Pete,’ I muttered, and thought at him fiercely. Look at me, think of me, tell them about me. Tell them I am going, too. Tell them I’m like you.

He didn’t respond, and I ran to him and hugged him tightly. Pete, tell them! Tell them you can’t leave me!

I felt the cold mind-touch of one of the other aliens, and then he spoke: not directly to me, but to everyone. ‘Child, you can’t come with us. You must stay here with your own kind.’

I was outraged. ‘Pete,’ I commanded. ‘Tell them.’

Reluctantly he gave me his thoughts: he had asked them, and they had said no. They would not take me. It was not allowed.

I was shocked to think of Pete having to ask permission, to see Pete as more of a child than I was. I realised that he had not even insisted. He was as weak and uncertain as a long-time hospital patient, bending before the doctor’s decision. It was not allowed. Didn’t he care?

My mother touched my shoulder. ‘Darling. Let us all say goodbye to Pete, now. We’ll miss him too, you know.’

No one could miss Pete the way I would, but I stepped back as she wanted.

My mother hesitated a moment, a little timid now that this old friend of the family had been revealed as an alien. But, after all, she had known him since childhood, so she conquered her fear and hugged him. My father shook Pete’s hand and patted his shoulder as if he were one of his workers about to leave on a long journey. My sister, a smile fixed politely on her face, hugged Pete for the first and last time in her life. Pete put his hands out as if he wanted to talk to them at last, to say something important before he left. Then he looked at me, and I saw the wattles of skin at his neck darken and wave slightly, about to flare.

That terrified me, that sight of emotion, for I knew it meant Pete was sad to leave me, which meant that he really was going to leave me. This was the end, with no escape.

Suddenly I was crying, for the first time in years, and I threw myself at Pete. ‘Take me with you … Oh, please, take me with you,’ I begged, with mind and voice and body. I didn’t want to be left alone. All my life, Pete had been there for me. I couldn’t bear it if he left; I had to go with him. He was my life.

Pete stood still, simply suffering my embrace, until I stopped crying. I let go of him, then, thinking of another chance. Trying to breathe normally, trying to sound calm, I turned back to my family.

‘Let me go with him,’ I said. ‘Just in the car, up to the highway. To give me time to say goodbye. Please. The driver can let me out on the highway.’ Away from my family, I thought, I could make the other humans forget I was there. If the aliens saw what I could do, they might agree to take me. Pete would be on my side – I could make him be.

My mother looked unwilling – she must have known I would desert her and all the earth for Pete – but I concentrated on making her forget that, making her feel nothing but my need, and at last she nodded reluctantly at the driver and the security men by the car. ‘It’s up to them,’ she said.

I looked at the man I figured to have the most power – it showed in the way he stood – and gave him everything I had. I tried to fix in his mind the idea that it would be stupid to leave me, good to take me along to keep Pete happy. They must take me, in fact, because—

One of the aliens intercepted my projection, snapped it up like a frog taking a fly from the air. They all three stared at me with their unreadable, alien expressions, and they looked nothing at all like Pete.

‘Ma’am,’ said the man I’d been aiming my plea at, ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea.’ He looked at my mother, not me. ‘There’ll be a lot of sightseers up by the highway, maybe even some crazies with guns. It might not be safe or wise to stop there. I’m afraid I’ll have to say no. Your daughter can say her goodbyes here.’ He smiled.

I knew it was over, then, and I hated them all. Even Pete, who had done nothing at all to keep me. I would have fought for him, I would have faced all the armies of Earth to keep him by me, and he couldn’t even argue with his friends.

That was the last of Pete for me. He made no effort to reach me with his mind as they drove him away, although I’m sure he could have done so. But he didn’t. When they took him into space I knew it because I felt a shock and then a numbness. And then I knew about being alone. No more Pete. No more mind-talk. Ever.

I’m alone among these humans just like Pete was. At night I wander through their dreams, oppressed by their limits, missing Pete, who could show me things I cannot see alone.

I wonder sometimes if Pete is as lonely as I am. Sometimes I start to think that he’ll come back for me. I know that’s probably crazy, and I can’t count on it, but I do think about it. It’s all I have to hope for. I’m just afraid that he’ll leave it too late. I could spend my whole life waiting for him, and die before he returns. But I’ll wait forever, if I have to. That’s all I can do. Pete made me his friend because he was lonely. He had no right to abandon me as he did – that was just too cruel. But I’ll forgive him when he comes back.

My parents think that I miss Pete the way I would miss a friend or relative who went away, and they think that I will get over it in time. They think I can forget. They don’t realise I lost my life.

They bought me a monkey, a bribe to cheer me up. What a joke. It almost makes me cry to look at it, sitting there on my bed and picking at things with its tiny hands, wearing a face no animal should wear, staring at me with those sorrowful, wise and stupid eyes, wishing I’d pretend to be its mother and teach it the ways of our tribe.

Reunion

He was not accustomed to such excitement, not when it came from within himself. He had stopped hoping and become resigned to his way of life, and he had forgotten so much. After so long he could barely control his thoughts and some of the more embarrassing body functions also evaded control: limbs twitched or spasmed at moments, the neck membrane bloomed and sank in meaningless indications. Worst of all, he still had the embarrassing habit of sleep. But his fellows assured him that all would be well. Once he was safely home they would cure him and make him whole again.

He was grateful to his fellows, for he knew how awkward he was for them. It would have been easier for them all if he’d had the grace to die, instead of surviving as a defective. But they would do their duty by him, and take him home, back to real life again.

His thoughts turning more and more towards home, he had no time for the humans. Jody was a burden – not as easy to shed as the others. She clung to him and made leave-taking a less than perfect joy. He knew his fellows scorned him for his relationship with her. There was something sick and perverted in feeling such affection for an animal, no matter how lonely he had been, and he felt too ashamed of himself to try to explain how it had happened, how Jody was special, not like most of her kind.

He didn’t like feeling uneasy. He wanted to get back to the life that was interrupted so long ago with the minimum of fuss. So he submerged his will and let the others tell him what to do. He was, after all, still an invalid, badly injured in the crash and malformed and malnourished by the years of living on this unhealthy alien planet.

The humans, seen now through the eyes of his fellows, were ugly again, unfamiliar with their smooth, plump-almost-to-skin-bursting bodies, and they made him shrink with distaste.

Jody, still, was Jody, and he was sorry to leave her. But it wasn’t possible to take her along, even as a pet. She would not be able to adjust and survive, as he had. The shock, if it did not kill her, would make her life a misery.

He did try to tell the others that she was different, but they responded that she was not different enough. She was a freak among her own people, but she was still only human.

Of course he had to leave her. There had never really been any question about it. Despite his injuries and changes, he knew where he belonged. Soon, he would be home among friends and family, he would be cured and resume his life. Jody, despite her limited life-span, would also adjust, he thought. She was young, and she would draw comfort from her own kind and forget him. It was right and proper for a being to be among its own kind.

MRS T.

There was no heater in the dirty white Ford, so Leslie drove wearing her heaviest coat, a man’s Navy pea-jacket, and with the smudged windows rolled up. She wondered if Ron had gone back to bed. It had been very hard to get up, to crawl out of that warm little den, this morning. Ron had ragged her, with a hint of real complaint in his voice, about this assignment.

‘Look at all this! Is this supposed to mean something?’ The contents of the folder, all the photocopied pages and fragments, had fluttered down on the mounds of blankets.

‘It’s all I have to go on. She sent it, so I presume she’ll tell me why.’

‘Why do you take these assignments?’ he had demanded. ‘Why do you let them always make you the one?’

She was submerging herself in a sweater, an old one of her brother’s, and her voice came out muffled. ‘Maybe this one will be something. I don’t know. Maybe this woman really has found something out. Maybe she’s made some great discovery, and I’ll be the first to report it.’

Instead of responding to that, he began to read, in an affected voice, from an article she had already read several times on the wrasse, a fish of the Australian Barrier Reef.

‘ “… each male has a harem of three to six females, all existing in a strict hierarchy controlled by the aggressive social patterns of the male. When the male dies, or is removed, the top-ranking female assumes his role, bullying the other females. Within four to fourteen days her ovaries have become testes and the former female has become completely male.” ’

‘Ok, Ron, I’ve read it. I’ve read all that stuff.’

‘What’s the connection? This woman isn’t any scientist – scientists don’t send batches of clippings to newspapers with mysterious letters … I mean, look at some of this stuff! Advertisements, for God’s sake. Ads for jeans and hairstyles. And all this stuff about dominance signals from baboons and chimpanzees. And this, about homosexual Indians—’

‘Transsexual would be more accurate, I think,’ she said, brushing her hair hard.

He glanced at her from across the room. ‘Oh, come on, Leslie! This woman’s a nut. She’s the kind who sees the hand of God in tornados and pizza parlours. There’s no story in this. Why do you let them give you these nutcases?’

She crossed to the bed and began gathering up the scattered pages. ‘Because I’m a beginning reporter, and I just do what I’m told. It’s all experience, after all. Dealing with nuts will prepare me for dealing with the big-time nuts like murderers and politicians. Now I have to go. And you’d better start getting dressed, too, if you don’t want to be late for work.’

He gave her a sly look. ‘Stay,’ he urged. ‘Come back to bed, and I’ll tell you stories about the basic female orientation of the hypothalamus. We can play tic-tac-toe with XYY chromosomes. Make up the story, or tell your boss it didn’t pan out. Who’s to know?’

Leslie cranked the window down half an inch and let the fresh air shoot in, chilling the side of her face and invigorating her. Think positive, she advised herself. Even if the woman was a nut, think of it as a challenge to get a good story anyway. Ron hadn’t tempted her away from her job physically – she wouldn’t let him do so mentally either.

The sky was a dirty grey, merging with the bland, flat countryside and the highway flowing on ahead of her. The air tasted of snow, and the sky seemed to promise it, but there had been no snow in south Texas in the ten years she had lived here. She would not be fooled by false signs.

Green and white flashed at her out of grey, the highway sign vivid in the absence of billboards, and she slowed the car for the turn. The car began to shudder when she slowed to forty-five, trembling and complaining as it always did at that speed.

The house that was her destination was at the end of a street of tired, suspicious houses, all set back from the road and separated from their neighbours by the ruins of bicycles and children’s games, mangled garbage cans and piles of brush. The street was empty, silent, and Leslie realised that all the children must be in school.

She parked the car in the last driveway. It had been strewn with flat white shells in a failed attempt to make it a proper, paved driveway, but dirt and creeping weeds predominated over the aliens from the sea.

Leslie stood a moment beside the car, hands in pockets, and looked up at the grey wooden house, trying to imagine a biological laboratory in there, wondering what the story was. ‘I think she’s one of those crazy broads with some theory supposed to prove the superiority of women,’ Pete had said. ‘Women’s lip, that’s what it should be called. Just a buncha bullshit.’

Leslie always managed to feel remote when the topic of women’s liberation came up, as if she were removed from it. Her world was one of men, she had a man’s job, she spent her life among them and had no women friends – it was not her problem.

She slung the camera around her neck and walked through the weedy lawn to the front door. There was a screen door and no doorbell, so she opened the screen and knocked.

‘You’re from the paper?’ The woman’s eyes ran over Leslie, who thought she saw disappointment, or disapproval, in them. She had met this reaction before. You? One young girl with a camera? That’s all I’m worth?

‘I’m Leslie Hawkins, Mrs Terisoro.’ The woman ignored her hand. She was small, a full foot shorter than Leslie, with a taut, angry white face, raisin eyes and coarse, greying hair clipped very close.

‘Come in.’ The woman drew back, abruptly disappearing into darkness, and Leslie followed.

She missed the cold outside air at once. The house inside was dim and close, the air permeated with dust. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that the room was filled with newspapers, improbably filled. Stacks of them covered every surface, only a narrow path remaining clear.

‘We’ll talk in the kitchen,’ the woman said. ‘I keep the table and chairs in there clear – that’s where I work. But the documents – they pile up. All of this is for my research, and it’s so hard to throw out something that might prove useful. I keep gathering evidence.’ Her voice had become more friendly; she sounded apologetic and shyly excited.

Leslie followed her to the kitchen which was indeed free of newspapers, although there were books piled in every corner, on the refrigerator, and on the table.

‘My name,’ said the woman, ‘is Henrietta Terisoro, at one time Henrietta Baker, and then Mrs James Gabriel Terisoro. Do you see?’

Leslie asked her to spell the full name, please, and wrote in her notebook.

‘Your name? No, wait, I remember … Leslie, yes, that’s a good, bisexual name – further proof. Names, you know, are very revealing, the way that masculine names have subtly shifted into feminine, and of course the cycle of popularity for individual names … But myself, I wonder whether to call myself Henry or whether, in James’ honour, do you see, I should take his name.’

Leslie noted that the woman wore a baggy blue sweatshirt and jeans, rubber thong sandles on her feet.

‘James died seven months ago. I wonder if the change will be complete in nine months, if it is a nine-month cycle? But, somehow, that seems too neat, too falsely scientific, do you see? I do not wish to jump to conclusions.’

Leslie looked up, into the flow of words. ‘Could you please tell me briefly what your discovery is? Very simply and concisely if you could, so our readers will understand.’

‘But that is your job, isn’t it? Making readers understand? You are the writer, and you do have some foundation in the biological sciences, of course?’

Leslie shook her head.

‘No? But,’ the woman paused, looking puzzled, hurt and angry. ‘I told him, I told that man, it is important that you be able to comprehend …’ She looked at Leslie suspiciously. ‘Why did the paper send you, then? Why you?’

Leslie had been given the assignment because she always handled the nut-cases, the strange assignments, the unexplained phenomena and UFO stories.

‘My speciality is the feature and the personality piece,’ Leslie said. ‘Since this isn’t exactly a news break—’

‘But it is! This is most important! One of the most important discoveries—’

‘What I mean is, it isn’t a news story in the sense that it must be covered at once, like a murder. This story can be written over a period of time, and be as long as it needs to be.’

The last story Leslie had covered had been the reported apparition of Jesus on a screen door some fifty miles further down the coast. Leslie had dutifully taken a picture of the imprint on the screen, but could never make out more than a vaguely oval blur either in person or on film, despite the cluster of the faithful at the door who had traced, their fingers held reverently in the air away from the screen, the features of the holy face for her.

Mrs Terisoro nodded doubtfully. ‘But it makes things more difficult for me, do you see … people always make things more difficult, I don’t know why. You read the clippings I sent, of course?’ Her voice suggested she did not expect an affirmative answer.

‘Yes, of course,’ Leslie said, a bit too forcefully, and then fell into a silence that lasted until she sneezed.

‘Bless you,’ the woman said, sounding startled.

Leslie sneezed once more into her hand. ‘The dust,’ she said apologetically. ‘Do you have any Kleenex?’

‘No, oh, no, I’m afraid not.’ Mrs Terisoro shifted heavily in her chair, staring keenly at Leslie. ‘Are you married?’

Leslie shook her head.

‘Oh? I would have thought … Engaged, then?’

‘I live with someone.’

‘Oh! I see. Well, that’s the way it’s done these days – without benefit of clergy, but married in the eyes of God, as it were.’

‘It’s nothing like that,’ Leslie said, feeling she must make this very clear. She always felt that she must make her relationship with Ron very clear. ‘It’s not a common law marriage at all. Ron and I are living together, and at any time we may decide to go our separate ways. We’re very independent, we both have our jobs and we don’t want children – what’s so funny?’

‘Your ignorance. I suppose you think that this young man and yourself are on an equal footing?’

‘Of course.’

The woman abruptly stopped laughing and looked down. Leslie saw loose flakes of dandruff on her scalp. ‘Things today … You must admit they’re changing. Once there was an instinctive feel for place. Masters and slaves. Husbands and wives. But you can’t escape it – the natural relationship, the only possible relationship, is that of the dominant to the subordinate. Those who are not one must be the other. The male to the female. You must accept it.’

‘That’s certainly not what I expected you to say,’ Leslie responded lamely. Women’s lib indeed! Damn that Pete, he must have known, and deliberately set her up …

‘What do you mean?’ Her eyes were quite black: Leslie could not distinguish the pupil from the iris.

‘Oh, Pete – my boss – led me to believe that you – well, what he said was, “One of those broads from women’s lib.” But what you—’

‘Your boss misunderstood me.’

‘Obviously.’ The woman’s monkey-sharp eyes disconcerted her, and to escape them, Leslie looked down at her notebook.

‘Does it frighten you, Leslie?’ There was a whisper of tenderness in her tone, and Leslie looked up quickly, annoyed.

‘Frighten me! What? I haven’t even got a story. Nothing but a lot of clippings, nothing very unusual, and a few mysterious statements from you. Hints, and—’

‘Dominance,’ said the woman. ‘If you want it in a phrase, dominance and submission. That is the key. Males are dominant and females subordinate. Or so they have been. Now, in this culture, things are changing. I can see the signs – anyone can. This “unisex”. It’s a merging, yes, it’s a merging because the women are becoming males and the males becoming women. I can see it in you. Look, wearing pants and a man’s coat and sweater … sneakers …’ Leslie drew back as the woman leaned toward her sniffing. ‘No perfume, no make-up.’

‘What have I to do with it?’ Leslie asked. The old woman made her nervous. She was very aware of being alone with her in a strange house, on an apparently deserted street. Who would help her? Her throat was dry. ‘For that matter, you’re wearing men’s clothes. Could I have a glass of water, please?’

‘My clothes, of course! Are you deliberately missing the point?’ Mrs Terisoro stood up; by an effort of will Leslie remained in her chair.

‘My husband, I told you that my husband died. Let me show you a picture, oh, where … ’ Mrs Terisoro paced around the cluttered room, her rubber sandals making fleshy, slapping sounds against the lineoleum.

‘Here, here’s a picture of him, and one of me. This was some years ago. It won’t really show you …’ Some books fell to the floor.

Leslie looked at the snapshot. It must have been taken many years before. Mrs Terisoro was hardly recognisable, wearing a scoop-necked dress and black hair to her shoulders. She was smiling and standing beside a man, a fairly handsome man, who was no taller than his wife.

‘He was the man. He went to work and brought home money. He did his best to give me children … He was the man and I was the woman.’

‘But you worked, too. Weren’t you a biologist?’

‘No!’ The woman sounded fierce. ‘I did my job. I was his wife. I stayed home and kept house and cooked. I had majored in biology in college, but before I could go on to graduate school, I met Mr Terisoro, and we were married, and there was no need, do you see? But I kept up with my reading. That is what has enabled me to understand … to gather data and to see what is happening to our society – and to me.’

‘What is happening to you?’

Mrs Terisoro stood very still before Leslie. Her voice became gentle, as if she spoke to a child. ‘I was a woman. Now I am becoming a man. I was subordinate, but now there is no longer anyone to dominate me, and I shall be fulfilled. I wonder who shall be my female? For, of course, there must be someone to dominate.’

Leslie felt stifled by the house, by this woman’s madness. She stood.

‘I’ll go now,’ she said. ‘I think I can sum up your theory …’

‘Wait!’ Mrs Terisoro did not move, but Leslie stopped.

‘You don’t believe me,’ said the older woman. ‘I can see it. You are on the verge of believing, but can’t face it. Look!’

She lifted her sweat-shirt triumphantly high, revealing a pair of withered dugs. ‘They are shrivelling, disappearing. You saw the pictures, how lovely a woman I was – my breasts were large and firm then. Look, you can see, they’re shrinking, shrivelling more every day.’

Leslie turned her head.

‘Don’t refuse to see – it will happen to you, as well, and you must be prepared to understand and to accept. It is a very wonderful thing, to be allowed both sides of life. And I am truly becoming a man not merely ceasing to be a woman – look—’ she fumbled with the zipper of her pants; Leslie was unable not to watch.

‘You can’t really see … the hair … but the signs are there. These lumps, growing here – give me your hand—’ Mrs Terisoro pressed Leslie’s hand beneath and against herself. ‘Feel them? They’re growing. And can you feel how the vaginal opening is shrinking?’ Leslie, tense and trying to pull her hand away, could not tell what she felt.

‘You mustn’t be frightened,’ said Mrs Terisoro. ‘It is really very beautiful. Nature is a marvellous thing. I think perhaps you have begun to change as well—’ Her hands were on Leslie’s breasts.

Leslie felt her body respond as it would have to Ron’s hands, and the current that ran through her made her feel sick and dizzy.

She left the house, gathering as through a growing fog her camera, notebook and coat, pushing away Mrs Terisoro and her words as if they had been cobwebs. Driving home, she could not shake off the sticky dream. The cold seemed to numb, rather than invigorate her.

She had been driving for a few minutes before she realised why the road was getting harder to see. Fat wet flakes, more like solid rain than actual snow, hit the windshield and disintegrated. She turned on the windshield wipers, but the snow did not last long.

Ron was home. She did not at first realise that this was odd, nor did she realise his mood when she came in.

‘Aren’t you even curious as to why I’m home?’

‘It’s that early?’ She glanced at the clock. ‘I had a pretty weird experience today – it kind of shook me.’ Already it seemed very far away, and she wondered at herself for her irrationality. Just a crazy old woman, after all – she had run into enough of them before.

‘I quit.’

‘What?’

‘My job. I quit my job today. I just couldn’t take it anymore.’ Ron was long and thin, with golden hair that brushed his shoulders. When he was excited, as now, he moved jerkily around the room, shaking his hair into his face and then out again. ‘I mean, I thought to myself, I’ll never become an artist, not really, never have the time or develop the discipline if I have to do this shit day after day. Layout! Who the fuck cares about layout! Sure, maybe once or twice a year they let me do a drawing, or design a cover – and then it’s to their specifications. I can’t be creative, or use my own mind—’

‘Have you had lunch?’

‘What?’

‘We could go out, or there’s some soup—’

‘Leslie.’

They looked at each other, and then she went to him and put her arms around him.

‘I’m sorry, Ron. But did you really quit? I mean, for good?’

‘Yes, I’m going to make it as an artist. A real artist.’

‘Here?’

‘I thought I’d keep on working in my studio, yeah, unless – I mean, do you mind? You’ve always said that anytime I wanted to – that you make enough money for both of us—’

‘Of course. It isn’t that.’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t mind. But you always said before that you didn’t want me supporting you.’

‘It would only be for a little while. I’m sure I can make it.’

‘I know you will.’

‘Look,’ he said, after a while. ‘Standing up doesn’t cut it. You’re too short for me. Why don’t we go lie down?’

‘It’s all right,’ she said later, into the quiet. She continued to caress him with one hand. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I think it was the tension of the day. I just hate to disappoint you.’

She kissed him. ‘You never disappoint me.’

‘We’ll try again later,’ he said.

She jumped off the bed. ‘Who wants to take a shower?’

He didn’t leap up as she had expected. ‘In a minute – no, stay there. I just want to look at you.’ She posed for him, thrusting her chest at him, then turning coyly half away. ‘The Pill made your breasts larger, right?’

‘You’ve already commented on the improvement about a million times,’ she said, annoyed.

‘That’s not what I meant. I think it must be wearing off. Your breasts are smaller.’

‘You’re just jealous ’cause you don’t have any.’ She went to the bathroom. ‘Are you coming or not?’ As she waited for him, she studied her image in the mirror, seeing with a sinking heart that they were smaller, definitely smaller, and wondering when it had started.

THE BONE FLUTE

I am forever falling in love with beautiful men who break my heart. Perhaps I prefer it that way. There are worse things than being left.

I first saw Venn in a spaceport bar. Not my usual sort of hangout, but I was a stranger to that world, with nowhere immediate to go and no one to see, and I was tired and looking for someplace dark and quiet.

The bar was called The White Bird, and it was dark and quiet enough at that hour. Light was provided by a set of glowing, artificial birds that fluttered around, seemingly at random, lighting up different areas as they briefly roosted. The female dancers – off-duty now, and lounging at a table – continued the bird imagery with costumes of feathers constructed to continually fall away and reassemble in various more or less revealing ways. Besides myself and the dancers, there was only one other person in the bar – a dark-haired, very handsome young man who was sitting with the dancers.

They were laughing, the three costumed women and the man, and although I could not hear what they said, I guessed that the young man was being teased about something.

He rose from the table just as a bird was passing overhead, and his face was suddenly lit. I felt his beauty like a pain in my stomach. At that moment, with his beard and the classic lines of his face, he might have been an ancient god revealed to a hidden observer. He was still laughing and directing his attention to the group he was with; he was unaware of my presence.

He gestured at one of the women, and the other two began to clap their hands and hoot. The one he had indicated reached with one hand behind her head and was suddenly naked.

‘Now take off your clothes,’ she said, her voice carrying clearly.

He hesitated and glanced around the bar. His gaze passed over me, and he turned back and pulled off his one-piece, self-consciousness evident only in the slight trembling of his legs and the clumsiness with which he tossed the discarded suit over a chair. He turned his back to the naked woman and bent his head, and she fastened something small in his curly black hair.

Feathers sprouted on his shoulders, down the sides of his legs, around his waist: white feathers tipped with gold. They outlined his nipples, concealed his genitals, and popped up like stray snowflakes in the hair on top of his head.

He looked down at himself and laughed out loud; then he began to strut and show himself off as his three companions applauded.

The naked woman settled herself in a chair, and one of the others jumped up and ran around to the back of the bar. The wide bar-top now lit up like a runway, and I realised that it was a stage. The gentle background music now swelled to fill the room and took on a heavy, insistent beat.

‘Show us what you can do,’ said the woman who had given him her costume. ‘Go on, show us your stuff.’ Her voice was a good imitation of the loud, drunken belligerence she must often have heard directed at herself, and she sat as if her nakedness was a uniform of high rank.

The other two women drew chairs closer to the bar. ‘Go on,’ they said. ‘Get up there.’ They laughed and touched each other with conspiratorial glee.

If he was nervous, he didn’t show it. He wore a pleased half-smile on his face. The feathers seemed to glow against his dark skin and black hair. An odd sight, but I thought I had never seen anyone more desirable.

Suddenly he ran forward and launched himself onto the bar. He was awkward mounting the stage, but quickly scrambled to his feet. Then he stood very still, then raised his right arm and beckoned with one finger. In response, one of the birds flew to him and perched on the uplifted finger. He held it beneath his face, and the upcast lighting made his face appear demonic. The feathers in his hair might have been horns; the feathers which shifted on his body might have concealed anything.

‘Ladies,’ he said in a deep voice. ‘For your pleasure, the exotic dancing and erotic talents of – Venn!’

On the last word he flung out his hand, launching the bird, and began to dance.

I was in no state to be very critical, but it seemed to me that Venn was a natural dancer. He’d clearly had no training, but he was utterly uninhibited, easy in his body, and quickly caught the feel of the music. His seductive gestures were not subtle, but they were effective. As I watched him dance, I grew more aroused, and it was clear, from the glimpses offered by the shifting, falling feathers, that his movements were arousing to himself, too.

When he had done, I burst into enthusiastic applause, even before his friends did. Startled, he looked my way, and seemed to see me then for the first time. When he climbed down from the stage, it was to me he came first, and not the dancers who were calling his name and commenting on his ability.

He stood close to my chair, looking down at me. He was breathing hard, and I could see the perspiration shining on his face, and smell the faint musk of his body. ‘May I buy you a drink?’ he asked.

I felt my heart lift with anticipation. ‘The offer should come from me,’ I said. ‘As a token of my appreciation. I enjoyed your performance very much.’

He smiled with his eyes. ‘We’ll buy each other a drink. But let me change, first – offstage, these feathers seem a bit silly.’

I watched him walk back to the dancers, and they were watching me. The naked one smiled. I nodded gravely in response, and she shrugged and turned away.

Venn came back dressed in his one-piece, but it was open to the navel now, and he was still barefoot. He fell into a chair at my table.

‘Hard work?’ I asked.

‘Exhausting. But, then, things worth doing often are. Pleasantly so.’ He looked me up and down, taking his time. ‘You’re … in trade?’

‘How could you tell?’

‘You’re not a regular, and this place doesn’t draw many women. So it seems likely you just wandered in to kill a few hours. We’re in a spaceport, you’re not in uniform, you’re alone …’ He shrugged. ‘There are a dozen other things you could be, but trader seemed a safe bet and not a guess that would insult you if I were wrong.’

‘And you,’ I said. ‘Not a professional dancer … the bartender?’

He grimaced. ‘I wish you hadn’t,’ he said, sounding pained.

I laughed. ‘Your heart’s not in it,’ I said. ‘It’s only until something better comes along. Your real interest is in … art?’

‘Music,’ he said. ‘I’m a composer, and I also perform, when I can get an audience.’ He sounded livelier now, talking about himself. ‘Actually, I’m not really the bartender. I came to apply for the job – they like the human touch at peak hours, despite the automated bar – but the owner didn’t show up. That was how I came to be talking with the others.’

‘Maybe you should apply for a job as a dancer,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said. ‘If you were here to watch me.’ He gave me a look that made me feel like melted butter.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said, so I did, giving him the interesting version, which relied heavily on listing all the worlds I had been to and suggesting adventures, but which revealed very little of myself.

As he listened to me, Venn was constantly assessing me. Before he spoke, he gauged my likely response. It was a diplomat’s skill, or a sycophant’s, and I was aware of it. But it didn’t matter. I was flattered that he took the trouble, that he cared enough to try to impress me. And when he told me about his music and his dreams of success, I was as interested and approving as he could have wished. If he was playing me, I was playing him as well. I wanted him, and I had made up my mind to have him.

‘How long are you staying?’ he asked me.

‘Tomorrow I leave for Habille,’ I said.

That interested him, as I knew it would. Mention any of the Lost Planets and there will be a surge of interest in any listener.

‘Habille,’ he said, lingering over the name. ‘I’d love to see Habille. A teacher of mine went there once to study their music. I would love to hear it – it would be fascinating to know what paths their music took over the centuries they were cut off from the Network.’

‘There’s quite a demand for all kinds of art from the Lost Planets,’ I said. ‘People imagine there will be some special magic, some freshness that the rest of us have lost.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve never been to Habille, but the other Lost Planets are mostly backwater kinds of places. They have their oddities, but most of the real differences don’t hit you in the face right away. It takes time and patience to discover them – and they may not be worth discovering. On the surface, things have already changed. They’re all part of the Network again. Only underneath they may be different still. Their legacy from the past is that they believe different things and do things differently, even though they follow the fashion in clothes and gadgets and entertainments.’

‘But there are differences,’ he persisted. ‘The Dead Speakers of Far Weiss—’

I tried not to grimace, not wanting to offend him if he believed. ‘A very profitable difference for Far Weiss,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of something less … definite. Something more general, which would show up throughout the culture. On Habille, for example, I’ve heard that the people mate for life. Infidelity is unthought of. When they fall in love, it is forever – nothing less is possible for them.’

He searched my face; his dark eyes softened slightly. ‘That appeals to you?’

‘Yes.’

He smiled. ‘When you get there, you’ll probably discover it only means there’s a feudal atmosphere towards marriage, with fierce punishments for anyone who steps out of line.’

I shook my head. ‘That isn’t how I heard it. It’s supposed to be … innate. Utterly natural. They fall in love once and for all. They don’t need to legislate it anymore than they need to pass a law requiring all citizens to breathe.’

He leaned closer to me. His eyes were intent and serious, although he was smiling. ‘What makes the people of Habille so different from us? How do they succeed where the rest of humanity merely dreams and believes and inevitably fails?’

I wanted to touch him. I was weary of words. I managed a few more. ‘Perhaps it’s a matter of belief,’ I said. ‘They grow up believing in love in a way we don’t. We expect to fail, although we may hope not to, while they don’t believe they can fail. They fall in love once, and their belief sustains it, makes it imperative. They can’t imagine anything else – and what can’t be imagined is impossible.’

Later, after more drinks and dinner, I asked Venn to spend the night with me. I knew, as I asked, that he knew I asked more than that, and I knew, when he accepted, that he meant to stay with me.

*

I will always remember our trip to Habille: that isolated, perfect time when the two of us were a world unto ourselves. The ship made its own mysterious, stately progress through silent space, and we need concern ourselves with nothing but each other. We made love, we slept, we ate, we played like two young animals snug in a safe den. No one intruded: the outside world did not exist. Sometimes Venn sang me songs of his own composition, and I applauded. They seemed, to my love-besotted mind, the highest perfection of music.

Venn told me stories about his past – mostly stories about the many women who had loved him. He was not trying to make me jealous, but simply letting me know that he was valuable. He was not successful, as I was; he drifted along from job to job, dreaming of the day his music would be discovered and make him rich and famous, but still he was important. People sought him out; people wanted him. He would give himself to me, but only as long as I appreciated the gift. Only so long as I made him feel valuable.

The magic ended when we arrived on Habille.

There, of necessity, I had to turn my thoughts to business. I had much less time and attention for Venn, and he was not pleased with his change in status. He became sulky and demanding. Yet when I tried to include him by asking his advice about the advisability of buying this work of art, importing that set of tapestries or metal flatware, he glowered at me and accused me of keeping him from his own work. Having had the whole, he would not be content with part of my attention.

Habille, too, must have been a sad disappointment to Venn. Despite my warnings, he expected something alien, some exotic and beautiful mystery.

But Habille was uninspiring: an unimpressive, industrial world which had quickly picked up all the modern conveniences from the Network, but none of the fads or fashions which made life more interesting. They had no interest in other worlds on Habille – they had their world and their ways, and that was all they knew or wanted to know. Another planet might have provided architectural marvels and bizarre rituals for the tourists, but Habille kept its cultural differences quietly tucked out of sight. That there was a great deal of strangeness beneath the surface, I had no doubt. What it might be, I did not know.

Most of the population lived in the huge, ugly cities. The agricultural areas which covered most of the southern region and filled much of one ocean were controlled by machines from a distance. I admit my own heart sank at the sight of the first of these unaesthetic cities – what could I possibly find to buy in such a place? The alternative to the cities were small, barren-looking villages, composed entirely of pale brown, dome-shaped houses built of rock. They seemed to have erupted from the flat ground, to be a natural part of the monochromatic, dusty landscape, rather than structures built by people who might have chosen to make them beautiful. The villages were totally dependent upon the cities, and those who lived there were for the most part artisans and artists, people who could sell their creations to the cities in order to support their lives outside.

I didn’t see the attraction of the ugly little villages until I had spent several days in one of the largest cities. After that, I decided that the villages possessed a certain quiet charm. They were undemanding, they were uncrowded, they lacked the pressures and the people, and above all the noise, of the cities.

I decided, therefore, to rent a house in one of the villages as my base, and travel in a rented ground-car around to the other villages and cities to seek out the things I wanted to buy. Venn approved of this idea. He couldn’t work in the city, he claimed – he couldn’t concentrate in such a sterile environment, and the music that he’d heard there was all pap and mush, all recycled from the Network. Perhaps, in one of the villages, he might find the real music of Habille, he said, along with the quiet and inspiration to work on his own.

His wish was quickly granted.

As we drove into the dusty centre of the village, we could hear faint, high, wavering musical notes above the sound of the car. I parked the car and shut it off. In the silence, the music was clearer. The sound made the hair prickle on the back of my neck, and I felt suddenly near tears.

I reached out to take Venn’s hand, but he wasn’t looking at me, hadn’t noticed, was already out of the car and moving away, following the sounds. I blinked my eyes hard and followed him.

Just around the corner, his back against the side of one of the yellow-brown, beehive-shaped houses, was a pale-skinned man playing some sort of flute. His eyes were closed, and he was oblivious to his surroundings. Others stood in the street or paused in doorways, drawn by the music as we were.

My skin prickled and crawled and I felt obscurely frightened as the music went on.

Then it stopped.

The young man drew the instrument away from his lips and opened his eyes.

There was silence, and then Venn began to applaud. Almost immediately the other listeners, too, applauded, and the soft slapping sound hung in the dusty air. An odd response to such music, I thought, and wondered if the natives would have clapped if Venn had not. But, not wishing to seem rude, I applauded too.

The musician looked around, yet hardly seemed to see us, as if he had just wakened.

Venn stepped forward. ‘That was magnificent,’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it. What is that instrument you play?’

‘I’m glad it pleases you,’ the musician said slowly. He held his flute in his hand and stared at it. ‘The credit belongs to this my flute, Alean.’

The flute was white and oddly primitive looking. It seemed to have been carved from a piece of bone.

Venn put out his hand to touch it, and the musician at once drew it protectively against his chest.

‘Forgive me,’ Venn said.

The man nodded and turned and began to walk away.

‘Wait,’ said Venn. ‘I’d like to hear you play again.’

‘You will,’ said the musician with a brief, backward glance, and then he had rounded the corner and was out of sight.

Venn raised his eyebrows at me. I could see he was excited, truly interested in something for the first time since we had arrived on this world. My own spirits lifted a little at that, grasping at the hope that the rift between us might be mended.

But his attention had turned now to one of the inhabitants of the village, a young woman standing in a doorway. She remained, although most of the other listeners had moved away when the music ended. She was watching us curiously. She was very pretty, with a creamy oval face, large dark eyes, and a slender figure.

‘Do you know when or where he’s likely to play again?’ Venn asked her.

‘He wanders and plays as the spirit takes him,’ she said. ‘He’ll likely stay here for another week at least. You are strangers here?’

We admitted that and introduced ourselves. Her name was Wara Duleen, and she said she was a music student.

‘I’m a composer myself,’ said Venn. ‘What did you think of the man who just played for us?’

‘Reni Laer is one of the great ones,’ she said simply.

‘That was an odd flute he played.’

‘That was his wife.’ She smiled. ‘It sounds strange to you … but you saw that it was made of bone? That bone came from his wife, Alean. She died two years ago – it’s the sorrow of his life. He might have killed himself, to follow her, but decided to live with his grief. To keep her with him always, he had the flute made. Before her death he was a promising composer and a good musician, but now – now he is great. It means nothing to him. He could not have composed that song you heard today had he not lived through such great sorrow, nor without his wife’s love, still with him after death, just as she is still with him, in the flute and the music.’

‘That’s beautiful,’ Venn said softly. ‘To love so deeply …’ He was gazing at her intently, oblivious to me. I had to stop myself from making a possessive gesture towards him, aware that he would probably shake me off. I saw her looking back at him, and saw the creamy skin of her cheeks redden. I felt the imminence of betrayal like a blow to my stomach.

‘I’d like to hear some of your music some time,’ Venn said. ‘I can offer you some of my own songs in exchange.’

‘That would be nice,’ she said, looking away. She drew back slightly, into the shelter of her house.

‘Venn,’ I said. ‘We must be going. We left the car …’

‘I’ll see you later,’ he said to Wara Duleen.

*

The house we had rented was a yellow-stone beehive like all the others, and I was grateful for the blue tile numbers set above the rounded doorway to distinguish it. Inside, it was simple but seemed fairly comfortable: it was just four square rooms, stacked like boxes on two levels. The walls were smooth and white, and the furnishings were all of bright primary colours. Thick woven rugs of blue and red covered the rock floor. Lighting came from recesses near the ceiling: the tiny round windows let in hardly any light or air.

‘I like it,’ said Venn. ‘This is the real Habille – simple and basic. So different from those awful cities. This is real.’

His smug, happy tone annoyed me. ‘The village is no more real than the city,’ I said. ‘It’s all make-believe. The towns pretend to be primitive and basic, but they’re parasites, completely dependent upon the cities.’

Venn ignored me and wandered into the back room. ‘I could really work here,’ he said.

Within three days I had seen all the village had to offer. I had commissioned a set of tapestries, bought some sculptures and pots, and made notes of other things of interest. But when I spoke of moving on, Venn said flatly that he was not ready to leave.

‘I’m just getting settled,’ he said. ‘I may be able to get some work done at last – it will all be spoiled if you keep uprooting me. You go on and do what you have to – I’ll stay here.’

I lingered, hoping he would change his mind. I didn’t believe him when he promised to wait for me. If I left without him, I should lose him. Not to his work – I didn’t believe that solitude and work could satisfy Venn for long. He was a man who needed an audience – a full-time audience. I had failed him, and he would be searching for another.

In the end, though, I left, going away by myself in the hired car. I could not cajole him into accompanying me, and I did have my work to do.

When I returned, three weeks later, I found the house empty. It looked just as it had on the day we had arrived. Everything, including my own belongings, was neatly in place, and there was no sign of Venn. I knew then, as I looked around, hoping against hope to find some sign of him in the four empty rooms, that Venn had left me. It was over – but I went in search of him anyway.

I learned of a recital in the town hall that evening, and I went there, discovering that Venn was to be one of the performers. I took my seat in the audience, and I don’t think he saw me when he emerged on stage with his guitar. He was in good voice, and I recognised one of the songs he sang from our time together. He looked relaxed and handsome in a white tunic and black trousers. His face was transformed when he sang; he was distant and untouchable. I ached, wanting him.

When Venn had finished his set, it was all I could do to stay in my seat and not go in search of him. I was oblivious to the performers who followed, trapped in my thoughts of Venn. Only one musician reached me, in spite of myself. When Reni Laer walked on stage and put his bone flute to his lips, I knew only the music, and the tears poured down my face as his liquid sorrow flowed into me and wrapped around my heart. Too late, too late. Gone forever.

Afer Reni Laer’s music, the concert was ended. There was a reception in a side-hall, and only Reni Laer did not stay for the drinks and the praise and the gossip. It was as well – words were inadequate in the face of his music. His departure seemed to free the rest of us from a kind of spell, and words and trivialities were possible once again.

I saw Venn and Wara Duleen. They were together – not touching, but the way they stood told me everything I had still hoped not to know.

‘Venn,’ I said quietly.

He turned, a drink in one hand, glowing with success. Wara, too, turned to look, and she, too, was bright with happiness. Her eyes passed over me. It was clear she did not know me.

Venn’s expressed changed. The glow was still there, but caution banked it slightly. He touched Wara’s arm, a casual, proprietary gesture. ‘Excuse me a moment.’

Together we walked away from the party. I scarcely knew where we went, I was in such a state. All my nerves were vibrating with his nearness, while at the same time the sick, empty feeling inside told me it was too late. He was gone, and I could not win him back. He led me, finally, down a hall and through a door onto a small balcony overlooking the village. But even outside in the open air I felt stifled. Behind me, Venn closed the door, shutting out the last sounds of the party.

‘I didn’t expect to see you here tonight,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect you back so soon.’

I turned on him. ‘You didn’t want me back – soon or at all,’ I said. ‘I was gone barely three weeks – is that so long? I’ve thought of you – if you knew how I’ve thought of you …’

He gazed at me calmly, almost indulgently, and my heart sank. He was safe from me, from anything I might say. I didn’t matter to him at all.

‘I’m not sorry to see you,’ he said. ‘But this might not be the best time or place to talk.’

‘We’ll go back home,’ I said. ‘We can talk there.’

He shook his head. ‘You know that my home is with Wara Duleen.’

I closed my eyes. ‘I know,’ I said. Then I looked at him again. ‘Can’t you spare me one evening? Come home with me and tell me why you left.’

‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said angrily. I was hoping he would touch me, but he did not.

‘There’s no point to this. It’s over between us,’ he said.

‘It’s over for you.’

‘You can’t pretend you’re surprised.’

I exhaled sharply and turned to look at the dark, ugly village. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’m hurt. Don’t you pretend I’m not.’

And still he wouldn’t touch me. ‘You’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘I know I sound cruel. But you knew from the start, from the moment you picked me up in that bar – it was only a matter of time.’

‘We were both lonely and bored,’ I said. ‘All right. But … you meant more to me than that. You came to mean more to me.’

‘Did I?’ His voice was cold; he was reminding me that I had hurt him first, however inadvertently.

‘You think I didn’t love you enough,’ I said. ‘You didn’t give me a chance.’

‘It’s too late now; it’s pointless to talk about.’

I turned to face him again. ‘I’ve had my allotment of your attention, right? Now it’s Wara’s turn. How long will you give her?’

He frowned. ‘I love her.’

‘Do you? God help her.’ Suddenly I remembered, and the bitter realisation made me laugh, although there was nothing amusing about the thought. ‘You’ve got just what you want, don’t you? If she loves you, she loves you for life. They don’t play around here on Habille. She wasn’t raised the way you and I were. She’s yours. Forever. She won’t get tired of you; you don’t have to fear losing her. But what happens to her when you feel like moving on? You won’t be able to make out that it’s her fault. You’ll destroy her.’

‘I’m not going to destroy her – I’ll never hurt her,’ he said, hating me. ‘I’ll love her forever.’

They mean something different by “forever” on Habille,’ I said. ‘They may mean something else by love, too. I don’t know, and neither do you. Wara Duleen will take you at your word, as if you were a native. What will she do when you stop loving her?’

He moved away from me, towards the door. ‘I know you’re hurt,’ he said. ‘But you’re wrong. You don’t know anything about me. You think that because I couldn’t love you, I can’t love anyone. I know what love is, now. Habille isn’t the only place where love lasts forever. Long ago, our ancestors—’

‘Told themselves pretty stories about love,’ I said. I shook my head, knowing it was too late. ‘It’s different here. The people here are different. We come of the same stock, but the centuries – and our worlds – have changed us in different ways. You’re not capable of their sort of love anymore than I am – anymore than an antelope is. Sooner or later, your “forever” will come to an end, and you’ll leave her. You’ll do what to her is an utter impossibility, and I don’t know how she’ll cope with it. She may go mad, or kill herself – or kill you. If you leave her, you’ll shake her whole concept of reality.’

‘I won’t leave her,’ he said flatly. By his voice, he might have been swearing a solemn oath. ‘I’m as good as married to her now. Forever.’

Since that night, nearly ten years have passed. I never thought to see Venn again, although I often thought of him – sometimes with regret, sometimes with anger, sometimes with nostalgic warmth.

But last night I saw him.

I had been thinking about him, alone in my hotel room – in one of the better hotels in New Denver – feeling bored and trying to find some occupation for the evening. I learned that a musician from Habille would be performing in the hotel lounge, and the reminder of Habille sent my thoughts flying back to Venn.

I wondered how long he had been content to stay on that dull world with his true love – I wondered how, or if, Wara Duleen had managed to survive his desertion. That he had deserted her I never doubted. I knew Venn – or I had known him – very well; my expectations were realistic, not cynical.

I thought also of Reni Laer, and the emotions I had felt upon hearing his music, and I was suddenly desirous of hearing it again. The name of the musician performing that night had not been given, but I thought it must be Reni Laer. I called in my reservation and began to dress, brooding still on times past.

The hotel lounge was furnished only with a thick, cushiony purple rug; the stage was a cleared circular space in the centre. There were perhaps a hundred people present, sitting or reclining on the floor, filling the room. I gazed around without really looking. I expected to recognise no one. So I let the faces blur together.

Then the room darkened, except for a centre spotlight, and a woman stepped into the circle of light.

A woman – at first I was disappointed, thinking of Reni Laer. Then I recognised Wara Duleen.

I had seen her only twice, and that ten years ago, and the years had not been kind to her. But I knew her. She was still beautiful, although her formerly creamy complexion was rougher and darker now, and her face was thinner. She wore a long, dark-green dress and a somber expression, and she carried a bone flute.

That startled me. I’d had the impression that she played a different instrument, something with strings.

Wara Duleen stood still and quiet in her circle of light. She gazed straight ahead but seemed unaware that she had an audience. Then, without preamble, she raised the white flute to her lips and began.

Only twice before in my life had I heard music which affected me so strongly, so physically. This music weakened me; I felt as if some giant rough hand had touched me. I felt utterly alone in the world, abandoned, betrayed, bruised by fate. It was a pain beyond tears, beyond words.

And then it stopped. The room was silent; all of us, I think, too stunned to respond.

Wara Duleen put her flute to her lips again and played.

This time, she soothed us. I closed my eyes. There was pain and longing in the music, but it was bearable. The music moved through me with the promise of comfort. People died and could not be brought back, but still the world went on. Still there was life, was music, was caring and warmth and memory. I felt lonely but strong.

There was a slight stirring when the song ended, then a hesitant smattering, then a torrent of applause. Wara Duleen stood in her circle of light, untouched by it, and when it had passed, she gave us more of her incomparable music.

I don’t know how long she gave herself to us, only that one moment there was music, and the next there was not, and she was bowing and walking away from the light. A man in the uniform of the hotel announced a reception in half an hour in the same room, an opportunity for all of us to meet the artist Wara Duleen.

We needed that half-hour interval to leave the realm of music and return to ordinary life. We all sat blinking and dazed in the dim room. Gradually, the lights increased and the carpeting beneath us began to change form, becoming less comfortable and encouraging us to get to our feet. A platoon of uniformed waiters entered the room with trays of drinks, and their arrival started the well-known party responses, the growing buzz of conversation, the slow movement about the room, the clustering and laughing and drinking. As I looked around for someone to engage in conversation, my attention was caught by a much too familiar face.

‘Venn?’ I said wonderingly. It couldn’t be Venn, I thought – he looked too much the same. Ten years had not changed him a bit.

His eyes came up – he had been staring broodingly at the floor – and focused on me. Blankness, and then recognition lit his eyes, and he called my name and stepped forward, smiling at me.

‘Venn, I don’t believe it! To see you again! What are you doing here?’

But even as I spoke, I made the connection. He was still with her, then. I had been wrong in imagining I knew him so well. I felt a pang – one part hope, three parts jealousy. Quickly, so he wouldn’t know what I had wrongly assumed, I said, ‘How are you and Wara these days?’

I knew that hurt, faintly disbelieving look that appeared on his face. ‘She doesn’t see me,’ he said. ‘She won’t forgive me.’

‘You left her.’

He frowned and fidgeted slightly. ‘Yes. Didn’t you predict it? We were very happy at first, but things … fell apart. And I couldn’t bear life on Habille. I couldn’t work. Such a dull place. And her music meant more to her than I did.’ He stopped abruptly, unable to meet my eyes.

‘But you’re here now,’ I prompted.

He nodded and met my gaze again. ‘I shouldn’t have left her. Nothing was ever the same afterwards. I went away, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I wrote to her and told her I was sorry and wanted to see her again, but she never replied. I couldn’t afford passage back to her, but she could have sent me the money – she was doing well by then. It’s almost as if my leaving made it possible for her – I’ve waited for the chance to see her again. She’ll have to listen to me tonight.’

I felt faintly sick. Listening to his self-righteous tone, I found it amazing that I had ever thought myself in love with him. I wondered if it was Wara’s success which had drawn him back. I did not think he had found any success for himself. Perhaps he found it harder to keep his lovers interested, too.

‘Why force yourself on her?’ I said. ‘If she can’t face you, or doesn’t want to be reminded of you, why torture her? She’s had to adjust as best she could—’

‘I love her!’ He stared at me, outraged. ‘I want another chance. She was supposed to love me forever – she must still love me.’

‘Perhaps she does,’ I said, keeping my voice low. ‘But what of it? When you left her, you forfeited that. She’s had to deal with the fact that you went away – an unthought of event on Habille. You should know better than I – you lived there, among those people. If she’s managed to make a life for herself without you, let her keep it. Don’t force her to see you.’

The rhythms of conversation around us had altered. I looked around, away from Venn’s refusal to believe in any pain beyond his own, and saw that Wara Duleen had appeared in the doorway. I glanced at Venn and saw that he was staring at her intently, as if willing her to look his way. I wanted no more part of his uncomprehending cruelty, and I walked away without another word.

Wara Duleen stepped into the crowded room wearing a faint, shy smile, and that expression suddenly made her more human and accessible. Her music might be miraculous, but she herself was not.

I noticed that she wore her strange white flute on a silken cord around her neck, so that it lay against her chest. Was it bone, I wondered – was it like Reni Laer’s flute? Moving slowly within the constantly shifting crowd, I gradually drew near enough to hear her speak.

‘Thank you,’ she said again and again in response to the half-articulated praise rising from those around her. ‘Thank you. But the credit must go as much to Venn, my … flute.’ Her slender fingers caressed the white bone, stark against her green dress.

I stopped short at the name. ‘Your husband?’ I said. I had not meant to speak to her, but only to get away before Venn made his scene.

She turned her head swiftly and her eyes took me in. ‘You are from Habille?’

I saw no recognition in her eyes. I shook my head. ‘I’ve been there. I thought your flute was made of bone.’

Her fingers curled protectively around the flute, and she nodded. ‘A part of my late husband,’ she said. ‘The physical reminder of him. His spirit lives on in the music we make together. He was a musician, too.’

The conviction in her voice made me look around, almost thinking I had imagined Venn. But there he stood, still staring intently at the woman who had been his wife. I looked back at Wara Duleen and wondered if her world would survive if she was brought face to face with Venn. Would she accept him as a miracle, returned from the grave? Or would she simply refuse to recognise him?

The crowd carried her away as I stood reflecting; it carried her towards Venn. After a moment of indecision, I followed. She had adjusted reality to cope with the unimaginable, I thought. Perhaps that made her mad, but, if so, it was a magnificent – even enviable – madness, certainly preferable to Venn’s sullen persistence.

I saw Venn approach her; I heard him call her name. It was obvious that she did not hear him, but a movement within the group around her suddenly brought her face to face with him. She looked straight at him and did not see him – I was certain she did not see him.

‘Wara,’ he said gently and smiled his most appealing smile.

Wara Duleen touched the bone that lay on her chest, a thoughtful, faraway expression on her face, and stepped forward.

Venn stood still, directly in her path, still smiling, apparently certain that she saw him. But she did not see him. She continued to walk forward. And when she should have run full into him, she did not. She walked straight through him. He became as unsubstantial as a vapour, less than a ghost, as her body passed through his. She shivered slightly, as if some cold memory from the past had brushed her mind, but she did not stop or look back.

And then, behind her now, Venn was standing there again. He turned, frowning, to look after her, unable to comprehend how she had passed him when neither he nor she had stepped aside.

Then, unable to give up, not realising he was dead, Venn trailed plaintively after her, waiting for another chance.

A SPACESHIP BUILT OF STONE

I came upon a vast and ruined city in the desert. Long ago, huge building blocks had been hewn from rock, cut to fit together so tightly that mortar was unnecessary. It was a city not of straight lines, but of rounded corners and circular enclosures, walls towering twice a man’s height. It seemed immense and harshly white against the blue sky and emptiness of the desert.

I entered by an arching gateway and walked through narrow, winding streets, touching the sun-baked stone with my hands. Here and there signs had been incised in the rock. I traced one with my finger: a cup-shaped maze with a stylised symbol, a rising bird, at the centre.

The city must have been abandoned centuries before. Everything was open to the sky, all roofs long since rotted away. The sand had drifted in to cover the cobblestone streets. But the emptiness of the city, although it seemed sad, was not oppressive. I felt comfortable there, at home, as if I had returned to a place familiar since childhood. I patiently followed the curving lanes and entered each abandoned building in turn, looking for something.

At last I found it. There was a large, semi-circular enclosure at the very centre of the city. Inside, a hole cut into the earth. Without hesitation, I lowered myself into it, my dangling feet finding purchase on a stairway carved into the rock. The stairs were steep, forcing me into a rapid descent. It was more a ladder than a staircase.

I climbed for what seemed a very long time, the darkness growing deeper around me as I descended. But just as I was wondering how long I could continue to climb down to an unknown destination in total darkness, a dim light from some source further down began to reach me, and when I reached the bottom at last I could see perfectly well. I was in a small stone alcove. Behind me were the stairs to the surface; ahead of me, three branching tunnels. I chose the well-lit central tunnel. As I walked, I looked around at the curving, featureless walls and ceiling which apparently gave off light. After I had walked for a long time, I began to hear a sound ahead of me, a soft, irregular noise which I thought might be people talking.

At last I came to another branching, and an archway, which led into a room filled with people. They stopped talking when I entered, and looked at me with some apprehension.

They were familiar to me – I knew they were the people who had built the city above. They looked enough alike to be members of one family, with their unusual yellow-brown skin, wide round eyes, thin noses and thick black hair.

A woman detached herself from the crowd and stepped forward. Her eyes were intent upon my face; I had the idea that she knew me very well, was even perhaps in love with me.

‘Rick!’ she said. ‘You came back! Tell us, is it safe? Can we come out now? Will they let us live in peace?’

My earlier confusion dropped away. I had been here many times before, and knew these people well. They were not my own folk, but I loved them and had agreed to help them. How had I forgotten?

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell them that it was safe now, and I would help them settle above ground; and then the alarm went off.

Groggy and fumbling in the dark, I stopped it, then sat up, switched on the light, and reached for my cigarettes. I felt disoriented and confused. Unlike most of my dreams, this one had the force of reality, of some remembered event. Had I dreamed of those people and underground tunnels before, or had my memory in the dream been nothing more than the dream of a dream?

I found notebook and pen and began to write down the details before they could slip away from me. I’d had bad luck with dreams, lately, waking every morning to find them gone, which was why I’d set my alarm to wake me up in the middle of the night. Describing the city in the desert, I wondered where I had seen it. I didn’t usually dream about places I’d never been, and I wondered if, perhaps, as a child I had been taken to some stone ruins in a desert somewhere.

And the dream left me in an oddly vulnerable state. My last thoughts, as I settled down to sleep again, were that I must hurry back, find the city and the people who hid beneath it, to offer them my help.

But by morning I had nearly forgotten the dream – I remembered only the waking and writing something down. I added the notebook to my stack of books and went outside to catch a university shuttle-bus a little before noon. On the bus I saw a pretty, dark-haired girl I’d noticed before, and sat down next to her. She was an art student – her sketchpad open on her knee. On the paper, growing beneath her pencil, was a familiar design: a cup-shaped maze with a stylised bird rising from the centre.

I stared at the drawing, aware only that it was a familiar symbol, when suddenly, with shocking vividness – as if it were a memory of something real and not just a dream – I saw again the white stone wall with the very same design incised on it. I had traced it with my finger in my dream.

‘What are you drawing?’ I asked.

She looked up, seemed to recognise me from other bus rides, and smiled. ‘This? I’m just doodling.’

‘But what is that design? Where is it from?’

She laughed. ‘It’s from my head! I just made it up.’

I was startled. ‘Are you sure? Couldn’t you have seen it somewhere before?’

‘Yes, I suppose.’ She frowned, then her face cleared. ‘I don’t remember. But, anyway, it was in a dream I had last night.’ She laughed again, a warm, delighted chuckle. ‘Don’t look so amazed! Don’t you ever get ideas from dreams?’

‘All the time,’ I said dryly. ‘In fact, that’s the reason I asked you about that design. It was in my dream last night.’ I tapped the notebook in my lap. ‘I wrote it down here. I woke myself up at 3.30, on purpose to catch a dream – part of an experiment for a class I teach.’

Her brown eyes were very wide – she seemed to accept what I said without question. ‘How strange,’ she murmured. ‘Three-thirty …’ She looked down at her sketchpad and began to draw an elaborate frame around the maze design. ‘You see, I probably wouldn’t have remembered this dream at all; but Bogey – that’s my dog – decided he had to go outside, and woke me up at about 3.30. So while I was up, waiting to let him back in, I sat and doodled in my sketch-book while I thought about my dream.’ She lifted the spiral-bound pad and flipped back a few pages, holding out one for my inspection.

A line of stone blocks, a wall. The maze-with-bird pattern again. A stone gateway. And faces – faces that I recognised. The people from my dream.

I felt strange, my pulse speeded up. ‘Looks like my dream,’ I said quietly.

‘I was in the desert somewhere,’ she said. ‘And there was this ancient city there, which was supposed to have been abandoned; but the people who had built it had actually fled below ground and were hiding there. They were very gentle and peaceful and afraid that they would be killed if they came out. They were a wonderful people – I loved them, and was trying to help them. They kept asking me if it was really all right to come out, and I kept telling them that everyone would love them as I did. And then Bogey woke me.’

I opened my notebook to the dream and handed it to her without a word. While she read I gazed past her, out the window at the sunny, familiar neighbourhood streets the bus was roaring through. The familiar had suddenly become strange, the strange familiar. The world was different – I couldn’t tell if it were tinged with promise or with menace.

‘Telepathy,’ said a clear voice at my side.

I looked at her and shook her head. ‘But why? You and I don’t even know each other – why should we be linked like that?’

She looked straight into my eyes. ‘Karma,’ she said. ‘We were meant to meet.’

I laughed at her words, but I liked her look. I even liked the idea that we were somehow linked, that something had drawn us together, although it was a silly idea.

‘A very scientific suggestion,’ I said, teasing her. ‘You want to have dinner with me tonight and talk about it some more?’

‘Sure.’

Through the window, I could see the tower lurching into view. I would have to get off at the next stop. ‘Meet me at Hansel and Gretel’s at 6.30?’ I suggested, gathering my books together.

She gave me another one of those high-voltage looks. ‘I’ll be there.’

It wasn’t until I had got off the bus that I realised I didn’t know her name.

But I didn’t expect she would stand me up – not after such an opening. I walked up the grassy mall towards the building where I was teaching a workshop in journal writing. Most graduate assistants get saddled with the dullest of introductory courses, and I considered myself lucky this semester to have got something a little out of the ordinary – no matter that I thought it a self-indulgent and unnecessary course.

I paused on the steps outside to smoke a cigarette. I was really trying to get my mind on the class I had to teach, when all I wanted to think about was the dream – my dream, her dream – and what it meant. When I finally went inside, and down to the large, blank-walled basement classroom where we met, my class of ten had assembled.

I perched, as usual, on the old wooden desk at the front of the room, and looked at them. ‘Any of you have trouble catching a dream?’ I asked.

Of the ten, it turned out, only five had dreams to report. One had slept through the alarm, another had simply forgotten the assignment; the other three were the most chagrined. They had ignored my suggestion for setting alarms for the middle of the night as unnecessary – they claimed to dream vividly and to remember what they dreamed. But this morning had been unusual. They had remembered no dreams.

I nodded thoughtfully, feeling myself slip into the psychiatrist role this class seemed to reserve for me.

‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, enjoying myself, ‘you dreamed of things you would be too embarrassed to discuss before the whole class? So your unconscious thoughtfully censored them from your conscious? Well, try again tonight. We’ll just move on to some of the dreams which were recalled. Anyone like to start?’

Eve Johnson flicked one impeccably manicured hand in the air and, at my nod, began to speak, referring only occasionally to her notebook.

‘The dream began at a frat party, which was pretty dull. But then some friends of mine started talking about driving to California, right then. This actually happened to me once – some friends decided to drive to California on the spur of the moment. Anyway, in the dream, all of a sudden it switched to us on the road, travelling through the desert, some place like New Mexico. We got off the highway onto a dirt road for some reason and drove through all this emptiness for a while. Then, all of a sudden, right in front of us was this huge, stone city. It was built of big white stones, and I found myself remembering, as I looked at it, that the people who had built it had been afraid that the government or somebody would kill them, so they had gone into hiding underground. Then – what’s wrong?’

Only then did I realise that I had got off the desk and walked towards her.

‘Uh, could I see the notebook, please?’

Eyebrows raised, she put the notebook into my hand. My eyes ran down the lines of neat, even handwriting, reading about her discovery of the tunnels and meeting with the people who lived beneath the city-ruin.

I looked around at the others, some of whom looked puzzled, others of whom looked oddly excited. I said, ‘Something strange has happened. This dream of Eve’s is remarkably similar to the dream I had last night …’

‘Me too!’

‘I dreamed the same thing!’

Pat Haggard and Bill Donaldson had spoken almost simultaneously. Now they looked from me to each other, their expressions mixtures of wonder, curiosity and suspicion.

‘Anyone else?’ I asked. I realised I was probably grinning foolishly. ‘Did anyone else have a dream with the same elements – the abandoned stone city in the desert, the tunnels underground, the people there afraid to come up?’

Slowly, Mary Crouch raised her hand. ‘I dreamed something like that, I think,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember much about it. Just that I had been talking to these wonderful people, some sort of advanced, peaceful tribe, who seemed to live near some huge stone ruins.’

I nodded slowly. ‘Pat, Bill … would each of you please read your dream reports?’

All the elements were there; all the inexplicable similarities. The same dream, dreamed by six different people. At least.

We spent the rest of class-time talking about the dreams and what this bizarre coincidence could mean. We discussed telepathy and precognition – one of the liveliest, most exciting, most wonder-filled classroom discussions I’d ever imagined. But of course we proved nothing and came up with no real answers. When the bell rang we were all frustratingly aware of how little we knew. My students all promised to continue recording their dreams and eagerly offered to do any other research I might suggest.

When they all left, I walked across campus to the library to start the research. I had decided first of all to try to find out if the place we had all been dreaming of had any objective reality.

I paged through volumes of anthropology, archaeology and travel, but did not find the city I thought I knew in Anatolian ruins, nor in Greece, nor Peru, nor in the monolithic structures on Malta, nor in the Arabian desert. Because two dreamers had mentioned New Mexico, I turned next to books about the southwest. There I found the stone and baked-earth structures of the Pueblo Indians, the hogans of the Navajo, and the legends of the Seven Cities of Cibola. The Pueblos believed their ancestors entered the present world from a hole in the ground, climbing up from a world below. I took notes, but I found no answers.

*

She was waiting at the restaurant when I arrived, even prettier and taller than I’d remembered, looking like a 1940s film star in a vintage black dress and lots of cheerfully fake diamonds, spike heels and an upswept hairdo.

‘I’ve got so much to tell you,’ she said at once, rushing to meet me.

I took her hand. ‘How about your name?’

We both laughed.

‘I’m Judy Anderson.’

‘Rick Karp.’

We shook hands, and that made us laugh again.

‘You look great,’ I said. ‘I’m such a slob … I knew I should have rented a tux.’

‘No, no, that shirt is lovely.’ She reached out to pluck at the fabric. ‘In fact, I have one just like it at home, only the azaleas on it are a little smaller, and a brighter pink.’

‘It faded some between Hawaii and here,’ I said.

We took a booth near the back and I ordered a pitcher of dark beer and a plate of cheese and bread to start.

Judy leaned across the table. ‘In my design class this morning we were told to create a symbol for a made-up company. A pictograph, right? And one of the women in class drew a picture of a maze with a bird rising from the centre, for a company she called “Anasazi Airlines”.’

I frowned in surprised recognition.

‘So I asked her where she got the idea, and she said it had just come to her. Then the teacher overheard us and said, in his usual supercilious way, “Give credit where credit is due, please. The Anasazi Indians came up with that design more than a thousand years ago”.’

‘The Anasazi Indians,’ I said, remembering what I had read about them that afternoon. ‘They were the ancestors of the present pueblo-dwelling Indians – the Hopis, the Zunis, the Pueblos. The Anasazi culture spread all across the southwest. The word “Anasazi” is Navajo, meaning “ancient ones”.’

She pouted. ‘And I thought I’d surprise you by doing a lot of research! But you know, I went through practically the whole art library and couldn’t find that bird-in-the-maze design. I figured if my teacher knew about it, it must be pretty common. Were we dreaming about the Anasazi, then?’

‘Courtesy of the Anasazi Broadcasting Company?’ I told her about what had happened in class that day and watched her eyes grow larger. I patted her hand. ‘So you see, it wasn’t karma bringing us together, after all.’

‘Maybe it’s your dream, and you’re sending it to receptive people?’

I shook my head. ‘It sure doesn’t feel like “my” dream. But even if that explained the people in my class – why would you have picked it up?’

She looked at me through her lashes. ‘Maybe I noticed you on the bus before … maybe I was thinking about you … maybe I’m just very receptive to your thoughts.’

I grinned. ‘And the woman in your design class?’

‘Oh. Coincidence.’

‘I think coincidence is one thing it’s not. There’s something going on—’

‘Rick. Maybe everyone had the dream. And only a few people remembered it – the people who woke up in the middle of it, like you and me.’

For some reason that idea made my skin prickle. ‘We have no evidence for that.’

‘No, and if they’ve been made to forget it, we never will have.’

I was silent, wild thoughts of a nation-wide – worldwide – survey on dreams racing through my head. ‘But what would that mean?’ I asked. ‘Assuming that were true – why would everyone have the same dream? Is someone sending it? Why? And if there is some reason for everyone to dream the same thing – why would the majority forget it? What could that accomplish?’

‘People are influenced by things they can’t remember consciously,’ Judy reminded me.

‘Yes, but … why? No, that world-wide theory doesn’t make sense. It’s more reasonable to assume that you and I and the woman in your design class and the people in my class are members of a group who are somehow telepathically linked, or receptive to … oh, each other, or one particular person. And this has happened before, and will surely happen again.’

Judy grinned at me. ‘I try to tell you we’re linked, and you sneer at me. Your theory is just karma under another name.’

We talked of little else during dinner – our speculation ranged and soared – but there was more going on beneath the talk. She went home with me that night.

During the next two weeks Judy and I and the people in my class all kept dream-notebooks. But there were no further ‘coincidences’ – all the dreams were idiosyncratic, personal, individual dreams. I began working on a report to send to the Maimonides dream laboratory in New York. Judy and I spent more and more time together.

One night, Judy and I lay cozily together in my bed, paying little attention to the newscast carried on the little black and white set at the foot of the bed, when something alerted us.

Judy half sat up. ‘What was that—’

One word caught us from the televised babble: ‘Anasazi.’

A well-dressed reporter was standing in a windy desert with a man dressed in grimy jeans and a pith helmet. The camera panned back to reveal an excavation in progress.

‘And who, exactly, were the Anasazi?’ said the reporter.

The other man, identified in a title across the screen as Dr Reuben Collier, UCLA, wiped his brow. ‘They were the precursors of today’s Pueblo, Hopi and Zuni tribes. We had never imagined that we would find anything as complex as this. We have right here in New Mexico uncovered an amazingly large, well-designed city built of stone and adobe. Many of the buildings were constructed with connecting underground tunnels. Hacking out those tunnels must have been a prodigious feat in itself. I’d say this rivals almost anything in the ancient world.’

‘Astonishing,’ said the reporter. ‘But you say this was unexpected? No one had any idea this city was here?’

‘We didn’t realise the Anasazi culture had ever attained such a height,’ the archaeologist said. ‘Of course, this find raises the new question of what happened to that culture, how it fell. But by calling this the work of the “Anasazi”, we are simplifying, you realise—’

‘How did you find this site, Dr Collier?’

He grimaced. ‘Most unscientifically, I’m afraid. I had a grant to do work in this area, of course, and was working on aerial photographs for some indication of what lay below the surface. But why we picked this particular spot to dig – well, quite truthfully, it came to me in a dream.’

‘Many archaeologists dream of great finds; Reuben Collier’s dream came true,’ said the reporter, turning his handsome visage back to the camera. ‘Steve Carpenter reporting.’

My chest was tight. I realised I hadn’t been breathing, and let out my breath with a sigh.

‘Well, so that’s it,’ Judy said. ‘He was the one the message was for.’ She sounded remarkably satisfied.

I stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The dreams. They didn’t mean anything to us – but they did to him.’

‘Well, yes, but so what? What are you saying?’

‘That getting someone to dig up the city was the point of the dream.’

‘And who was it who wanted that particular task done, may I ask? A bunch of dead Indians?’

She chewed her lower lip. ‘Well, I don’t know. But now that the city has been discovered, the dreams seem to make a little more sense, don’t they?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. I was thinking about getting in touch with Collier and wondering if anyone else who’d had the dream might have seen him on television and decide to do the same.

‘Look,’ said Judy. ‘If the dream had a point – if it was supposed to have an effect on someone – that could be it. Maybe it was beamed out; and a lot of people picked up on it, like us; but only a few would be in any position to do anything about it – like that anthropologist. The dream meant something to him, and he could do something about it.’

I shook my head, annoyed because what she seemed to think was an answer was no answer at all. ‘Where did the dreams come from? Who beamed them out? Who could possibly want that city discovered yet have no way of ensuring that discovery except by giving people dreams?’

‘Well I don’t know,’ she said, sounding aggrieved. ‘I didn’t ever say I had the answer – I was just making a suggestion.’

So then, of course, I had to kiss her and tell her that her suggestion was a good one – as good as any other. And it probably was – but it still didn’t make sense.

The discovery in the New Mexico desert had to be the biggest archaeological find of all time. It caused more excitement than King Tut’s tomb ever had, and suddenly the whole country was Anasazi-crazy. Everywhere you looked there were the headlines, the magazine articles and books, television specials and commercials. Stores carried Anasazi toys, games and postcards. One day Judy showed up in a sundress covered with the bird-in-a-maze design.

It was a flood, a bombardment. Everyone knew about and talked about the Anasazi. We all dreamed about them. It would have been odd, given the sea of information we all swam in, not to have dreamed about them. In the dreams – in my dreams and Judy’s, at any rate – the Anasazi were always the gentle, wise and peaceful people of that first dream, only emerged now from their tunnels. Even that original dream, shared by an unknown number, no longer seemed so odd to me. We were all so obsessed with the Anasazi now that it was as if the force of the present had been pressing against our unconscious minds then, demanding to be recognised: the Anasazi knocking to be let in, calling with ghostly voices for remembrance.

I had a recurring vision, during this time, of a crowd of the Anasazi emerging from the earth. They climbed up narrow stone steps and emerged from the tunnels into the open air, one by one, in starlight and daylight, unending. One by one they come, the line behind them going back forever, and each, to my foreign eyes, looks like the other. Their faces are watchful, thankful, wary. Are we home yet? they seem to ask. Will we be safe here?

Not exactly a dream – not at all like my other dreams about the Anasazi – but just a fleeting thought, an image that recurred to me, disturbing me.

Because the Anasazi had suddenly emerged; had come out when no one was looking. And everyone – except me – seemed content to believe their eyes instead of their memories and accept the common knowledge that they had always been among us.

I saw them everywhere. A woman with that distinctively Anasazi face would be sitting quietly on a city bus, or pushing a cart through a grocery store. I would see an Anasazi man, holding two small Anasazi children by their hands, crossing at the light. Faces in crowds, on the evening news, passing in cars. They had arrived quietly, without fuss, and integrated themselves into society as if they had always been here.

Even to myself this seemed an odd obsession – where, then, had they come from if they had not always been among us? – and so I tried not to think about it, and did not discuss it. I was under a lot of strain, trying to get my dissertation written and adjusting to life with Judy – at the beginning of the summer we took a house together, and talked of marriage ‘eventually’.

At the end of the summer I emerged from my stupor of research and writing to discover that the Anasazi had united to ask for their city (baptised, naturally, ‘Cibola’, months before) and surrounding lands to be turned over to them. They asked to reclaim their homeland.

Indian groups had asked for Florida and New York, as well as other chunks of property before, so there was nothing so unusual in the request. What was unusual was the response. Sentiment ran high in favour of giving the Indians their home back. Senators and Representatives spoke in favour of it. Even the President …

It all seemed to happen with amazing speed as we read about it in the papers and watched it on our television screen. One hot day in September, Judy and I were ensconced in the bedroom, the window-unit labouring mightily to cool the air, eating Chinese food from cardboard cartons and paying feeble attention to the images flickering across the screen at the foot of the bed when the President made his special appearance and deeded Cibola and surrounding lands to the Anasazi tribe. Just like that.

Judy gave a small cheer. I sat up, set my carton of food aside, and turned off the set.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘Where did the Anasazi come from?’ I asked. ‘Who are they? Two years ago, nobody but professors and archaeologists had heard of them. Now they suddenly have not only a history, but a present and a future – and their own homeland.’

She stared at me. ‘I thought you agreed that the Indians—’

I held up one hand, cutting her off. ‘I’m not talking about the Indians. I’m talking about … these people who are called Anasazi. Where did they come from all of a sudden? Remember the research we did? The Anasazi culture died out long ago – their descendants are called the Pueblo, Zuni and Hopi. Nowhere in any of those books was there a mention of a modern-day Anasazi tribe – yet there are suddenly thousands of them!’

‘Oh, books,’ she said, with fine scorn. ‘What are you going to believe, Rick – what some old book tells you, or what you know, what your senses tell you?’

‘What do I know? I know that since the dreams, and the discovery of Cibola, I’ve seen the Anasazi, and read about them, everywhere. Not before then. Before, they weren’t here.’

‘Of course they were here! We just weren’t aware of them!’

‘That’s what they want us to think,’ I said. I paused, steeling myself to say aloud what I felt. It was a crazy idea – I knew that as well as anyone – but it haunted me nevertheless, unforgettable as a recurring dream; and I was tired of keeping it to myself.

‘All right,’ I said after a few moments. ‘I’m not asking you to believe this, just to listen and consider it. Suppose that somewhere, maybe on another planet, was a race of beings who either looked like us, or could alter themselves to look like us. And something happens, maybe their planet is about to be destroyed, and they need a new place to live. A planet like this one.’ Plots of many old movies, comic books and paperbacks avidly consumed in adolescence raced through my mind. ‘But they aren’t aggressive – they’re a peaceful people, unwilling to hurt or frighten the primitive Earth-people. All they need, after all, is a base, room for a colony of maybe a hundred thousand people.

‘They could be quite advanced, although they don’t use their technology for war. They send advance propaganda in the form of dreams, so that we meet our new neighbours at night, in the most intimate circumstances, and absorb the lessons with no conscious memory later … everyone loves them, without knowing why. Everyone is accustomed to the idea of them, sure they’ve always been around when they finally do arrive, and accept them as the indigenous people whose name they use.’

‘You’re saying the Anasazi came from outer space in UFOs?’ Judy asked blandly.

‘Maybe not in the way our popular culture has prepared us for,’ I said. ‘Instead of arriving here in bright silver ships with flashing lights, they came in the back way, climbing out of a hole in the ground. They stepped through some interdimensional doorway, bringing their city of underground tunnels and above-ground structures – they came in their spaceship made of stone, and no one noticed.’

‘Except you,’ said Judy, ‘Oh, Rick.’ Her face was distressed; she looked as if she was going to cry.

‘You think I’m crazy,’ I said. ‘Just because I wonder where the Anasazi really came from.’

‘If I woke up some morning and began asking you, in a very worried way, where all those brown-skinned people with Spanish surnames came from all of a sudden, and wouldn’t believe you when you told me they hadn’t suddenly invaded us, but had been around all the time – you’d think I was paranoid, wouldn’t you?’

‘I’d think you were putting me on,’ I said. I shrugged. ‘I don’t begrudge them their desert city – they built it, after all, and nobody was using that land. But I don’t like thinking that they’ve tampered with our memories and made us love them. Even while I’m saying this, Judy, part of me is protesting that this is crazy-talk, that I know who the Anasazi are, as well as anyone! And I can’t help feeling warmth for them. But I also know what I’ve read, and I think it’s very suspicious that nothing written before the discovery of Cibola refers to Anasazi as if it were anything more than the name of a long-vanished culture. There is no reference to a present-day tribe by that name. It’s as if … when the Hittite civilisation was rediscovered by the archaeologists and historians, suddenly a group of people appeared, calling themselves the Hittites, saying they had been there all along, despite any references to them in any book or—’

‘Rick,’ said Judy, looking at me with tender sadness. ‘Oh, Rick, and you think my theories are crazy!’

‘It’s not a theory,’ I said. ‘It’s just a story.’ I was annoyed, with myself as well as her. I didn’t want to convert her, or even convince myself. I wanted to reconcile the two kinds of ‘knowledge’ I had about the Anasazi. I wanted to understand what had happened. I didn’t want to be right, but I didn’t want to be crazy, either.

‘You think too much about books,’ Judy said. ‘After all the work you’ve done on your dissertation, it’s no wonder. But plenty of things are real which aren’t in books. I’m not in any book, and neither are you – except the phone book – and we’re both real.’

I didn’t argue anymore. I didn’t want to. We smoked and talked about other things. I didn’t forget my uneasiness about the Anasazi, but I tried not to torment myself about it, either. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do to prove my fantasy had some foundation.

*

Two years later, we went to Cibola on our honeymoon.

Odd, to see a dream made solid.

This Cibola was different, of course. It had been fixed up, repaired and inhabited. There were domed roofs on the round stone structures now, wooden doors, flowers and herbs growing in window boxes.

The stones were still brilliantly white against the blue sky, just as they had been in my dream; but as we wandered through the maze of cobbled streets the smells of people, animals and frying food, and the sounds of tourists and Anasazi bartering over jewellery and woven blankets added the hard, undreamlike edge that was reality.

I reached out to touch the dressed stone blocks, so carefully fitted together. My fingers encountered the smoothly incised lines of a maze-design; and I traced it with a finger – again? or for the first time?

There was a guide, pointing out sights of interest and explaining Anasazi customs. He led us with unerring instinct to the shops and stalls where Judy was most likely to buy. While she was comparing the merits of two silver bracelets, I asked the guide about the tunnels.

‘Tunnels?’

‘Yes, when Cibola was discovered I remember it was mentioned that underground tunnels connected the buildings.’

‘Ah.’ His face told me nothing. ‘There isn’t much to see. But of course it will be out of the sun, and perhaps you would like that?’ He led us off in a new direction.

But this tunnel was nothing like the cool, wide, well-lit artery of my dream. It was narrow and dark and we had to crouch slightly as we travelled along. My back soon began to hurt. After a few minutes of unrewarding exploration we climbed up a short wooden ladder and emerged in a candle-shop.

‘Is that all?’ I asked. ‘What about the other tunnels?’

‘There are more. Cramped little passage ways leading from one house to another – perhaps twenty in all, but none of them any longer than the one I just showed you.’

I could feel Judy’s eyes on me, and knew that she knew what I was thinking. I persisted. ‘Bigger tunnels,’ I said. ‘Wider, deeper below the ground, well-lit, with underground chambers where people could live.’

‘Nothing like that here,’ he said, shaking his head.

I was suddenly impatient with him. ‘And if there were, and you didn’t want us to see them, you’d say the same thing. Why do we need a guide at all here? What are you protecting?’

Judy took my arm. ‘Rick …’

‘You are a guest here,’ the guide said, very quietly. ‘You must obey our rules, or leave. This is a reservation, which is to say a separate country.’

‘An alien outpost,’ I said. I was sweating, suddenly aware of how hot it was. ‘And we gave it to you. We accepted you and gave you a place to live, just as you wanted. And it’s too late to change our minds now. Come on, Judy, we’re going.’

It wasn’t the greatest honeymoon in history. Judy’s initial anger over my making a fool of myself and spoiling the trip soon turned to concern for my mental health when I began expressing the opinion that I would not be allowed to live very much longer, now that I had revealed my suspicions of the Anasazi.

But, of course, nothing happened. And eventually, to Judy’s relief, I stopped talking about my paranoid fantasies. They might be true, or they might be crazy, but in either case they didn’t do me, or anyone else, any good.

And so, for almost three years, I had no reason to remember my doubts. Until very recently.

Bogey woke up in the middle of the night about two weeks ago, desperate to go outside. Judy went back to sleep after a sleepy argument over whose responsibility the dog was; and I got up to take him out, musing meanwhile on the dream he had interrupted. It had been an odd and vivid dream – and it reminded me of something I could not quite catch hold of. While waiting for Bogey to be ready to come back inside, I picked up one of Judy’s sketchpads, and a pen, and began jotting down notes of what I remembered.

I was in the jungle, a tropical rain forest on the side of a mountain. I began to notice a faint trail that told me someone else had been here before me, and, at the same time, became aware of an odd, soft, whispering sound. I stopped still and looked around carefully, and then I saw them.

People, their faces shy and frightened, peeking at me from hiding places among the trees and underbrush. I knew that it would require a great deal of care and patience on my part to get them to come out. And I wanted them to – I wanted them to trust me. I felt an overwhelming surge of affection for these people I could barely see, and the urge to protect them, to offer them shelter and safety. As I tried to think how to let them know this, Bogey’s cold, insistent nose in my ear woke me.

As I sat there, sleepily staring at what I had written, I suddenly knew what this dream reminded me of. Another dream. I hurried back to the bedroom and woke Judy.

‘Judy,’ I said urgently, trying to break through her sleepy incomprehension. ‘What were you dreaming? Quick, tell me.’

‘Hmmm? Tell them … tell them we love them. They’re safe here.’

She was dropping off again. I shook her. ‘Judy! Please! Wake up.’

She opened her eyes and sat up. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘What were you dreaming?’

‘Huh?’ She rubbed her eyes and yawned. ‘I don’t know … something. I was in the forest. With friends. What’s the matter, honey?’

‘Go back to sleep,’ I said. ‘I’ll let Bogey back in. We’ll talk in the morning.’

She made a face and grumbled at me, but was asleep again almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.

Since then, I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. And today my waiting ended. It wasn’t on the evening news. It was just a story on an inside page of the paper – so many other important things happened today, it seems. A report from the Philippines on the discovery of a group of people who may be a tribe previously unknown to civilisation, living in mountain caves in an almost inaccessible rain forest. A shy and gentle people, who only want to be allowed to live in peace. I know just what they look like.

THE CURE

I sit here, day after day, turning my life into language. Books by other writers line the walls, and on either side of me, on the desk, my own writing accumulates: unfinished articles, abandoned letters, the bony skeleton of a novel, beginnings without ends. The typewriter hums as I test words against each other, listening to their click, piling them up, a swaying tower of sentences, paragraphs, pages. The air of the room is thick and murky with words.

Beyond the glass, a gleam. Your golden hair lures me to the window and I see you, a solitary woman standing beside a sorrel mare. You are both so still, you are in another world. A world beyond words. More than glass shuts me out.

At the far end of the paddock the child, his hair a paler gold than yours, is walking, head down, hunting for some special weed or rock to add to his hoard of treasures.

He glances up and for a moment you are both frozen, caught in that moment as if to give me time to examine and describe you. Then he grins, the picture shifts and becomes life, and you are running, you catch him in your arms and raise him to the clear, blue, empty sky.

Behind me the typewriter growls: great, grey, mechanical beast. The one I tell all my secrets to, my only true friend. Waiting for my next failure, my latest attempt to pin you to the page.

Words are magic – I’ve always believed that. Things become real once they are said. But the magic no longer works for me. There is no spell I can say to make you hear me, to bring you back.

Words brought us together in the first place. We were two students in a library, reaching for the same book. Our hands touched and I jerked mine away, mortified that I hadn’t noticed, that I had thought myself alone.

You laughed and spoke, and your voice startled and warmed me like a shot of Southern Comfort. I heard only the drawl and the friendliness, and I asked where you were from.

‘I guess I’d better learn to talk right so everybody will quit asking me that first thing! I’m from Tennessee.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well, why on earth? You ever been there?’

‘No, I mean—’ I felt like an idiot and longed to disappear. ‘I mean I’m sorry to be like everybody else and ask you that.’

You smiled and touched my hand, casually, knowingly, as if we were old friends or even sisters. ‘Of course you’re not like everybody else. You’re like me.’

I thought you had to be making fun of me. You were gorgeous and self-assured, the kind of girl everybody liked and boys flocked after, while girls like me stayed home, unnoticed, with their books. But you explained:

‘You’re a freshman, right? But you’re not at any of the orientation parties or mixers – you came straight to the library, first thing. Like me. And then went for the same book.’ You pressed it into my hands. ‘This is not on any of the assigned or suggested reading lists. And they won’t even let freshers take the basic linguistics course!’

‘I know.’

‘I know you know.’ You smiled. ‘I think we’re going to be friends.’

We were kindred spirits, self-determined intellectuals out of place at a party school. The book was Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. I can never think of Chomsky without smelling oranges, and remembering how you carried that fruit with you in your patchwork leather bag, where they bounced against the periwinkle blue cover of the paperback edition. The oranges were for health, to ward off the colds you expected to catch in our nasty northern winters; the Chomsky was for your soul. Oranges never cured anyone, and we both found the Chomsky book heavy going – the importance was symbolic.

Symbols were important, keys out of the material world into a higher realm of thought, ideas and language. Whenever I think of that first year of friendship what I imagine is our two voices, drifting like smoke into the sky. We talked constantly, when we weren’t writing or reading. We were intoxicated with ideas, and the new freedom we had to express them; mightily impressed by the sound of our own voices saying things we would never have dared in our mothers’ houses. Life without words was not life at all. Words were the basis and meaning of our friendship. Words brought us together and kept us close. But also, for two years, words kept us apart.

Words were defence as well as discovery. I was afraid of silence. If the words ever ran out, if you ever looked into my eyes with nothing between us, you would see the truth. You would see that I loved you – and I was afraid that if you knew the truth you would be disgusted, and reject me, and I would have nothing. So I clung to the words which divided but also linked us.

You finally broke that chain, finally told me the truth and compelled the same from me – not with words, but with touch. You stroked my face with your fingertips; you pressed my gesticulating hand gently to your lips, silencing me. We came together slowly, solemnly; our bodies together began a long, easy conversation in which sensation was the only speech. Secret messages inscribed with tongue against flesh. I came to new understandings of you, the world, myself. I discovered new meanings in silence. You taught me that. But we didn’t have to give up words; we just added to them. We never had to make that fatal, absolute choice.

From outside comes the heavy thunk of an axe splitting wood. A familiar sound, a comforting sound. I know just where you are, just what you look like: the way you stand with your legs slightly apart and braced, the way you swing the axe with both hands, the fiercely intent, yet oddly blank, expression on your face as you work to fill the log basket. I love the way the logs split cleanly for you, the two halves clattering off the stump, one after the other with never a misjudged blow.

I’m not as good at it as you are: I swing the axe with too much force, and then too little, and can never fix my eye on the perfect centre point. Still, I took my turn. It used to be a task we shared, along with all the others necessary to keep the house comfortable, but little by little you have taken over all the physical work, and I am left more and more alone in this room, my fingers tapping out messages you cannot or will not read.

The third or fourth day of your silence – memory makes me hot with shame – I took you by the shoulders and shook you as hard as I could, then slapped you across the face as if that would loosen your tongue. Sobs mangled the question I asked, turning it to a meaningless, animal sound of pain: ‘Why? Why? Why?’

Why won’t you speak?

There was pain, but no comprehension, in your dog-brown, horse-brown eyes. So might the dog look at me if I shouted at her for no reason.

The doctor said he could find nothing organically wrong with you, and recommended I commit you for observation and more tests. I won’t do that: you’d feel it as a punishment, and I don’t want that. Besides, I know that if you ever speak again it will be because, finally, there is something you must say to me, and to me alone.

A psychological problem, the doctor said: all in your mind. Grief over an imperfect son. Guilt over your relationship with me. I stood meekly bearing his condemnation, aware that he was a man disgusted by the idea of two women together, but thinking it more important that he was an expert. You, gazing placidly out the window at the tiny bit of sky to be seen between the buildings, were not there to help me. Our voices floated over your head, having no more meaning for you than the clouds your breath makes on a cold day.

He told me nothing I wanted to hear. Before we left, I asked if he’d heard of any others like you who had lost the ability to speak.

‘She hasn’t lost the ability to speak,’ he snapped. ‘Only the will. This isn’t some infectious disease, you know, if you’re imagining she caught it from her child.’

‘Not from him – but couldn’t it be for the same reason? Because of the Cure?’

‘Certainly not. If you had the least understanding of why the children of the Cured have not – to date – learned to speak, you wouldn’t ask such a question.’

‘But I don’t understand – I thought no one did.’

‘A side-effect of the Cure was to cause genetic damage,’ he said in what he probably thought was a tone of great patience. ‘Do you understand what that means? The ability to learn a language is inherited, like brown eyes. The Cure has caused a chromosomal mutation which is not obvious in the person affected – it appears as an inheritance … or I should say, as a loss of inheritance. It only affects the children because it only affects the ability to learn. In you, and in me, and in your friend, language exists as a structure, and that’s not so easily dismantled. Not without brain damage, and there’s no evidence of that. No, there’s no physical reason why your friend can’t speak … although she’s passed that inability to her son.’

His flat, hopeless certainty terrified me. ‘But that hasn’t been proven – the genetic basis of language is just a theory.’

‘Oh, yes. Just a theory. And no doubt you have a better one – you and your friend.’

No, I have no better one, and you’ve passed out of the realm of theory, beyond knowing or caring why you do not speak, certainly beyond telling me. Nevertheless, I go on talking to you, go on asking you. It’s an old habit and hard to break. And what other theory should we have but this: that Chomsky was right. His ‘deep structure’ exists, an innate grammar coded into chromosomes, in-born, preexisting speech, now wiped out of the gene-pool, a lost possibility. There is no cure for the descendants of the Cured.

‘The Silent Generation’ as a cover of Time had it. But not just one generation, for their children, too, will be speechless; a whole new species has come into being. Millions upon millions.

And as for those who didn’t take the Cure – the poor, the careless, the cautious – what of their children? Will they inherit the earth? Will they decide to tend or slaughter the dumb masses around them, or will they feel themselves locked out of reality, crippled by the words they’re forced to use, unhealthy remnants of a sick and dying race?

You and I belong to that race; it’s not a matter of choice, but of birth. We are composed of words as much as we are of flesh and blood and bone. You cannot strip language away like unwanted clothing – I have tried, and it sticks like skin.

How have you managed to free yourself from it – and why? Is it because you love your son so much more than you love me?

Before the boy was born I used to fear that he would come between us. I didn’t want you to have a child, because that was something I couldn’t give you. And I was afraid of competing with an infant for your love – I was jealous of him long before he was born, even before you were pregnant, because of the yearning in your eyes.

Yet I couldn’t refuse you anything you really wanted – I loved you too much for that. So I told you to go ahead. I wouldn’t ask you any questions about the father; I would try to love your child as much as you did. I wanted you never to resent me, never to leave me. Together we would raise him. Together we should now be sitting in this room, holding grief at bay with words, struggling to understand as we stare through the window at him, we locked in by words, he locked out.

Is it guilt that drove you to join him? Guilt because you took the Cure and so deprived your son of language? You shouldn’t feel guilty – you took the Cure as much for his sake as for your own, to ensure he would be healthy. You couldn’t have known. No one did.

It seemed a miracle, without side-effects. All it did was to stimulate and strengthen the body’s own defences against microscopic invaders. Gone was the need to be inoculated against many different, specific diseases: after the Cure, the body could fight off anything it recognised as a threat. One simple injection and all the diseases humanity had feared through the ages lost their power. People who had taken the Cure could still pick up infections, but their bodies rallied defences so quickly and surely that invading germs were destroyed within twenty-four hours.

I experienced this myself about a year after we both took the Cure. I had to go to New York to see an editor – you were pregnant, so I took the bus alone. Down in the teeming city, because I was nervous, tired, sleeping badly, missing you, some virus managed to slip past the outer ramparts and gain a precarious hold inside me.

Did I ever tell you this story?

Returning home, I felt cranky and sore. My joints were aching and I felt hot – so hot it had to be a fever.

As the realisation hit me, I felt outraged. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me – I couldn’t be sick – I’d been Cured!

Then I remembered that increased temperature is one sign of the body’s defences at work, and I felt better. Already the healing process must be underway. I could put up with a little discomfort, for my own good. Sinking back in my seat, I closed my eyes.

I was immediately caught up in a vivid dream. I still knew who and where I was, but now another reality presented itself to me, one that I accepted as the truth. It seemed as real as the smelly, noisy bus, only it was taking place inside rather than outside my body.

Moving with speed and a horrible, single-minded determination through the hidden pathways of my physical self was a bright orange blob, featureless, yet with a pitted, throbbing surface. Its victims were the individual cells of my body: small, pale circles, bland and innocent, going about their important tasks unaware of danger.

When it brushed against a healthy cell, the blob turned a darker orange and began to flow over the paler creature, engulfing it. A thin, orange stiletto punctured the cell wall, the orange mass flowed in, and the conquest was on.

Silently, without moving a muscle, I screamed for help.

And there they were: blue, upright soldiers shaped like the letter T, rushing to do battle. They were doctors as much as killers, for they went first to the aid of the infected cells, eliminated every speck of orange and made them whole, a healthy part of me again. They continued until the virus was utterly wiped out.

I woke as the bus was pulling into town, and I felt refreshed, clear-headed, hungry – and as triumphant as if I’d just won a war single-handed. Which I suppose, in a way, I had. Of course it was a fantasy. Mine was the dream of someone untrained in biology and bemused by video games. Yet however imprecise, the dream had a meaning for me which linked it with reality. It was as real as anything else I’ve ever experienced, and since that day I’ve never felt the slightest bit ill.

Until now. Watching you, so happy, so at home in the universe, I can’t help wondering which one of us is truly the more handicapped, the more shut off from life and health. Never before have I felt so isolated and estranged.

What do you know that I don’t? Did you pity him? He doesn’t have to be alone – there are special schools now, and if we lived in town we would have neighbours with silent children. It’s a commonplace now – you’re not the only mother unable to communicate with her child.

Why did you give up hope so soon? He’s only four, and the oldest of them are barely past seven years old. No one knows what they might become. Perhaps they’ll all be late-blooming geniuses. It’s only another theory, after all, that at age two or four or six the door permitting language acquisition clangs sternly shut. Perhaps, deep within their shared silence, a new language is growing. Perhaps they’ll prove telepathic. Perhaps, if we persist, we could eventually reach him with our words. Or he might teach us the meaning of his silence.

But together, you and I. We belong together. You knew that from the first moment, and it’s still true.

If I think back – recapture the past – recall every movement, gesture and word, will I finally understand what you have done?

I remember hints, rumours, speculation, fears. The first uneasy sense that there was something different, something wrong, about the children of the Cured. You were pregnant at the time, and I tried to keep those worries from you. It wasn’t difficult, at first, for we were out of the mainstream of life, living alone up on our mountain, surrounded by books which spoke of other days, other lands, imaginary lives. And then the rumours swelled into truth.

I remember when the news broke. I found you standing in front of the television, standing as if the solemn-faced reporter had turned you to stone. You had the baby in your arms, and when I spoke you suddenly jerked around, pressed him tightly to your breast and turned your back to the screen, as if to shield him with your body from the news and so save him from his fate.

But there was no protection, no return to ignorance. The information, and the fear, were everywhere, unwanted and deadly as radiation, in the very air we breathed. It was no longer possible to believe that in a matter of weeks or months the baby would begin at last to talk.

We had to pretend there was hope, though – it wasn’t fair to the baby to give up. I increased my efforts, taking more and more time away from my book to play and talk to him. I used the same simple words and phrases over and over again, getting him to watch my lips, even making him feel their movements with his chubby little hands, begging him to understand.

He wasn’t stupid. He was healthy and lively and intelligent … but was it human intelligence? Without speech, how could it be?

I remember that he was two years and three months old when he said his first word. He said your name.

I had been trying to coax it from him for the better part of an hour when finally, beaming with pleasure, gazing up at my face, he said it: one simple, meaningful, syllable.

My heart nearly stopped. This was the moment I had been waiting for, the moment I had almost ceased to believe in. I grabbed him, screaming for you, and promptly frightened him into tears.

You rushed in, white and terrified.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, shouting above the baby’s wailing. ‘Really it is. It’s wonderful! He said his first word – he can talk! He said your name!’

You took him from me. ‘You’re scaring him.’ In your arms he calmed at once.

‘He spoke, he really did. Let me try again—’

You stared as if you hated me. ‘No.’

‘But—’ I was astonished by your reaction. ‘Don’t you believe me? I’m not making it up – he actually said his first word.’

‘Imitating you. Even a parrot can do that. It doesn’t mean a thing.’ You sighed, and I saw it was a deep sorrow, rather than anger, that moved you. ‘Haven’t you kept up with the research, the latest reports? They can be taught to imitate simple sounds. That’s not language. I won’t have him making noises like some performing animal. Don’t you understand? He’s my son. Leave him alone.’

You had drawn the line of your loyalties, and I was shut out. My heart ached because what I’d always feared was true: you did love him more than you loved me.

But that night you told me something different with your body. You clung to me and kissed me, and we made love more passionately, more profoundly, than we had in a very long time. Nothing was said in words, but the breach was healed.

And not only that night but the next, and the next. We made love desperately, wildly, greedily, as if we’d just discovered how. I fell in love with you all over again. I thought I understood. I thought I was comforting you, helping you through your disappointment, reminding you there was more to life than the raising of a child. It never occurred to me that you might be comforting me, preparing me for your departure, your defection. I heard the message I wanted to hear.

Outside of bed we didn’t have much time together, but there had been periods in our life like that before. I was busy with my book, and you were busy with … other things. You certainly weren’t writing, and I suppose you had stopped reading by then, too. Household tasks seemed to consume all your time – things neither of us had bothered much about before. You washed walls, carpets and windows; repainted woodwork; dyed the upstairs curtains and our bedspread to match; put up more shelves in the kitchen; and even stained and varnished the old dresser. Cooking was a new enthusiasm: you made soups and stews and pies, and the house filled with the wonderful smell of baking. You taught yourself to brew beer and wine, and sometimes went foraging for edible mushrooms and berries. I heard no note of desperation in all that, because when I asked you at night if you were happy, you always said yes.

Your familiar tap sounds at the door, and I realise the room is dim: it’s late afternoon. You come rushing in and press your cold cheek to mine. You smell of wood-smoke. The child is with you, and the dog, and suddenly my quiet, stuffy room is full of life, as if a fresh, invigorating wind had swept in from the real world, to blow away my imaginary fears. I look at your beautiful, loved, familiar face, and you smile – the same smile I’ve known for so many years. You’re here – and in my relief, feeling I’ve awakened from a bad dream, I begin to talk, really to babble, about all the things I’ve been thinking and writing in my solitude.

Your smile wavers and then deflates. You stare at my moving lips and then into my eyes, trying to understand. You are attentive and patient, knowing that is what I want from you, but as the words continue to tumble out (I can’t help myself; tears stand in my eyes and my voice wobbles, but I can’t stop) you lose your way, become confused and then bored and finally resentful.

You back away from me, frowning, and I gaze at you through the bars of words until, finally, they falter and fail, and I fall with relief into silence.

I’m shaking. I can’t even look at you now. What was I saying, what was I trying to say? The words seemed to come out independent of my mind, and the only meaning in them was my desire to touch you, to catch you, to draw you to me in a net of words. Was that so wrong?

The dog flops down on the rug beside my chair and her heavy body presses against my legs and she gives a deep, groaning sigh of contentment. The boy gets on his hands and knees to stroke her long, silky ears.

You wander around the room, pausing to gaze out the window and then moving on, touching familiar objects, sometimes lifting them to peer more closely. Do they recall the past to you, or are they puzzlements, like my words? What do they mean to you: the shallow pottery bowl we bought in New Mexico; the pillow your grandmother embroidered half a century ago; the carved wooden box, empty now, where we once kept the marijuana and the rolling papers; a red wool scarf; a book I’ve been sent to review. You hold the book like an unfamiliar artefact, like a box. You gaze at the back cover, holding it upside down, and your blank incomprehension stabs me to the heart.

Gone. Lost.

I look away, at the paper in the typewriter. The little black marks blur against the whiteness, move around erratically and lose their meaning. I cannot read what I have written. Is that how you would see it? The words are gone for you, and no logic, no arguments, can bring them back.

I’ve lost you, but you’re still here. Why? We live in separate worlds, yet you stay with me, you look after me, out of love, I presume. Are you waiting for me to join you in a world I cannot imagine?

I remember a conversation, one of the last we ever had, when you told me something I wasn’t ready to believe.

You came in one day and asked me what a virus looked like. As always, I thought of books, and turned to scan the shelves. ‘We might have a picture somewhere. Why?’

You didn’t answer.

‘You could call the library,’ I said. ‘Or, I know, we’ll go into town tomorrow and go around the bookstores. We haven’t done that for awhile. We should have some basic science books – all our books are about books, instead of about real things! How about that?’

‘I don’t really need it,’ you said.

‘Are you writing something?’

I turned to look at you and saw, with a sickening sense of disorientation, pity in your gaze. You shook your head. ‘I’m not writing.’

And suddenly – finally – I became aware of the rift between us. Bed was miles away; we were two strangers. How long had it been since I’d heard the sound of your typewriter, seen you at your desk or with a book in your hand, since we’d talked about anything but the most necessary daily affairs?

‘What’s wrong? Please tell me.’

‘Nothing is wrong.’ You smiled, slipping away from me.

‘Why are you asking about viruses? What do you want to know?’

‘I was curious … about the colour.’

I remembered a battle between orange and blue.

‘But it doesn’t matter,’ you said. ‘I can see it.’ You were staring in the direction of the bookshelves, but your vision had turned inward. ‘It’s golden. Glowing all over, stretched fine, like golden lace. Like a web, linking cell to cell. I don’t need a picture. I can see it.’

‘Inside you?’

You nodded, then hugged me and said fiercely into my ear, ‘Don’t worry! Now that I’ve seen, now that I know, my body will take care of it. That’s what the Cure was for.’

I was comforted, I was deceived, thinking you ill. If I had demanded a description of your disease, a name for the virus, would you have told me?

Would you have told me that the virus was language?

A virus carried in the genes, waiting to be born, infiltrating other cells in the brain, taking them over one after the other, using the cell machinery to its own purpose. Spreading throughout the mind, and then from one mind to another, spreading through the infection of the spoken word, no one in the world free from it. Then mutating into other forms, into writing, giving rise to such side-effects as stories, books, writers, printing presses, schools, libraries, all through the natural, blind urge to survive and reproduce.

A virus, and no more glorious than polio or rabies except in the eyes of the diseased humans who embrace their sickness and find it good. A highly successful, adaptable virus, for it does not kill its host – not directly – and its colonising ability is outstanding.

You saw it that way when you decided that you were the crippled one. When you recognised the cool, golden web of words as a trap and an affliction. When you used the Cure to turn your own defences against the very thing that made you your self.

If it happened to you it can happen to others. All it takes is that moment of recognition, the ability to see language as something alien, something wrong coming between you and life. I, too, have glimpsed that golden web and wondered about life unhindered by it.

I look at you standing by the window, gazing out, and try to imagine what you see and what is in your wordless mind. I try to imagine myself in your place, having given up the whole, named world for love.

For love … yet what is love without words, what does it mean if it can’t be described? What is it that I should be giving up?

If language is a virus, then what about love? Love which begins like a one-celled creature and quickly multiplies within the heart, then spreading throughout the body. But a far less successful virus than language, much more easily killed.

Already I can feel the armies drawn up for battle inside me. It’s beyond my choice; the decision has been made on some deep, unconscious level where my very awareness has triggered the Cure. When I wake in the morning, the world will have changed. I will have changed. The long sickness will be over.

Perhaps I will wake in your arms and be with you at last, without any words between us, well and happy. Or perhaps there will be nothing, nothing between us at all.

THE HOLLOW MAN

Felicia woke counting the chimes of the clock in the hall. Six o’clock. Four more hours to wait. She kept her eyes closed, wanting sleep to pass the time. She concentrated on the noise of the clock, a comfortable, clopping sound, measuring out the seconds. But with each second she was further from sleep, her body strung more tightly in anticipation.

With a shaky sigh, she gave in: rose, and walked into the bathroom, her movements deliberately slow. She ran a bath, pouring in lavish handfulls of the bath powder used only once before: it had been a gift from someone unaware that Felicia preferred the brisk efficiency of a shower.

After bathing, Felicia lingered at her dressing table, taking unusual care in making up her eyes. Large, and a translucent grey-green, they were her best feature. She put her hair up, then let it fall again, dissatisfied. Finally she wore it as she usually did: parted on the left and hanging straight to her shoulders. It was caught and held just above her right ear with a diamond clip her father had given her.

As she had long planned, she wore the red silk blouse Ron liked and a new pair of raw silk trousers. She didn’t bother with jewellery or shoes. She wasn’t going anywhere.

Two hours yet. Felicia paced the empty, silent house, pulling at her fingers in sudden anguish. What if Ron were not grateful, as she had been imagining, but resentful? What if he had not wanted to come back? What if he had killed himself because he no longer loved her?

There it was, the fear she had repressed since Ron’s death, two months before. The fear that he would not love her as she loved him; the nightmare possibility that he would refuse the precious gift she offered, this second chance at life.

For two months Felicia had been driven by determination, by need, and she had not allowed herself doubts. Doubts were dangerous: they slowed one down. To have paused would have been to risk all, to have lost Ron, as she had lost her mother and her daughter, forever.

Felicia walked into the living room where floor-to-ceiling windows faced the curving driveway. As she pulled open the heavy green draperies, Felicia wondered whether Ron would be brought home in a car or an ambulance.

An ambulance had taken him away. An ambulance, although no hurry or care was needed to transport a dead man.

She sat on one of the straight-backed chairs beside the fireplace (an absurdity in the nearly tropical climate of Houston) and stared at the empty grate. The last time she had seen Ron alive they had sat together on the rug and watched the flames, savouring the warmth within against their knowledge of the cold, wet, February night outside.

He had taken her hand and pressed it to his lips. They had spoken comfortably of trivialities: a movie they had seen, the sail they planned to make to Galveston as soon as it grew warmer, a friend who was opening an art gallery. That evening, Ron had been more relaxed than he had been in months. Felicia thought he might be working again, but she did not ask, fearful of disturbing the evening’s tenuous happiness. She wished she were not leaving for Dallas in the morning; wished she could stay here to share in this welcome, unexpected peace.

‘Why don’t you come with me to Alma Sue’s wedding?’ she asked.

He shook his head, smiling at her. ‘You know how I feel about weddings.’

‘Not to mention how you feel about Dallas.’

‘Not to mention Alma Sue.’

They laughed together and, not long afterwards, went into the bedroom and made love with a passion and conviction they had not shared in many months.

Felicia had basked in Ron’s sudden good mood, not understanding it any more than she had understood the silent despair which had preceded it, but appreciating it. Ron was a moody, melancholy man, and Felicia sometimes felt she was no nearer understanding what drove him now, after eight years of marriage, than when she had first fallen in love with him.

She lay awake that night after he had fallen asleep, pressing her lips against his warm chest and lightly stroking the hairs on his arm. After nearly six months of solitary, incommunicable anguish – which she had tried helplessly to understand and ease – Ron had returned to her. She wondered if he would ever be able to tell her what he had been through. She had not seen him so desolate since the terrible year their daughter had died.

But whatever it had been, she thought comfortably, closing her eyes, it was over now. Ron was back from wandering those dark lands.

Remembering that night, the last they had shared together, Felicia hunched over in her chair beside the empty hearth and hugged herself against a chill that was completely internal. If she had stayed at home that weekend, instead of going to Dallas, would it have made a difference?

Sometimes she blamed herself for Ron’s death. If she had been home when he needed her, to watch out for him, to help him, as she had often before, through some particularly bad moment …

She had tried to call him from Dallas several times, and heard only the faraway, unanswered ringing of the telephone. That had not worried her: it had seemed a good sign. When Ron was working – whether playing the piano, composing, or thinking – he shut himself into his room and ignored outside intrusions. He never interrupted himself to answer the telephone when things were going well. The other possibility was that he was out with friends – also a good sign.

So, although she had been eager to hear his voice, to hear from him that all was well, she did not worry.

Nor did she worry when he was not at the airport to meet her: she had hoped he would surprise her, but, after all, the airport was a long drive from their house. It was more sensible for Felicia to take the bus to the downtown terminal, where, as always before, Ron would meet her.

But the downtown terminal was nearly empty when she got in. There was no one waiting for her. And then the fear and worry hit her all at once.

Her fingers trembled as she fumbled in her purse for a quarter to call him: time, she was wasting time. The unanswered telephone, five miles away, was a mocking burr in her ear. She hung up, then dialled her father’s number. She could have phoned a taxi, but some presentiment made her choose to have her father’s strength beside her should she need it.

The fear that ‘something had happened’ to Ron drove her: she didn’t think specifically of suicide. For all his recurring depressions, Ron had never spoken of ending his own life.

So when they found him, curled almost foetally in the back seat of the Buick, in a garage still reeking of exhaust fumes, Felicia still saw it as something that had happened to him, not something he had done. It was some dreadful accident.

Because Felicia was the daughter of Austin Lloyd Roberts she had it her way: her husband’s death would be declared accidental.

Ronald Stanberry had met with a tragic accident, said the Chief of Police. Even a professor from Rice University could forget the dangers of a closed garage and a running car.

But Felicia didn’t want that. She didn’t want an accidental death – she didn’t want any death at all. She wanted her husband back alive. His death was more than bereavement to her: it was an outrage. It should not have happened. And she would not suffer it. She would not accept it and learn how to live without him; she would not respond numbly as she had when her mother had died, or when her baby daughter had died. She would have Ron back. She would not lose him. She would erase his death, nullify it. Pay what she had to, do what she must, she would bring her husband back from the dead.

The shrill voice of the telephone roused her, and she ran to the telephone. Ron, something about Ron, it must be.

But it was her father.

‘They bring him back yet?’

‘No.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘Should be about an hour.’

‘You all by yourself?’

‘Well, sure.’

‘Want some company?’

‘No. I think I should see him first by myself, Daddy. I don’t know how he’ll be feeling.’

‘They said anything to you? At the hospital?’

‘Just that he’s been progressing normally. Whatever that means.’

‘You know, sweetheart, I’ve been reading about other people who’ve been revived, and—’

‘I’ve read it all, too, Daddy. But individuals react differently.’

‘But all of them seem—’

‘And the doctors are learning more each time,’ she said swiftly. She wouldn’t listen to doubts. Not now.

‘It’s just that I’ve been worried, wondering whether or not we did the right thing,’ he said.

‘Daddy, of course we did! And, anyway, it’s done. So there’s no sense crying about it now. Anyway, there never was a choice. Not for me. How could I let them bury Ron when I knew there was a chance he could be brought back to life? Wouldn’t you have done the same for mother, if it had been possible then?’

Silence. Then, ‘Of course I would. Of course I would have, sweetheart. Listen. As soon as Ron feels up to it give a call and I’ll take y’all out to Tony’s for dinner. That sound good?’

‘That sounds wonderful, Daddy. Just as soon as Ron feels up to it.’

As far as most people knew, Ron had not died at all. The official report was that he had been in an accident and was in a coma in the hospital. As the revival proceeded, reports of his improvement were released.

The idea of reviving the dead was not a universally popular one: less than a year before, a former movie actress had been murdered by an hysterical mob for the terrifying crime of having escaped her first death.

And most reports – which worried Felicia more than she cared to admit – indicated that the revived were changed, people who never recovered from their deaths. But Felicia had allowed herself no doubts when she had determined to have Ron revived, and she would allow herself no regrets now that it was done. Ron had been dead, and now he was alive. No matter how he might have changed, he was still Ron, and he was alive. That could only be good.

She heard the sound of tyres crunching the gravel on the driveway and ran to open the front door. A black Continental was pulling up. As she watched, it came to a stop and a back door opened. Ron got out, slammed the door, and the car slid slowly away.

He was home. Felicia said his name silently. Her face felt numb: she didn’t know if her mouth were open or closed. She stood in the doorway, waiting for him. He stood in the driveway and looked at her.

She ran to him, scarcely aware of the sharpness of the gravel beneath her bare feet. He was still standing motionless on the drive when she reached him, and as she flung herself against him, throwing her arms around him, she felt him flinch away.

Tears came to her eyes and she closed them, and hung on tight to him. After an eternity he moved again: this time, unlike the first, split-second withdrawal, the motion was voluntary. He slowly raised his arms and put them around her, to hold her in a light embrace.

Felicia let out the breath she had been holding. ‘Oh, thank God, Ron,’ she murmured into his shoulder. ‘I’ve got you back.’

*

He was not eager to talk, and so she did not press him. Learning that he had not yet eaten, she threw all her energy into preparing omelettes, juice, and sweet rolls. They breakfasted together in the sunny kitchen, and Felicia talked.

She told him all the local gossip as if he had been away on vacation, never referring to the operation that had been the centre of both their lives for the past two months, never touching serious ground, never questioning him, never mentioning death.

Ron ate his meal silently and efficiently. He looked at her often, but his face was expressionless: she could read nothing in his eyes. Occasionally his glance would make her falter in mid-sentence; then she would look away and resume speaking, sometimes on a completely different subject. He did not comment.

Felicia moved through the day as if in a dream. Ron was home, and this was the day she had been waiting for. And yet as often as she felt blessed, she would be gripped a moment later by an unspeakable, painful fear. Who was this silent stranger who looked at her with empty eyes? Was this really the man she loved and had married?

The doctors had warned her that it would take Ron some time to readjust to living. He would not be exactly the same person he had been before he died, they said. Everything would be strange to him, and he himself would be different. It was, after all, no simple illness he had been rescued from, but death itself, from which there is supposed to be no return.

Felicia followed Ron into his room at the back of the house.

‘What would you like to do this afternoon?’ she asked.

He shook his head, shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘I guess you’d just like to rest? Get used to being home again?’

He said nothing.

‘Am I bothering you, Ron? Would you rather be alone?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

She chewed her lip. ‘Ron, I want to help you. I want to help make you happy and comfortable and everything. But I can’t guess what you want. You’ll have to tell me.’

He finally looked at her then, and the lack of love, the complete lack of anything at all in his eyes, made her want to cry.

‘Maybe I’d be better off alone,’ he said. ‘Don’t disrupt your day for me – don’t worry about me – just do whatever you were going to do, as if I weren’t here.’

Because he had asked it of her, she left him alone. But she had nothing to do. She had called the ad agency, where she worked part-time as a copywriter, and told them her husband was coming home from the hospital. They had given her the whole week off. There was nothing she needed or wanted to do, other than to be with Ron, and now she had to leave him alone.

An hour away from him, and she could bear it no more. She went into his room. He was sitting beside the window, just as she had left him. He was facing out, but she suspected he was not seeing the riotously green backyard.

‘I thought I’d sit in here with you,’ she said hesitantly. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘I won’t talk.’

She settled herself on the comfortable old couch beside the piano. The couch had been one of the first things they’d bought after they were married. Once, while guests waited for them in the living room, Felicia and Ron had made love here on the couch.

Felicia stared at the rich, polished wood of the piano, so close to her face, and saw it blur. Helplessly, she wept. She put a clenched fist to her mouth and bit down painfully hard on a knuckle. She cried nearly soundlessly, but the force of the sobs wracked her, bending her nearly double.

She regained control of herself at last, and wiped at her wet face with shaking hands. Timidly, she looked across at her husband: he sat still beside the window, still motionless, still turned away from her. Impossible to blow one’s nose silently, but Ron still did not turn.

She stared at his back, wanting to touch him, to make him turn. He sat, breathing in and out, only a few feet from her. He was alive. His back, if she should touch it, would be warm beneath her fingers. Warm and alive. She saw the slight movement of muscles in his neck, and the gentle rising and falling of his shoulders as he breathed.

He breathed. He breathed in and out. He moved, and his skin would be warm and supple to the touch. Felicia stared at his living, eloquent back, clenched her fists tightly in her lap, and concentrated on breathing the same air that he did. She slowed her breathing to match his. For the moment, it was enough. For the moment, she breathed a happiness beyond dreams.

*

The doctors had told her that Ron would be changed, that he would need rest, that adjustment would take time. Although she had not asked, she had assumed this would apply to their sexual relations as well. She had imagined herself and Ron together in bed again, lying close, touching often, tender but chaste until they fell asleep.

That night she undressed in the bathroom and put on a thin nightgown, careful not to push him, to leave the decision of intimacy up to him. She felt as shy as a Victorian bride, fearful of seeming too bold, hoping her husband would be pleased with her.

Once in bed, though, she could not stop herself from slipping close beside him, resting her head on his shoulder, and draping one arm across his bare chest. It was a natural movement, born of years of lying in the same bed with him, and one that had tormented her throughout the months of his absence, when his side of the bed had grown colder and less hospitable to her with each passing day.

But as she touched him now, as she moved close to him, she felt him shudder. It was a slight movement, scarcely more than the briefest tension, but of course she felt it. And she remembered his arrival, how she had run to him only to feel him draw back from her embrace.

A reflex, then as now. The body speaking before the will could contradict it. But the later contradiction was not a negation of the first reaction: the first response was the true one. Revulsion.

Ron lay inert beside her now. He did not pull away from her, nor did he force himself to embrace her, as he had on the driveway. He was passive, waiting.

He was the bride now, not she.

With sudden determination, Felicia tightened her grasp on him, raising her head slightly to kiss along the line of his jaw. She began to kiss his face with rising passion, and rubbed her cheek demandingly against his. The familiar smell of him made her breath come fast, and even his lack of response did not daunt her.

I shall teach you to feel again, she thought, running her hands down the length of his naked body. She sat up and stripped off her gown, then lay across him, using her hands, her mouth, the urgent warmth of her own body, in an all-out attempt to rouse him.

But he lay beneath her like a dead man, and nothing she did could win him back to life.

There had been times in the past – before his death – when, out of anger, exhaustion, or playfulness, he had laid just as passively beneath her coaxing body, but always then she had been able to wake him, to stir him from pretence into a passionate response.

Not this time.

At last, sweating, lips sore, and her own passion extinguished, Felicia had to recognise that this was no pretence. His lack of interest went deeper than she could reach.

‘Why?’ she whispered.

She felt his shrug. ‘A part of me they couldn’t revive.’

‘Do you still love me, Ron?’

‘No.’

That cut too deep for tears. She exhaled and turned onto her back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘No you’re not,’ she said sharply.

‘I loved you until I died,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s as far as any of my feelings went.’

She turned her head restlessly on the pillow. ‘I don’t understand you. You’re not dead, and you’re not a different person. You’re Ron Stanberry, revived.’

‘I’m a dead man.’

She rolled over and pounded a fist against his chest, not gently, she wanted to hurt him. ‘You’re alive, you breathe, you feel me hitting you. Do you deny that?’

‘I breathe,’ he said. ‘I go through the motions of living. I can feel physical pain. I can feel your touch against my skin. But inside, I’m dead. It’s as if there’s nothing inside me except a cold, mechanical brain filled with a lot of useless, meaningless memories. I know that I loved you once, but I don’t know what that love felt like. I don’t feel it now. The real Ron Stanberry is dead. That’s what I told the doctors, but they sent me here to take over his life.’

‘Who are you then, if you’re not Ron?’

‘I’m what’s left of him. A reanimated corpse. I do everything the living do – except live.’

‘That sounds like metaphysical bullshit to me, Ron. Are you talking about something known as the soul?’

‘I don’t know. “Soul” sounds like something that could still exist, somewhere apart from the body – and I don’t think it’s anything like that. It’s something like the will to live, I suppose. Two people, the same age, with the same illness, one who is happy and well loved and wants to live, the other with nothing more to live for. Which one dies?’

‘But, Ron, it’s not like that, for you! You’ve got everything to live for,’ Felicia protested.

‘And yet I killed myself. Felicia, you’ll have to accept that. And when they revived me, that’s all they did. I’m somewhere in limbo now, between life and death.’

‘That’s absurd. I don’t believe you.’

He was silent.

Felicia twitched her feet restlessly and brushed against his feet, which were as cold as a corpse’s. But he’d always had poor circulation.

‘You resent my having had you brought back to life,’ she said. ‘You’re trying to punish me by showing me that I can’t have you back.’

‘No.’

‘Then what is it? What makes you so different now?’

‘I’ve been telling you. I’m cold and empty inside. I feel no emotion.’

‘That’ll change. It will, Ron. I’m sure it’s just a matter of adjustment.’ She felt, in his silence, a refusal to accept what she said. Then she remembered something. ‘You say you can’t feel anything?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re forgetting something. Because you did feel something, at least twice today. When you got home and I first hugged you, and then, again, when I touched you when I first got into bed. Well? Will you admit it?’

‘There was something,’ he said, and she thought she sensed reluctance in his voice. ‘But it was more like a twitch, a physical reaction, than an emotion.’

‘But you felt something,’ she persisted, ‘for however brief a moment. Tell me what you felt.’

‘Felicia, I don’t want to hurt you.’

She smiled at that. ‘You already have, so don’t worry about it. Tell me.’

‘I felt … distaste. A faint revulsion at your touch. I feel – as much as I can feel anything – a repugnance towards the living. An unwillingness to get close, as if you were all crawling with disease and could infect me.’

‘How appallingly Freudian. And easily translated. You’re afraid we’ll “infect” you – in other words, that we’ll bring you back to life. You refuse to feel, you’re afraid of feeling, because it was too much feeling that made you so unhappy before and drove you to end your life.’

‘Felicia, if it were as simple as that—’

‘Well, why shouldn’t it be? You’ll see a psychiatrist; he’ll be able to help you.’

‘No he won’t. I saw one daily, constantly, after my revival. He was as helpless as the rest of them, as helpless as I am. This isn’t some simple neurosis I’m suffering from, Felicia. I don’t think there can be any help for me, not in the way you mean. Death is my disease. And death doesn’t let go as easily as the doctors think.’

‘Like it or not, you have been brought back to life. You can’t go on playing dead. I won’t let you.’

She wore herself out, finally, exhausted herself against his controlled, passionless conviction. Arguing, she saw, was futile, but she had no intention of giving up.

Somewhere between sleeping and waking, Felicia thought of the ancient Egyptians. Believing in a revival after death, they had taken such care to preserve the body. Hollowed out and carefully wrapped, it waited through eternity for life’s return. The perishable brains and viscera were scooped out and stored safely in separate containers. But what if the dead man, returned again to life, could not find the blue jar that held his heart?

*

Felicia woke to the sunshine of mid-morning, alone in the bed. Her stomach lurched.

‘Ron! Ron!’

She got out of bed, feeling with her feet for her slippers. No, she thought, no, don’t let him …

‘Ron!’

‘What’s the matter?’

Felicia sank back on the bed in relief. All safe. Her husband was standing in the doorway, looking at her. He was still alive.

‘I thought – oh, it was nothing.’ she said. ‘I was afraid that—’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind. Come here; talk to me while I get dressed.’

He sat on the edge of the bed, in response to her gesture. She looked at his face, but it communicated nothing. And, after a moment, his face seemed to change: the familiarity of the features was gone, and she seemed to be looking at a stranger.

That frightened her, and she looked down at her fuzzy, pink bedroom slippers, half-on, half-off her feet.

‘Ron,’ she said, reassuring herself with his name. ‘What was it like, to be dead? Do you remember?’

‘That’s what they all want to know,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you waited this long to ask me. The doctors were at it practically from the moment they had me breathing again.’

‘So what did you tell them?’

‘The truth. That death is nothingness, non-existence, a huge blank. No spirit guides, no blinding lights, no ineffable beings. Just – blank. Stop. Nothing.

‘I don’t think they believed me.’

‘It sounds terrible,’ Felicia said, with a shrug that denied her words. ‘So why weren’t you delighted to get out of it?’

‘It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t anything. And I chose it. I chose to stop living. I didn’t ask to be brought back.’

Felicia set her jaw. ‘And you resent me for having you revived.’

‘I don’t feel resentment, or anything else, Felicia. It doesn’t matter to me any more whether I’m alive or dead. Not any more.’

*

Dr Randolph Ott was a man of medium height with pale hair, thinning on top, and startlingly blue eyes.

‘Ah, Mrs Stanberry,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I am very sorry we did not meet earlier. Would you mind talking with me over lunch? I’m afraid my afternoon schedule is a busy one, and I was just going to take a break and get something to eat.’

Felicia glanced at her watch and saw, with some surprise, that it was a quarter to twelve. ‘I haven’t even had breakfast,’ she said.

‘No? I think the nutritionists advise against that, skipping breakfast. But it was a common habit of the ancient Greeks.’ He took her arm and led her down one of the featureless, underground corridors that laced the medical centre together. ‘The food here isn’t as bad as in some places I’ve been. You can get a good, fresh fruit salad.’

The cafeteria was large, a study in green and white formica. It looked much like any other institutional cafeteria, and it was less than half full. Ott paid for Felicia’s salad and tea and steered her to an empty corner table far from the other diners.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let me try to guess. Your husband is a stranger to you. He has profoundly changed – a fact he readily admits. He tells you that his revival was less than complete, that he is still dead inside. He tells you, and it seems to be true, that he feels nothing, knows no emotions, has no interest in anything.’ In conclusion, Dr Ott looked down and began carving up his Salisbury steak.

‘If you realised that about him, why did you send him home?’ Felicia demanded.

‘My dear Mrs Stanberry, I had no say in the matter. I could not keep him forever. The other doctors had their fill of examining him and announced him well and fully revived. If he had some psych-o-logical problems – well, he was advised to see me, or some other shrink, on a weekly basis.’

‘Ron didn’t say anything about seeing a psychologist.’

‘No. Why should he? An exercise in futility. Your husband is not unhappy. He does not feel the desire to change. Your husband feels only the greatest indifference towards everything. Do eat your salad.’

Felicia pushed the bowl aside impatiently. ‘Can’t you help him? Even though—’

‘Even though he doesn’t want my help? I don’t know.’ Ott set down his fork and sighed. ‘There was a time when I was certain that I could. Now I’m coming around to the opposite view. I’ve been involved with this whole revival business from nearly the beginning, you know. Five years ago I was on hand for the first successful revival. Something of an afterthought, I was. Since I had dealt with the terminally ill, it was thought I might have some insights into life and death. But I was no help at all. I don’t think anyone would have been.

‘That term revival is misleading. It makes it all too simple, it sounds as if we were bringing people back from death as if it were no more than a sleep, an interruption in life. And that can’t be all it is. We know so little about death, only what we can guess from observations on one side of it.

‘And the people who’ve known the other side, the people we bring back, are so changed, so set apart from us by their experience. How can we judge them? After what they’ve been through, how dare we state that this about them is psychosis, this neurosis, this a defence mechanism, this will pass, this can be cured, this is normal? They’re a new breed, or a mutation. But they are different. We can’t expect the same reactions from them – and we certainly don’t know enough to expect to be able to cure them!’ Ott prodded his rice pudding with a spoon and frowned at it.

‘I had thought that since my husband killed himself—’ Felicia began.

‘Ah. No, they’re all much the same,’ Ott said, nodding. ‘Not that they are all as articulate as your husband. Most of them speak as little as possible. They look with some bemusement at their arms and legs, as if they were strange machines we’d outfitted them with. But after a while, even the curiosity dries up. They continue to exist, without much interest in anything. You know of Bill Geyer? The physicist? When an automobile accident ended his life, he was in the midst of some very important and exciting work, I understand. When he was revived, it was widely expected that he would be grateful for the second chance and eager to get back to work.

‘But in the past nearly four years since his revival, what has Geyer done? Nothing. He does no work at all, takes no interest in the field he once loved, doesn’t even read. And now he passes his days—’

‘Sitting by the window,’ Felicia said quietly, ‘staring out at nothing.’

‘Mrs Stanberry, when revival first began to seem possible, I was entirely in favour of it. I was thrilled by the early experiments and operations, and when the first man was finally, successfully brought back from the dead, I swore it was the beginning of a new era. I thought that at last we had conquered death. It seemed such a tremendous step forward.

‘A tinge of doubt crept into my excitement after I talked with Hibbert, the man who had been revived. But I managed to convince myself that his problem was something I blithely called “the death trauma”, and that with care, time, and the best professional help, Hibbert – and all the others who were to follow – would recover from it. He was alive, and that, to me and to us all, seemed to be the main thing. His psychological problems, as we thought of his new character, would soon pass.

‘But they did not pass, of course. In time I was forced to recognise that our whole way of thinking about the revived was wrong. This passionless exterior was not a defence mechanism against either the pains of life or the fear of death; this coolness did not hide a deep fear.

‘Did you know that the revived don’t dream?’

Warily, Felicia shook her head. She didn’t want to hear this, but she couldn’t walk away without learning all she possibly could about the strangeness that afflicted Ron.

Ott had a spoonful of rice pudding.

‘They don’t dream. They barely seem to sleep. And if you should care to try waking your husband in the middle of the night, you’ll find him instantly alert. No fumbling, no confusion. He’s wide awake and aware at once.

‘And the reason for this, I think, the reason they have no need of dreaming, is that the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious mind does not exist. For the revived, it’s all one. Just one smooth, seamless, passionless whole. They are what they say they are: they are without illusions. And to try to cure them of what they are is impossible, not to mention pointless.’

‘So you’re saying that Ron will always be like this.’

‘Yes. Or get worse.’

‘Well, I think you’re wrong. I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.’

Ott shrugged and consumed his rice pudding.

‘I’m going to bring Ron back to normal,’ Felicia said. ‘Maybe I can find some other psychiatrist to help me. If I can’t, I’ll do it alone. I know Ron better than anyone else in the world knows him, and I’m sure I can reach him.’

‘Good luck to you,’ Ott said, laying down his spoon. ‘I truly mean that. I hope you prove me wrong. As I said before, we know so little about death, and we’ve had the revived with us for so brief a time, that it would be foolish to make such hard and fast pronouncements about them, as I have been doing. With persistence, patience, and love, perhaps you can resurrect your Ron. It will give me great hope if you do, and it will ease my fears for the future. I might even start believing in the miracles of medicine again.’ He smiled.

Softened, Felicia said, ‘Won’t you help me? I know Ron, but you have experience, and I don’t.’

‘I’d help you if I could, but I can’t help a man who refuses to be helped.’

‘Couldn’t you hypnotise him? Find out what he really—’

Ott shook his head heavily. ‘Hypnotism won’t work. It was one of the first things we tried when the revived proved reticent about their experiences. But it’s as I told you: no subconscious to tap into, no guard to slip past or bribe with hypnosis.’ He sighed and massaged the top of his head with one hand. ‘They could tell us so much, if they would. They could help us.

‘I told you before that I wished we could have met earlier. If I could have talked to you before the revival started, I would have done my best to talk you out of it.’

‘I don’t think you could have stopped me, Dr Ott. I was determined to have Ron back. I still am. No matter what the difficulties or risks are.’

‘So, you wouldn’t have listened to me,’ Ott said. ‘The doctors won’t listen to me, either. They don’t believe what I tell them. As far as they’re concerned, they’ve cheated death and won the battle. Animation, to them, equals life. They never ask if it’s a life worth living. They never ask why this sort of life should be considered better than death, or why those who have died should be brought back. It can be done, so it is done.

‘They’ll repopulate the world with soulless robots. Swell our ranks with people who don’t care and cannot feel or love. And what then?

‘Oh, don’t listen to me, Mrs Stanberry. I don’t want to make you gloomy, too. I want you to prove me wrong. I want you to prove that there’s still some heart within your husband that you can touch. Transform him from an animated corpse into a real human being again. If I can help in any way, give me a call. If he wants to talk to me again, I’m always available.

‘And God bless, Mrs Stanberry.’

*

Felicia embraced her father in the front hall, clinging to him just a moment too long, just a shade too desperately. When she finally let loose she saw, by his sad eyes, that he understood. Although he had not seen Ron yet, and although Felicia had been deliberately light and brief in her phone calls to her father, he knew.

She led him into the living room, and they sat down side by side on the green velvet couch. ‘Drink?’

‘Thank you kindly.’

She got up and went to the mantelpiece, where she poured a glass from the decanter of Scotch that stood there. She hesitated a moment and then, although she didn’t care for Scotch, poured herself a glass as well.

‘Ron’s in the kitchen,’ she said, handing her father his glass and sitting down. ‘He’s cooking so that I can entertain our guest.’

‘I don’t need much entertaining, you know that,’ Roberts said. ‘Give me a drink and I’m happy.’ He eyed her keenly. ‘Wish I could say the same for you. Now, what’s troubling you, sweetheart? Tell me what I can do.’

Felicia shook her head and smiled waveringly. ‘There’s nothing you can do, Daddy, but it’s sweet of you. It’s all much harder than I thought it would be. Ron has changed so much. I don’t know how to win him back. And the psychiatrist at the centre didn’t give me too much hope.’

Roberts lifted his heavy brows and took a substantial swallow of Scotch. ‘The doctors did warn us it would take time.’

‘I know. And I haven’t given up hope. It’s just – hard.’

‘You know Earl Bonnard?’

He was a Dallas millionaire. ‘I know of him, of course. I think we may have met at the Pin Oak Ball once or twice. I don’t think he’d know me.’

‘You’re my daughter,’ Roberts said. ‘He’d know you.’ With a grimace, he finished off his drink. ‘His daughter died, and he had her revived, a little less than a year ago.’

‘I had no idea.’

‘Of course not. It was hushed up – like Ron’s.’

‘You think he’d talk to me? If I went up there?’

‘I’m sure of it. I’ll give him a call before you go up.’

‘Thanks, Daddy. Maybe he’ll be able to help me. At least he’ll understand what I’m going through.’

Roberts nodded and held up his empty glass. Felicia refilled it for him.

‘Hadn’t you better go check up on that husband of yours? I don’t want him burning my steak.’

‘Oh, Daddy, you know Ron was always a good cook.’ She heard the past tense after she had spoken and bit her lip. Then she hurried on. ‘Anyway, we’re not having steaks. We have a little more imagination than that.’

‘What’s wrong with steaks? If y’all try to feed me any of that brown-rice-vegetarian crap, I swear I’ll butcher a cow on your front lawn.’

‘Don’t worry. We’re serving meat, and your silver-plated catsup bottle will be beside your place, as usual.’

Their foolishness rang hollowly, but at least the pretence of normality was being kept up. ‘I will go check up on Ron,’ she said. ‘Dinner must be nearly ready, and he may need some last-minute help. I’ll leave you to your Scotch.’

He raised his glass to her as she departed and, looking back, Felicia saw, above his smile, the sadness for her in his eyes.

In life, cooking had been one of Ron’s pleasures. Now he was cooking only because Felicia had told him to. As with everything else in his existence, Ron had shown no interest in the idea of cooking, but neither had he protested. Felicia was discovering that Ron would usually do what she told him to do and so, determined to make him live again, she had started ordering him around as if he were a sulky child. And she watched him, hoping for some slip in the mask of indifference he always wore, hoping for any small hint of pleasure or pain.

When she entered the kitchen, Ron was standing by the window, his back to her, looking at the palm of his upraised hand.

‘What is it, Ron?’ she asked, as she came up beside him and saw.

His hand was cut by a diagonal slash across the palm. It was a deep cut, and the blood was still welling up from it. Rivulets of blood streaked his arm and splashed onto the kitchen floor.

Ron stared down at the blood. His face was expressionless.

‘My God,’ Felicia said in dismay. ‘Why didn’t you call me? Do something: bind it up, quickly!’ She yanked open the drawer where the dish towels were kept and pulled out a clean cotton towel. Taking his hand she roughly, swiftly, tightly wrapped the cloth around it, closing the wound and stopping the bleeding. ‘What happened?’

‘I cut myself.’

‘Well, why didn’t you do something about it? Why were you just staring at it like that?’

‘It was curious, to see the blood,’ he said in a detached voice. ‘The heart pumping, the blood escaping. I find it hard to accept the idea that I am full of that stuff. Such a waste.’

‘You’re like everyone else,’ Felicia said sharply. ‘Human, not a machine. And not a corpse. Of course you have blood running in your veins.’

‘If I lost enough of it, I would die,’ he said.

Felicia tensed. ‘Not from a cut across your palm, you wouldn’t die. Now let’s go fix that cut up properly. I’ll put some anaesthetic on it and bandage it up. I hope it’s not deep enough to need stitches. I don’t understand how you could have cut yourself like that, across the palm. What were you doing?’

‘I cut myself deliberately.’

She looked at him.

‘I wanted to see if I would bleed. I wanted to watch myself bleed, to know that I was alive.’

‘Are you satisfied now?’ she asked.

He did not answer. She did not expect him to.

As they stood there, face to face, Felicia knew they had never been farther apart. Even when he was dead she had felt traces of his spirit in their house, and she had believed that he was waiting somewhere for her. But now he was here, his physical presence displacing memories of his former self, and he was a stranger to her. She remembered what Dr Ott had said: a new breed. A mutation. She looked at this stranger she was married to, this unpredictable, barely human being, and she was afraid of him.

*

At Felicia’s request, Ron had started sleeping in the guest room, so now he and Felicia met for the first time each morning over breakfast.

A leisurely breakfast, with plenty of food and coffee, a paper to read, and some comfortable, loving conversation with Ron, had always been Felicia’s favourite sort of meal. It had become a mockery, now; it was something she dreaded, yet forced herself to go through with, again and again.

Ron sat across the table from her, eating as he did every other task: because it was expected of him. He cared about nothing. His only preference, if it could be called that, was to be left alone.

Looking at the remains of breakfast and wondering how she had managed to eat anything at all, Felicia said, ‘I thought we’d go to Dallas this weekend.’ She looked up and across the table at Ron. ‘I thought we’d fly.’

Still no response. He watched her, his face giving away nothing.

Well, we’ll see, Felicia thought grimly.

In life, Ron had feared flying. The last time he had flown had been a last visit to his father, dying in Chicago. Felicia had tranquilised and peptalked him onto the plane, and she had held his hand tightly all the way to Chicago. But after the funeral, Ron had left Felicia to fly home alone. He had taken the train back.

But that evening Ron went to the airport with Felicia and made no protest, showed no signs of even the mildest apprehension when they boarded the plane.

As they were waiting for takeoff, Felicia said, ‘You aren’t afraid of flying anymore?’

‘When I was alive I was afraid of flying only because I was so terrified of death.’

‘And you’re not anymore? Afraid of death?’

‘I’m not afraid of anything.’

The plane began to move slowly down the runway. ‘Why not just kill yourself and get it over?’

He shrugged. ‘Why should I?’

‘Why did you in the first place?’ Tears stung her eyes as she finally managed to voice the question that had gnawed at her ever since she had found Ron’s body.

‘It’s hard to explain, now.’

The lifting of the plane pressed them both back in their seats.

‘Try,’ said Felicia. ‘Try to explain.’

He was silent, and Felicia wondered how far down he had to go for the memories. ‘It meant something to me then,’ he said, finally. ‘It was an emotional decision, one I can’t really understand anymore. I killed myself, chiefly, I think, in order to face death. I had been running scared of death for so long, that I finally challenged it by taking my own life. It sounds absurd now. Meaningless. But all those memories seem that way to me now. The emotions I suppose I felt then are just words now, and they seem to have less meaning with each passing day.’

‘You were so happy, that day,’ Felicia said. ‘I suppose it was because you had made up your mind to kill yourself. I would never have guessed that.’

Ron said nothing. The plane had levelled out now, and the seat belt signs flashed off. A stewardess made her way down the aisle with a clattering cart of drinks.

‘Did you have any regrets?’ Felicia asked. ‘While you were in the car, waiting to die, did it occur to you that you might have been mistaken? Did you consider changing your mind?’

‘I don’t remember any regrets.’

Felicia took a deep breath and clenched her fists. She spoke in a low voice. ‘Then why not do it again? I ruined your first death, but this time it could be for good. Why not kill yourself all over again? Even if I were crazy enough to ask for revival, no doctor would want to take on the case of a double suicide.’

He looked at her – and Felicia wondered how a human gaze could be so utterly empty – and said tonelessly, ‘When I killed myself, I was looking for an answer. I thought death might be the answer. I’m no longer looking for answers now, because I no longer care. It doesn’t matter to me whether I live or die. Life and death seem much the same to me now.’ Then he turned his face towards the blackness beyond the small window and kept silent for the rest of the brief journey.

*

Earl Bonnard reminded Felicia of her father. Like Austin Roberts, Bonnard was a big, weather-beaten old man who was ruthless in his business affairs but softer than a kitten with friends and family. He looked like a rancher and chose to dress that way, but his boots pounded the pavements of downtown Dallas most days, and he rarely went further into the country than the small, surburban towns his company had built on the outskirts of Dallas.

Although a uniformed woman answered the front door, Bonnard was right behind her to greet his guests.

‘Mrs Stanberry, I can see right off you’re your father’s daughter. I’d know those eyes and that stubborn chin anywhere – and I’ll bet you’re thankful you weren’t saddled with that nose of his as well! Mr Stanberry, how do you do, sir. Missy’s in the garden room, waiting to meet y’all. Come right this way.’

Melissa Bonnard sat in a green and yellow room, as still as if she were posing for a portrait. She looked about eighteen, and she was thin, blond, and pretty in an aloof, untouchable way. The room was bright with sunshine from the many windows, and a pair of French doors had been left open onto a small, walled patio to let in the warm spring air.

Melissa glanced up as her father spoke her name and made the introductions, and then her gaze floated away to the windows again. Felicia felt a sick pang of recognition at the totally uncaring emptiness of her face.

‘June will be in any minute with some lemonade and cookies,’ Bonnard said, moving towards the door. ‘Y’all just sit down and make yourselves comfortable and visit with Missy. I’ll join y’all in just a minute.’

‘Mr Bonnard,’ Felicia said, moving after him. ‘Could I speak to you for a few minutes?’

Bonnard glanced at Ron, who was taking the armchair opposite Melissa’s, then looked down at Felicia. ‘Well, surely. In my study?’

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Bonnard asked when they reached his panelled study at the end of the hall. ‘Or some sherry?’

‘No, thank you.’

Bonnard sat behind his big desk and began fiddling with the carved wooden figure of a deer.

‘When was Melissa revived?’ Felicia asked, sitting down opposite him. She saw the man tense.

‘She had her accident in May.’

‘A year,’ Felicia said. ‘I’ve had Ron back for less than a month. I’d hoped to find Melissa—’

‘Mrs Stanberry, I’d better warn you. We don’t talk about what happened to Missy. She doesn’t know what happened, beyond the fact that she had an accident and was in the hospital. I don’t want her getting all upset.’

‘Oh, Mr Bonnard, surely she knows. What she’s been through has changed her in a way that—’

‘Mrs Stanberry, I do hate to keep interrupting you, and I know it’s rude to contradict a lady, but since you’ve never met my Missy before, how can you say she’s changed?’ And he narrowed his eyes and raised his bushy brows at her.

‘Hasn’t she changed? Ron has. And it seemed to me that—’

‘Missy’s the same sweet girl now that she always was.’

‘Always so quiet?’

‘She’s a bit subdued, true, but an accident like that would sober anyone up. Then, too, she had some boyfriend trouble. Guy who was dating her just sort of dropped her.’ He frowned. ‘No good reason, he just stopped calling and stopped coming around.’

‘Maybe Melissa broke up with him,’ Felicia suggested.

‘Naw. She thought the world of that boy. And she won’t go out with anyone else, which suggests to me that she’s still pining after that boy.’ Bonnard frowned again, and Felicia felt sorry for the boy.

‘Since Ron was revived he’s been apathetic,’ Felicia said. ‘He doesn’t care about anything, and he seems to have no feelings. I wondered if perhaps Melissa had gone through something like that. If you could tell me that it passed—’

‘I’m real sorry to hear that, ma’am,’ Bonnard said. He set the wooden deer atop a stack of coloured brochures. ‘Have you tried a psychiatrist? I’m afraid I can’t help you at all. At the hospital they told us Missy might have some trouble readjusting, and they recommended a psychiatrist, but Missy’s never needed to go to him. She’s never had any trouble at all. Missy’s just fine.’ Bonnard stood up. ‘Why don’t we join her and your husband in the garden room and take some refreshment?’

They found Ron and Melissa sitting quietly, looking through the open doors at the sunny patio. Felicia wondered if a word had been spoken since she and Bonnard had left the room. A silver tray, with a pitcher of lemonade, glasses, and a plate of cookies, rested on a low, glass-topped table.

Bonnard poured out a tall glass of lemonade and handed it to his daughter. ‘Here you go, Missy. Something nice and cool.’ She accepted the glass without expression.

‘Mrs Stanberry? Mr Stanberry? Lemonade?’

‘No thank you,’ Ron said. Felicia shook her head and sat on a cane-bottomed chair.

‘How’s the weather in Houston?’ Bonnard asked.

‘Wet,’ Felicia said. ‘As usual. Everything’s blooming.’

Bonnard nodded and glanced at his daughter. ‘Missy started a garden a few years ago, but lost interest and the gardener had to rescue it. But maybe this year, hmm Missy?’

Melissa said nothing.

‘Is that lemonade sweet enough for you, Missy?’

She was still holding the glass of lemonade, untasted. Scarcely moving, she murmured, ‘It’s fine.’

‘June makes the best lemonade,’ Bonnard said.

Felicia looked into her lap and tried to think of something to say. Ron and Melissa felt like two, large weights which had to be pushed around with conversation.

‘Will you be going to school in the fall?’ Felicia finally asked Melissa.

Silence from Melissa. Bonnard said, ‘She may take a few courses at SMU. But there’s no need to rush things. She just hasn’t decided yet what she wants to do.’

And she never will, thought Felicia. You’ll decide for her. She looked at Bonnard’s craggy face and wondered how long he would be able to delude himself about his daughter. Didn’t tendrils of regret, of doubt, of despair, ever creep in? Or did he really believe he still had his Missy?

Then she looked at the blank-faced Melissa and tried to imagine her twenty years hence, still seated in that flowered armchair, still being moved gently through life by her aging father, or, if he were gone, by some well-paid servants.

Suddenly, Felicia could not bear any more. She stood up.

‘I’m awfully sorry, but we’re going to have to leave,’ she said. ‘I wish we could spend some more time with you, but we do have to go, or we’ll be late.’

Bonnard, who had risen as soon as Felicia had, extended his hand to her. ‘We’re so glad you decided to drop by,’ he said. ‘You give your father my best. And it was very nice meeting you too, Mr Stanberry.’ He glanced at his daughter. ‘Say good-bye to our guests, Melissa.’

As if she were a two-year-old, thought Felicia.

‘Good-bye,’ Melissa said tonelessly.

‘Good-bye, Melissa,’ Felicia said. Melissa turned her pale eyes away, back to the window again.

*

Driving the rented car back to the airport, Felicia raged. ‘Who does he think he’s fooling? Pretending everything is just fine, pretending his daughter is the same as always – even pretending she never died!

‘I never heard that Earl Bonnard was a stupid man. And since he made himself a millionaire, he’s obviously not easily contented. So why has he settled for that hollow mockery of his daughter, that empty doll of a girl?’

‘She satisfies his emotional needs,’ Ron said. ‘Her presence satisfies his feelings of love, loneliness, pride, paternity.’ He spoke mechanically, like a computer listing some exotic, human traits.

‘You get farther away every day, don’t you,’ Felicia said quietly, her rage dissipated. ‘More and more detached from mere humanity. There’s less for me to understand and catch hold of in you all the time. Do Mr Bonnard’s emotions really seem so alien to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what about your memories? Surely you can remember when you loved me? And when Carrie died.’ Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. ‘Don’t you remember how you felt then? You would have done anything, just as I would, to have had her back. You said you’d die yourself, if it would help. You said you’d go to hell, fight every God there was, to get her back. Don’t you remember?’

‘I remember.’

‘Then why can’t you understand? Why can’t you feel?’

‘Memories aren’t enough. I can remember everything that ever happened to me, everything I felt or thought while I was alive. But the memories are flat and faraway. It’s like having a stack of photographs that belong to someone else, not me. The more I go through them, the more boring they become. I can’t connect them to what I am today. They don’t mean anything to me.’

There was no regret in his words, no hint of sadness, although Felicia strained to find some trace of emotion in what he told her. He spoke about himself with as much detachment as if he were speaking about some stranger glimpsed on the evening news.

‘You’re telling me to give up,’ Felicia said. ‘That you’re not my Ron anymore, and never can be again.’

‘I’m telling you what I am,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you before, but you don’t want to believe. You and Earl Bonnard aren’t so different in that respect.’

Felicia was silent, considering Earl Bonnard and his relationship to his daughter. Am I the same as he? she wondered. He moves his daughter around like a doll in a dollhouse, and I, too, push Ron through the motions of living. Coming to Dallas was my idea. I didn’t even ask his opinion.

But Bonnard can be content with that. I can’t. I push Ron in the hope that he’ll push back. I want much more than Bonnard wants.

She said, ‘Did you talk to his daughter at all?’

‘No.’

‘Not a word, I suppose,’ Felicia said, rather bitterly. ‘I left the two of you alone, so you would talk, and you just stare blankly past each other. Why, Ron? Why didn’t you talk to her?’

‘What could I have said?’ He sounded almost surprised.

‘Something. That was the reason – part of it – for the trip. I thought that since you and she had both died, that you might be able to talk together. You’d be able to understand each other in a way that no one else can.’

‘A romantic idea. Two corpses, eager to discuss their experiences of the grave.’

‘Ron, really! Why shouldn’t there be some kinship between the two of you? She wouldn’t pester you with the ignorant questions of the living – she wouldn’t need to ask you all the questions I keep asking you. I thought you might care for each other’s company.’

‘We don’t care for anything, Felicia. As I’ve told you. As you rail against. All we have in common is our emptiness. And there’s nothing we could want to say to each other about that.’

*

The desk calendar caught her eye, and she counted backwards. Two months. In those two months, the counting backwards had become almost as much a ritual as once the counting forward had been. But once she’d had something to count forward to. Now she looked back: two months since Ron had come home; two months before that since he had killed himself. And since she had been happy …

Felicia sighed, locked her desk, and stood up. Time to go home and face him again.

When the agency she worked for had acquired a new account, Felicia had been able to go from part to full-time work. She welcomed the additional work as she welcomed everything that kept her busy, kept her mind occupied with thoughts that had nothing to do with Ron. Since they had stopped sleeping together, and she started skipping breakfast, they saw each other only in the evenings and on the dismal, empty weekends.

She dreaded being in Ron’s company, and found excuses to avoid it. She had started to wish – and almost to admit to herself – that Ron was still dead, and that the folly of revival had never been conceived.

But he was still her husband, and she loved the man he had been. Loyalty, memories, and sadness sent her home to him night after night.

Ron had dinner ready when she got home that evening, which meant that the ritual of drinks and conversation could be skipped.

Marvellous how I’ve adjusted to this, thought Felicia as she ate. She looked at her husband across the table. Life goes on. People adjust to anything, she thought. I’ve learned to live with this man who has taken the place of the husband I loved.

‘Do you think you’ll go back to work in the fall?’ she asked.

‘I won’t teach again,’ he said flatly. ‘I won’t compose. As I’ve told you.’

‘What will you do, then?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I could get a job.’

‘Not if you don’t go out and look for one, you won’t. Nobody’s going to pay you for sitting and staring out the window, you know.’

‘If you want me to, I’ll get a job. If money’s a problem—’

‘You know it’s not. You know that’s not what I’m asking.’ Felicia stopped, and made herself take a sip of water. Not so adjusted, she thought wryly. Not when I still insist on talking to him.

She looked at him, wondering if he looked different now than he had before he had died. Her memory had become so unreliable, with her perceptions of the revived Ron creeping over and covering the man she remembered. Yet his face, in life, had surely never looked so dead, not even in photographs. Even now, with the small motions of his chewing, he had the cold, still face of a statue. She looked at his face often these days, searching it for emotions. Sometimes she thought she found some trace – but always, she realised she was deluding herself. His face was a blank, and on it she imposed her own desires, as people will hear words within meaningless sound. There was nothing in his face, nothing in his eyes, nothing in his voice. He had looked upon nothingness, and it inhabited him.

‘I’ve always liked conversation with my meals,’ Felicia said, her tone falsely bright. ‘But I might as well talk to myself as talk to you.’

‘I could take dinner alone in my room.’

Felicia closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘You would live your life out in that room of yours if I let you. I could lock you in and pretend you didn’t exist. You’d be like Rochester’s mad wife, except that you wouldn’t scream at night or set fire to the draperies.’

‘You’d hardly know I was here.’

Felicia’s eyes flashed open. ‘Was that a joke? Are you being funny, Ron?’

He looked at her with blank incomprehension.

She sighed. ‘I’m the one who’s mad, imagining that you could tell a joke. Learning to hear dual meanings and inflections in your flat words. I need a drink.’

She got up and fixed herself a gin and tonic, then stood sipping it, leaning against the refrigerator and staring at the man she was married to.

‘I think I’m starting to hate you, Ron.’

He looked down at his plate, where he was carving his meat into small pieces, then eating them with no sign of pleasure.

‘Do you remember – I’m sure you do, since you have no unconscious to lose your memories in – how much in love we were when we married? Do you remember that I told you I would always love you, and that I had never loved anyone as much as you, and that I was certain that I could never love anyone else, ever again, half as much as I loved you? I meant it. I felt the same way when you died. I couldn’t believe you were gone from me, and I couldn’t imagine going on without you. Since I’m not the suicidal type, I decided I had to have you back.

‘I’m a lot like my father. I can’t sit back and accept things. I always have to be doing something about them, no mater how wrong I may be, no matter how big a fool I may make of myself.

‘And, like my father, maybe I just don’t know when to give up. I find it hard to admit defeat. But maybe I should have. Maybe I should have resigned myself to your death when I saw you curled up in the back seat of the car, an obvious suicide. I should have realised. But I didn’t even think, I didn’t even consider, that death had been your choice and perhaps I should leave you to it. I had to have you back. That was all I could think of. I loved you too much.

‘I still love the man I married. Ron Stanberry. Someone you’re just the shadow-image of. When I look at you, I feel surges of that love, and I have to remind myself that it’s for someone who’s not here.

‘I failed. I couldn’t bring him back. Instead, I got you. And you’re killing my memories of him. And I’m starting to hate you.

‘It’s not what I wanted.’

Ron had finished the food on his plate. He put down his fork. ‘Why don’t you divorce me?’

Felicia stared at him. ‘What would you do, if I divorced you? How would you get along?’

‘I could get a job. I’m not helpless. Something undemanding. Factory work. I wouldn’t mind the boredom.’

Felicia gave a little sob of laughter. ‘I can see it. On the assembly line all day, then home to a bare, one-room apartment. Great. I can’t give you over to a life like that. I can’t divorce you. You’re my responsibility.’ She rattled the ice cubes in her glass and opened the refrigerator for more gin and tonic water. ‘Wasn’t it the Chinese who believed that if you saved a man’s life you were ever after responsible for him? Something to make any humanitarian stop and think twice.

‘That’s how I feel about you. I brought you back from the death you freely chose. You wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t made that selfish decision.’

She carried her fresh drink, now mostly gin, to the table and sat down.

‘How are you feeling about life these days? It’s been a while since we’ve had a good, existentialist talk about your emptiness.’

Ron simply looked at her.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard it all before, anyway. Why should you tell me again? Why do I keep asking? A longing for human contact, a desperate belief in change, and a hope that some humanity still lingers inside you. I suppose I’d be better off talking to my typewriter. Do you want a drink? Can you still get drunk, by the way?’

‘No thank you.’

‘I remember how you used to get drunk. You were so funny. You couldn’t hold your liquor. Two beers, and you’d get so sweetly amorous.’ She finished off her drink and rose to get another.

‘Well, that’s the last of the tonic. It’ll have to be gin and gin after this.

‘Tell me,’ she said, sitting down again, ‘since you don’t care to comment on life, how do you feel about death these days?’

‘That hasn’t changed,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid of death, but I don’t long for it, either. I don’t think about it.’

‘You don’t resent me for forcing life on you?’

‘No.’

‘Because you don’t have to put up with it, you know. If you killed yourself, I wouldn’t try to stop you, and I wouldn’t have you revived, this time. A chance to do it over again, and do it right, this time.’

‘It doesn’t matter to me whether I live or die,’ he said. ‘I don’t care enough to choose, or to make any effort.’

‘I don’t suppose you’d consider doing it for me. Out of kindness, or in memory of the love we once shared.’

‘No. None of that means anything to me.’

She stared at him, bitterness in her gaze, and he looked back, unperturbed.

The telephone rang then, like the gong between rounds. It was Felicia’s father, with one of his frequent invitations to them to come over, have dessert, watch one of his movie cassettes with him. All other invitations Felicia refused, not wanting to put Ron on display, but with her father there was never any need for pretence. She could bring Ron or come alone, as she desired. Her father would stand by her. He was the only one who understood.

When she had hung up, Felicia turned to Ron. ‘Let’s both go,’ she said. ‘I’m too drunk now to drive myself over, and you can sit and stare at the walls in his house as well as you can here.’

They went out to the garage together, and Ron got into the driver’s seat of the Buick, the car he had killed himself in. Felicia hesitated beside the door on the passenger side, and then her hand dropped away. She looked behind her, at the flat, wooden wall of the sliding door. It was closed, but she could open it by touching a button. Or she could walk over and raise it manually. It wasn’t locked.

She walked around to Ron’s side of the car. ‘Go ahead and start it,’ she said. ‘I have to get something in the house.’

She looked into his eyes for some flicker: of knowledge, of pleasure, of fear, expectation, anything. But there was nothing. A fish, she thought, would show more emotion in the black pool of its eye.

He looked down at the wheel and turned on the ignition. The engine caught at once. It was a good car. No need to coddle it, no need for the foot to rest heavily on the gas pedal.

She turned and walked away from him. Inside the house, her heart suddenly began to pound, and she felt so dizzy she could not move forward another step. But that passed, and she went out the front door.

She stopped beside the garage and stood for perhaps two minutes, listening to the steady rumble of the engine, and then she began to walk. Her father’s house was some distance away – getting there would take her long enough. And then she would know.

She kept her mind nearly blank as she walked, listening to her firm footfalls on the pavement, watching her shadow change as the evening grew darker and the street lamps began to come on.

She didn’t start to cry until she reached her father’s house.

THE OTHER KIND

I don’t know how old I was when I first realised I was not a human being. Oh, my body was human – I was born to human parents, citizens of Keemah and descendants of some of the earliest colonists of Ederra – but that was by some freakish mistake.

As a boy I was miserable, ill at ease with myself and with others. I was clumsy at games and slow in school. Other children ignored me, for the most part; were kind or cruel as their natures dictated. I was too aware of my own inferiority even to hope for a friend.

My parents were ordinary people. I was the only piece out of place in their carefully regulated lives. To me they seemed distant, self-absorbed beings, mysteriously coming and going in a world beyond my comprehension. The wonder was that they had ever decided to have a child. I must have been a disappointment to them, but they dealt with the problem efficiently. I had everything a child could need or want. All the toys and treats my peers clamoured for were bestowed upon me without asking. I had special tutors, special lessons, sessions with a speech therapist and psychologist and even, for one brief period, a nanny. We’d always had servants, of course, but they were the mechanical kind. Some people might draw upon the native Ederran workforce, but my mother’s fastidious human nature made the idea of what she called ‘alien creatures’ to cook or clean for us abhorrent. My Ederran nanny, therefore, was a special concession.

I called her teddy, of course. My teddy. There are those who object to the term, claiming it is degrading to the Ederrans, but to my ear it is fond and childish, a tender nickname given to nameless creatures. ‘Ederran,’ after all, is our name, too.

My teddy came when I was four or five years old and stayed for some brief, unreckonable span of time. Her effect on me was to be life-long.

She was the whole world to me, all I wanted and all I knew. For the first – and, I now know, the last – time in my life I was truly happy. I sat on her lap, doing my best to bury my ugly, naked skin in her lush, silky fur while she patted and rocked me through the long, silent afternoons. She never minded when I tugged at her soft, floppy ears, or rode imperiously on her back, commanding her to turn this way or that, but those games were merely breaks in my real life, when I clung to her in timeless silence, losing all awareness of self in her faint, warm scent and the beat of her heart; at peace.

And then one day, without warning or explanation, my paradise ended. My teddy went away and did not return. Perhaps this was by command of the psychologist, perhaps my mother’s squeamishness was responsible. Perhaps my parents were afraid of losing me to her, unable to see that I was already lost.

Now you’re beginning to recognise me; the elements fall into place to form a familiar case history. Alienated as a child by emotionally distant parents, isolated from peers by physical handicaps (speech impediment, manual clumsiness, a tendency to overweight), driven to cling to and identify with the one positive source of warmth in a cold world; later, of course, the sexual difficulties …

Of course, the sexual difficulties. I was never attracted to my own kind, either male or female. There was nothing even vaguely erotic to me in smooth, furless skin, in the constant eruption of words and sounds, in the sweaty athletics that passed for lovemaking among human beings. I did not know how to cope with the sexual urges which assaulted me in my miserable adolescence. Alone in my bed, or locked into a dark closet, I would fondle myself and imagine that the hands which stroked my genitals were rough-palmed and softly-furred on the backs. Reaching orgasm, I smelt again the distinctive musk of her, and the heat that suffused my body might have come from the close embrace of my teddy.

But even for a timid, solitary adolescent an imaginary lover could not be satisfactory forever. I remember when the idea first came to me: I was riding the rails home from school, reclining in a padded seat and staring without interest at the tape loop which traversed the wall of the capsule: a dreary playlet extolling dental hygiene. I kept watching in an attempt to blot out awareness of the other passengers in the capsule, a boy and girl of about my own age, blissfully uncaring of my presence as they fondled each other, panting and moaning.

When the capsule doors unsealed at my station I rushed out, hot, bothered and vaguely envious. They were lucky, those two lovers, in having each other. My eyes fell upon a shaggy figure rubbing a soapy brush in careful swipes against the tiled white wall of the station. I stared at the labouring Ederran and felt a longing so powerful I nearly fainted. People pushed past me and someone swore; I was blocking the walkway.

Somehow, I began moving again and made my way up to the street, but I might as well have been sleepwalking. Outside the cold air cleared my head somewhat, and I could think again. I knew what I wanted now: I wanted a teddy.

I was in a street of shops, and their tinted glass fronts winked and sparkled at me like jewels. I wasn’t ready to walk the few short blocks home and face my parents, so I moved slowly along the street, pausing to look into each shop window. Instead of the merchandise I saw myself, reflected in emerald or ruby hues.

I hated myself, hated the way I looked: tall and plump and blond, my face and body hairless. My face was perpetually unhappy, the downturned mouth and deep-set eyes giving me a faintly petulant look which irritated adults. In a sudden flash of despair I wondered how I could inflict the creature that I was upon some innocent Ederran. I might be failing my class in human sexuality, but I had learned a few things from it which reinforced what I already knew from holodreaming. I knew that bestiality was wrong because animals were innocents who could not give their consent to sexual use by human beings. The Ederrans were something more than mere animals, but were not on the same level as human beings.

And yet people did have intercourse with Ederrans – I knew that. Ederrans were sexually receptive to human beings. Although they never initiated encounters, they seemed to welcome and enjoy human sexual advances. They were not, therefore, poor dumb victims, but neither were they suitable partners. Ederrans might mingle with us doing menial jobs, but at night they went home to their own. There could be no meaningful intellectual contact between human and Ederran any more than there could be cross-fertilisation.

Still the fruitless, frowned-upon mating was common. Human-Ederran intercourse was not actually prohibited: people who indulged in it occasionally were accepted; people who made a habit of it might be shunned, but they would not be punished. I had experienced the subject many times in holodreams. A common theme, particularly in comedy, was the fumbling first attempts of a human adolescent, learning about life with a large and willing teddy.

The thought cheered me. After all, I was an adolescent learning about life. I looked around the new interest as I turned homewards. The sky was the muddy yellow-brown common to the season of mists, but that afternoon was cool and clear, the fresh air giving no hint of the damp, heavy fog which would descend in an hour or so. The tall, thin Obalil trees swayed almost constantly in the breeze, the lizard nests in the lowest branches making sounds like the clicking of castanets. There were a few people out, some on the moving walkways and others taking exercise on foot or bicycle, but I saw no Ederrans. This was not unusual, for in such a residential area the only Ederrans would be the occasional housekeeper or gardener hard at work, but I was disappointed. Having made up my mind to take one as a lover, I was ready to tumble forthwith into the shelter of some hedge with the next Ederran I met.

My parents were entertaining friends when I arrived. Normally I would have rushed past them to my room, to wrap myself in another holodream, but the sight of a low table spread with food made me realise I was hungry. When my father invited me to join them, I did – to his obvious surprise.

As I sat down I stuffed a piece of cake into my mouth to save me from having to say anything. I needn’t have bothered, for after presenting me to the visitors, Enoch and Vi, my parents ignored me, as if I had become part of the furniture. It was their customary attitude, and it suited me.

‘I don’t see why we should restrict immigration,’ said my mother, picking up the threads of the conversation. ‘We’ve plenty for everyone here.’

‘We won’t have plenty forever – not if we’re overrun. We could wind up like Gleya,’ said Vi. She was a small, bald woman in body paint. Her nakedness repelled me.

‘What’s Gleya?’ asked Enoch. He had a high, piping voice which was at odds with his powerful frame.

Vi gave him a look of contempt. ‘What do you care? If it’s not fun to eat, and they don’t use it in holodreams, you don’t know about it. You never question, you never try. You might as well be a teddy, if you weren’t bone-idle.’

She was whipping herself into a fury, which my father interrupted. ‘What does the history of some second-rate planet have to do with us?’

‘At least you know Gleya is a planet, which is more—’

‘I learned all that at school. I studied colonial history. What does it matter? I just happen to have a good memory for even very boring, useless facts.’

‘Facts,’ said Vi, almost spitting the word. ‘Is that what you learned at school? I don’t think so. Schools aren’t about knowledge. They’re assessment centres and training camps, to ensure society gets the best use out of each individual.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked my mother.

‘Nothing … if you happen to be one of the lucky ones. If it means you get opportunities to grow, and to enjoy the good life you’re so fond of. But what about the others? What about the misfits, who have to suffer and work so that we can be comfortable? Don’t you realise what your good life means? That our whole society is founded on slavery?’

‘Vi, what have you been eating?’ said my mother. ‘There’s no slavery on Ederra – there never has been!’

‘She’s talking about the teddies,’ said my father wearily.

My attention was caught, although I continued to munch my cake. The teddies – my passion. What had Vi said?

‘Yes,’ said Vi. ‘The teddies. Our slaves. If they’re not an exploited class, I don’t know what is.’

‘Oh, honestly,’ said my mother. ‘You can’t talk about the teddies like that! They’re not people, you know. And they don’t have to work for us – we don’t make them do it – they help us out of love. Everyone knows that!’

I nodded, for this was one lesson I had absorbed during my earliest years of schooling. The settling of Ederra had been a far cry from the bloody battles fought on some worlds. The Ederrans had welcomed us, and befriended us from the first, and annually Friendship Day celebrated the continuing peaceful, almost symbiotic, relationship between the two races.

‘And look at all we give them,’ my mother went on. ‘All the benefits of civilisation! They choose to build their towns on the edges of our cities – they could always go off and live in the wilderness, but they like to be near us. They love us, and we make them happy.’

‘Happiness isn’t the issue. And happiness isn’t enough. It is possible to be happy and still be enslaved.’

‘So what are you saying? That because we know better than the Ederrans that we shouldn’t allow them to work for us? That we should drive them away, make them live by themselves in the wilderness, or keep them on reservations? Maybe we should never have come here, but we can’t go back now. For better or worse we’re a part of the teddies’ lives, and they are a part of ours. How can you call that slavery? We haven’t made them what they are – it’s in their nature to love us.’

For a moment Vi looked uncertain. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean – but actually—’

‘Vi means the other kind,’ said Enoch. ‘Not the real teddies – the others.’

‘What?’ I said. I couldn’t help myself, but I should have kept quiet. For now they had noticed me, and they were frowning.

‘Back to your room,’ said my father. ‘This isn’t for you. Go do your homework, or holodream or something. Go on, now.’

I had not been punished for years but I found it impossible to disobey my father. Once out of the room, although my heart pounded unpleasantly with guilt, I lingered and strained my ears for more. I had to know what this mysterious ‘other kind’ of Ederran might be.

I heard my mother say, defensively, ‘If he does, it will be his choice, and it will make him happy. You can’t call that slavery.’

‘I can and I do. Happiness has nothing to do with it. If it really was his choice – but he’s been subtly programmed for it all along. You know that. Ever since his early tests showed that he wasn’t likely to qualify—’

‘But that’s just it! The tests didn’t make him – they just showed that he didn’t fit in. And he’s miserable because he doesn’t fit in. Why should he have to be unhappy all his life? Why shouldn’t he have a choice? It’s not something we would want for ourselves, but we shouldn’t deny it to those who do. It does make them happy – there have been all sorts of tests. It’s the best thing for them. I’ve read all the literature—’

I felt myself blushing. I knew, although I didn’t understand exactly what she meant, that my mother was talking about me. I crept away to my room, feeling clumsy and unwanted, and wishing with all my heart that I could find, before I died, a place where I belonged.

*

Every Ederran city has its Teddytown, that pathetic cluster of mud huts and wooden shanties clinging to the skirts of the greater human city. I set out for ours one afternoon in the season of sun, and rode the rails to the farthest station on the Eastern line.

For me, for everyone, the descent into Teddytown is a potent, mythic experience. Others before me have turned it into the stuff of art, or at least sustaining entertainment, but I will not even try. My emotions and thoughts were real, but they would sound clichéd if I tried to set them down. There’s nothing special about me, and I have no creative or artistic talents: the tests given to me regularly throughout my school days showed that with a depressing, undeniable thoroughness. But I must tell you the bare facts. For me they glow in memory with a magical radiance, and perhaps, from your own experience, you can clothe them with a certain conviction, at least.

I had never before ventured so far from home. This part of Keemah, near the outskirts, was utterly strange to me. People didn’t live here; the massive stone buildings around me – shining faintly pink in the reflected glow of the setting sun – were factories and warehouses, not designed for beauty but for utility. Only factory owners and inspectors would occasionally visit this clean yet desolate part of the great city.

Just as I was beginning to feel rather frightened by the emptiness and silence of the streets, there was the sound as of a great wheel turning, and openings appeared in the sides of the large, featureless buildings. A crowd of Ederrans, voiceless and slow, emerged. Of course: the workers were going home.

I fell in among them as they walked towards Teddytown, my skin prickling and nerves tingling at their presence. I was clumsy, drunk with their nearness. Whenever I bumped into one a shock of joy, nearly as potent as an orgasm, passed through me. I had worried about finding my way, but now, a part of the large, moving crowd, I did not even pause to notice where we went, but let them carry me along. Homeward bound.

They showed no interest in me, but no distaste, either. They neither welcomed me nor drove me away. Whenever I cast a glance at one I found the kindly, animal face looking straight ahead, a part of the herd, serene and unaware. Gradually their indifference lulled me into peace. I didn’t mind the long walk, or worry about what would happen when I arrived. I felt I could go on walking forever, effortlessly, at one with the crowd.

And then we were in Teddytown. It was cleaner than I had expected, but every bit as crudely built and crowded as its depictions. Hovels – some rounded mud domes, others narrow wooden boxes – were crammed together without obvious planning on either side of narrow, unpaved lanes. I wondered if this was an Ederran attempt to imitate human architecture, or if they had lived in such warrens even before we came to their planet. No attempt had been made at decoration, and everything was mudcoloured.

But if there was no beauty, neither was there squalor. There was no garbage on the twisting, slightly muddy streets, and I saw no signs of untidiness as I wandered through the maze. The simplicity of it all appealed to me.

What struck me most was the silence. Although Keemah seemed to buzz in the distance, humming just on the edge of my consciousness, Teddytown was still and calm. The Ederrans had no vehicles and few machines. They could have had any of the benefits of civilisation we humans had brought with us, but – as far as I could tell – they had accepted only our plumbing and pollution-free methods of heating and lighting their homes. They had no interest in holodreaming. Although not deaf they disliked unnecessary noise.

Teddies, born without vocal chords, could not speak. They possessed no language of their own, but had learned a few simple gestures for the benefit of the human settlers, and seemed to understand, in a limited way, human speech. They did not feel trapped or limited by their silence, and now I felt slightly ashamed, as the descendant of a noisy, conquering race. I fought the urge to clear my throat, and tried to breathe more quietly.

I was a spy moving through alien streets, watching the natives at their leisure. Guilty and aroused, I glanced in doorways and peered through windows, seeing them embrace, prepare food, or stroll through the streets. Some puffed on pipes, some snoozed against doorsteps, some swept the streets with enormous, crudely-made brooms. My heart caught in my throat at the perfection of it all and my own loneliness swelled within me.

They did not make me feel an intruder; none stared or seemed disturbed by my presence, none drew back or barred my way. I was as free as they all were, free even to come and go in their tiny houses. The gentle, undemanding gaze of an animal met my eyes when I looked through a round window. Through another doorway I caught sight of two figures entwined on a floor mat – one figure furred, the other as repellently naked as I was myself. I hurried away from that house, my heart like a knife in my chest, and tried to lose myself, to forget.

Gradually the silence of that primitive place wrapped itself about me and I felt the knots of my soul loosen and let go, one by one. There were no rules here, no expectations, no lessons to be learned. For a little while I could pretend that I belonged.

The smell of cooking tickled my nose and I realised I was hungry. From several chimneys drifted warm aromas: baking bread, stewing meats and vegetables, something malty and rich. I walked through an open door and found three Ederrans sitting on the floor with bowls of a succulent-smelling soup before them. I pointed to my mouth and then to my stomach, and one of them rose and ladled out another bowl for me. They watched benignly, waiting until I sat down awkwardly on the floor and took a cautious sip. At that moment I became one of them, and they turned their attention back to their food. A new feeling of warmth and comfort spread through me with the hot soup as we ate companionably together.

When I had mopped up the last bit of rich, tasty soup with a morsel of brown bread, I remained seated, watching as the teddies washed the dishes and cleaned up around me. One of them lit a pipe and offered me a puff, and we sat together on the doorstep, passing the pipe back and forth, watching the light fade from the sky.

With the fall of night, I felt I must leave. I spoke no word of thanks, for words in that place were wrong as well as unnecessary. I smiled at them, and all three of my new friends touched me before I went. From those brief caresses I knew they had accepted me. As simply and completely as that.

Only afterwards did I realise I had not accomplished what I had come for: I was still a virgin.

And yet it didn’t matter. I knew that now. Something far stronger and more important than a merely sexual need had called me to Teddytown. I had found a place where I belonged.

It became my habit to visit Teddytown every evening. My parents did not question me – I think they were relieved I had at last started to have a life of my own. Going out was an improvement over my former habit of sprawling in a stupor, surrounded by holographic images.

By the end of the first week I could detect differences among the Ederrans. They were no longer a homogeneous mass to my human eyes. I could tell males from females at a glance, but learning to recognise individuals was more difficult. I was determined not to give in to the human habit and nickname them: if Ederrans did not need names among themselves, neither did I.

I usually took supper with the three Ederrans I had met on my first visit, frequently bringing gifts of food so as not to be a burden. I did not know what their relationship was, why they lived three together in one tiny house, but I found myself thinking of them as a family: father, mother and daughter.

One evening in the third week since my first visit, our usual ritual altered. After we finished the meal the ‘parents’ went out, closing the door behind them. The younger female and I were alone together in the little round room.

My heart began to pound and I scarcely breathed as she moved closer to me and began to stroke my arm. I needed no words to know that this was more than a friendly gesture: I took her in my arms and learned the meaning of love.

I use that word intentionally. It was what I felt. And nothing that has happened since, nothing I have learned, can diminish what happened to me then, with my first lover.

She became a habit, too, my warm, furry lover: like the long walk to Teddytown, the evening meal, the pipe I shared on the doorstep.

One night I stayed until morning. When I went home my parents did not ask me where I had been, but there was a feeling of celebration in the air, despite my sullen, defensive silence. I was growing up, and they were pleased.

It was my last season at school. I had reached the age when young people generally left their families to set up their own homes, to embark on their own careers. I had no plans for my life, however: I was qualified for no work and had no interest in further education. I only wanted to be allowed to go on as I had been, but that, of course, was impossible.

I dreamed of moving to Teddytown, but that was only a dream. Humans were not allowed to buy or lease the land which was provided free to the natives, and zoning restrictions ensured that I could not move my new-found Ederran family into the city with me.

I would have to work. The allowance my parents gave me would stop as soon as I left school, and if I could not find work for myself the city would assign me to something in exchange for room and board. But I did not want to be provided for: I wanted to make my own life, find my own happiness. I went on avoiding the day of decision.

One morning like many other mornings I woke in the warm, round hut in Teddytown and didn’t want to leave. I could hear the others stirring, but I held my lover close and refused to let her rise even after the other two had left for work. She did not struggle; once she understood what I wanted, she relaxed and did as I wished. I had sometimes wondered just how far an Ederran would have to be pushed before fighting back. They seemed to possess no wish or will of their own. It was as if they existed merely to reflect and fulfil the desires of the human beings around them. It made the question of how they had lived before the coining of the humans that much more puzzling.

But although such questions occurred to me, they did not obsess me. I wondered briefly and then forgot, more interested, really, in my own reactions.

As I made love that morning to my acquiescent teddy I was absorbed in sensation, not thought. I had never before lain with her in daylight; never before had I seen her so clearly and so close. As I lifted one soft, floppy ear, stroking it tenderly, I saw a thin line of scar, and the breath stopped in my throat.

She felt the change in me and looked up. In that moment I saw in her eyes an awareness and intelligence that I had never before seen; which I had never even imagined might exist.

The next moment she had turned her face away and was nibbling gently but demandingly at my neck. But it was too late for that; far too late. I had gone utterly cold. I pushed her away, down flat on her back, and bent over her. She tried, desperately, to distract me with love-play, but I put a sharp halt to that. And so she submitted. She lay still and let me examine her. What else could a teddy do?

Now that I looked, the signs were everywhere. How had I missed the unmistakable humanity in her face, how had I been so easily fooled by the mask of fur and the outward pretence? I parted the silky hair at her throat and saw the most damning evidence of all: the scar tissue left by the operation which had removed her vocal chords. I left her there, lying in her human tears.

I was furious. I felt I had been cheated, tricked and made a fool of. To have believed myself in love with one who was nothing more than a mockery, a former human misfit, was a blow to my always shaky self-esteem. If I could be so easily misled, how could I expect to recognise true happiness – and what made me think I deserved it?

A whole week I stayed away from Teddytown, and the pressures built up intolerably. My parents urged me to get a job, to move out, to make a life for myself. What I did was not important, they said, but I must do something. I was an adult now, and I must choose.

It seemed so obvious when I finally decided. I had been happy among the Ederrans as I had never been with my own people. I wanted to live in Teddytown. For a human being, this was not possible, but I could have myself changed. I would become a teddy.

I thought this was a brave and original decision, not realising that my whole miserable life had been a journey to that end. The choice had been made for me some time back in my childhood, when I had snuggled against the warm, furry body of my teddy. Really, there was nothing else I could do.

But it took me some time to work up the courage to go to a transformation clinic. I expected scorn or distaste; I thought psychiatrists would be enlisted to try to change my mind. But everyone I spoke to seemed sympathetic. They found my desire understandable, not odd. Even my parents seemed almost relieved – at last I was doing something – and took my momentous news very calmly.

I had to undergo a great many tests, of course: guided dreaming, hypnoregression, and hours of interviews with counsellors trained to spot any hidden neuroses or uncertainties. No one ever tried to discourage me, and all the tests and discussions served to reinforce my conviction. For the first time in my life, I began to believe that I was normal. I’d felt like a misfit for so long because I’d been trying to be something that I was not. Now I knew the truth about myself: I was a teddy who’d had the misfortune to be born inside a human skin.

The preliminaries went smoothly, and soon I was pronounced ready for the sequence of operations and treatments which would eventually transform me into what I knew myself to be.

There was only one catch: the cost. Despite the team of psychologists who declared me unfit to live a full and happy life in my present physical form, the course of treatment necessary to turn me into an Ederran was considered ‘cosmetic surgery’, and, as such, it was very costly.

But other poor souls had gone before me, and there was a system. I had only to sign a contract, an agreement to work for the city for a given number of years, and I could embark on the course of treatment immediately. My job would be unskilled labour, working in a factory with other Ederrans. Nothing could have pleased me more. Even if money had been no problem I would have wanted to work among the Ederrans. I wanted no special privileges. I wanted to be one of them, to forget that there had ever been any other sort of life open to me.

The transformation from human to Ederran would be slow. It was carefully staged to allow the individual time for adjustment, and until the final operation severed my vocal chords, I was told I could turn back at any point. But I could not imagine changing my mind. Already I felt an imposter in a human body.

I moved into a government housing block and started my new job. The factory where I worked was filled with Ederrans, of course, but there were others like myself, in various stages of transformation. These I shunned. They were repellent to me, reminding me of myself, and how I must appear to others.

In the evenings I went back to Teddytown where I took my meals and found new lovers. I had everything I had always wanted, and I should have been happy.

We made love in darkness, always, but late at night, when I should have slept contentedly in a warm embrace, my fingers would creep as if of their own accord to trace the tell-tale scars beneath the thick fur. Under the fur I felt the human bones, just as I could now see human features, human customs and manners, hidden and distorted by pretence. But still, and always, there.

It became a desperate, obsessive search. Every night a new lover – and every one was like me. A freak, a misfit, an imposter.

Where were the real Ederrans? Were they avoiding me? Was I still too human for their liking? Or had the transformed humans, over the years, taken over this Teddytown, driving the true-born teddies somewhere else?

Perhaps they lived in the wild, scorning cities. I had never heard of such a thing, but perhaps the truth was kept hidden from such as me. I did not know whom to ask, nor how to find out.

The soft, golden fur grew all over my body, and day by day I took on more of the semblance of an Ederran. But I knew my appearance was a lie, and it tortured me. Outwardly I was changing, but not inwardly. I was still myself, still a misfit. I did not know how else to be, how to change myself from within. For that I would need a model – a true Ederran, not the fakes and freaks around me.

Hating myself, and stumbling uncertainly (for teddies do not question), I tried to ask one of the counsellors at the clinic. Had I been sent to live among false teddies as some sort of test? When would I be allowed to meet the real ones?

She seemed surprised. She said she had never noticed any differences among the Ederrans – oh, she could tell male from female, and recognised a few, but basically they all looked alike to her.

When I insisted, and she could see how miserable I was, she told me that I must stop questioning, stop looking for differences. I would never be happy, and never be an Ederran, until I believed I was. Then she scheduled me for some special counselling sessions.

These sessions left me more confused than before. Instead of answering my questions, the new counsellors told me that my curiosity was a human trait which I must eliminate if I wanted to become an Ederran. I was offered drugs and hypnotherapy which they said would cure my curiosity by making me forget. They could make me believe that I had never been human. As well as a new future, they could create a whole new past for me. They could make me happy if only I would let them.

Happiness isn’t the issue. And happiness isn’t enough. I remembered hearing that without understanding. And now I felt it. I wanted something more, something other than happiness. I wanted truth.

At school they had taught us that answers could be found in libraries. But I also learned at school how difficult it was for me to find those answers. Now, as a teddy, I knew my mind would go as blank as the blinking green screen on the terminal when I tried to formulate my question.

Casting about in my mind for someone who might help me I recalled that friend of my parents, the woman named Vi. She had spoken about the Ederrans – and about slavery, and happiness – and I’d had the feeling that she knew something most people, including my parents, did not. I had seen her once or twice while holodreaming, zooming past her lecturing face – she was some sort of public scholar, an authority on something. If she couldn’t tell me, perhaps no one could.

Vi answered her door and looked at me in a way I had come to expect from most human beings – with pity, but not, I was relieved to note, disgust. She did not recognise me, but when I introduced myself she looked a little shocked. She recovered quickly, however, and invited me in, asking about my parents.

‘I don’t see them much,’ I said. ‘They don’t know how to act towards me now.’

‘Yes,’ said Vi. ‘I can well imagine … What brings you here?’

Her voice was sharp and cold. In my nervousness, I found it hard to speak. ‘Teddies,’ I said. ‘Them, the Ederrans. I want to know. About them.’

She looked me up and down. ‘You must know a lot more than I. Living among them. Becoming one of them.’

I shook my head. ‘No. The ones I’ve met are all like me. Changed, not born. They’re only pretending. I can’t find any real Ederrans.’

‘What, not in all of Teddytown?’

‘No.’ I touched my neck, where the incision would one day be made, and traced a line. ‘They all have the scar. Every one I’ve met. I’ve been looking, believe me.’ I had the feeling that she already knew what I was telling her, that she’d heard it before, perhaps discovered it herself.

‘Look, just forget about it,’ she said. ‘What does it matter if you can’t find them? You’re getting what you wanted, aren’t you?’

‘It’s important,’ I said. ‘See, I don’t want my body – not just my body – changed. I have to change, too, inside. And I don’t know how, I don’t know how to be a real Ederran. If I could find them, they could teach me.’

She sighed, and held herself as if she were cold. ‘You are what you are,’ she said softly. ‘Nobody else can change you.’

I had the impression she was talking to herself. ‘Just tell me where they are,’ I said. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘You don’t want to know,’ she said, and I began to shake.

She saw my terror but offered no comfort. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘You’ve felt it, haven’t you? No one has to tell you. You’ve felt it.’

‘No.’

Then she was pushing me towards the door. ‘Forget about it,’ she said. ‘Go away, be what you want to be. Don’t question. Believe what they tell you at the clinic. You were miserable, but now you’ve got a chance for happiness. The truth doesn’t matter.’

‘It does,’ I said. I stood firm, not letting her push me.

She looked up into my ugly, half-and-half face. ‘If you mean that, why do you want to change yourself? Why do you want to live a lie?’

‘I wanted to be happy.’

She sighed, and the tension went out of her body. I knew then that she would tell me what I wanted to know, and I began to wish I’d never asked.

‘There’s no happiness in finding out,’ she said. ‘Believe me.’

‘Happiness isn’t enough,’ I said.

‘That sounds like me talking. Teddies don’t ask questions.’

‘I’m not a teddy. I’m not anything. Tell me.’

‘How you knew to come to me,’ she said wonderingly. ‘I’ve one life already on my conscience. I thought I could cure him with truth, but it was a poison. That’s why they make it so hard to find out. Dangerous drug, truth. You know they can make you forget, at the clinic? If I tell you something you can’t bear to know, they can take it away again. All you have to do is ask. They can give you happiness. They won’t force it on you.’ She sneered. ‘That’s their out. All your life they push you in one direction, but then at the last they hold back. They pretend it was your choice all along. Your decision, they say. Free will. To be or not to be … as if choosing your chains made you less a slave!’

‘I don’t care about that – I’ll be a slave, if I can only find them. If they’ll have me.’

‘Who?’

‘The Ederrans.’

‘They’re everywhere! Look around you.’ She smirked unhappily. ‘We’re all Ederrans. There are more today than ever before.’

‘Not your kind … not my kind of – I mean, the real teddies. The first ones. Those who were here when the human colonists came.’

‘They’re dead.’

I started to protest, thinking she was playing with me, but the expression on her face stopped me. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘All of them. Not just dead. Extinct. The whole race. For years and years now. Would you like to sit down? Can I get you a trank?’

I didn’t move. I didn’t even feel surprised.

She rushed on, as if glad to get it out. ‘It’s true. Believe it or not. Don’t believe it. I shouldn’t have told you. It’s not the official story; it’s not what they say to schoolchildren; it’s not what people want to believe. But it is the historical truth. People try, people change their memories, but they can’t really change the past. It happened, and it leaves a deposit to be found – if you look hard enough, if you search the original records the way I did. The native Ederran population had completely died out by the end of our first century here.’

‘How? Why?’

She shrugged. ‘They couldn’t tell us, and our scientists couldn’t figure it out. They seemed to lose the will to live. There were plagues, and then they stopped reproducing. They simply died, one by one, of various causes. It was never a large population. Perhaps that sort of thing simply happens to species all the time. Maybe we triggered it – a lot of the first colonists felt it was their fault, that if they didn’t carry some actual, deadly virus, that the human presence was in itself a virus. That the Ederrans on some level decided to commit suicide rather than try to compete or coexist with us.’

‘But why – why are there so many—’

‘I had this theory for a while – this paranoid, crazy theory – that it was a plot. Some computer’s idea of the perfect society, with lots of content, cuddly slaves serving the upper class. Our society does benefit from it, there’s no doubt of that. And it’s perpetuated because it is so useful to have a cheap, uncomplaining labour force. It also cuts down on crime, and the birthrate. So we make it easier for people to stop being people. We weed out the misfits at an early age, and suggest to them that they’re not good enough to make it as human beings … but that’s all right, they don’t have to struggle or feel unhappy, because there’s a place for them, too. If you don’t fit in with the humans, the Ederrans will take you. Don’t change the world, change your body.

‘The teddies live on, not only in holodreams, but in our hearts. In people like you.’ Briefly she touched her hand to my furry chest.

‘It’s not a plot,’ she continued. ‘I wanted to believe it was, that there was someone besides myself to blame when my son – But I’m too good a scholar. I can’t settle for fantasy, no matter how satisfying it seems.

‘We say the Ederrans need us, but of course they didn’t. They died of us. It’s we who need them. Not just economically, not physically, as servants, but psychologically. Emotionally. I don’t know why, but we were unable to let them die. Since we couldn’t save them one way, we had to resurrect them, even if it was with our own bodies. As far as I can tell from the records, the first humans to go native did so in a spirit of atonement. They felt responsible for Ederran deaths, and this was their way of working out their guilt, and doing something positive to keep the native culture alive.

‘Or maybe they were fooling themselves. Maybe they, like the Ederrans they imitated, were trying to commit racial suicide. It might be a form of death-wish. I don’t know what drove them to it. I don’t know what makes you hate yourself so much, what makes you believe that you’re not really human. Sometimes I think people like you are far more alien than the original Ederrans.’

‘Why?’ I asked, meaning now: Why me?

Vi’s voice was gentle when she replied, and I knew that she was going to offer me an antidote to her truth, whether a more palatable version, or a kindly fib.

‘Some people – scholars, psychologists, philosophers – have suggested there’s another answer. Not guilt, not self-hatred, not cultural conditioning. Their answer lies with the Ederrans. They say that perhaps the Ederrans, although they perished physically, are still among us. Their souls survived death to be reborn into human bodies. We are the new Ederrans in more than one sense. We haven’t simply replaced them, but have incorporated them within ourselves. And for some of us, the Ederran soul is too strong, too self-aware to be absorbed. It can’t adjust to humanity because it still remembers the old ways, and longs for them. It’s not comfortable in a human body, and struggles to recreate the vanished self.

‘A lot of people believe that. It might help you.’

But she did not believe it, and neither could I. I’d gone beyond the fantasies that had sustained me throughout my childhood. The truth stuck in my throat, and I couldn’t swallow anything else.

Yet I went back to the clinic. I went back to my factory job, and back to Teddytown. What else could I do? Where else did I belong? I am a misfit, and I know it. I refused the drugs and the enforced forgetting – it was a point of pride. Not so much to remember what I was, but always to know what I was not.

I was what I had been made to be.

They made me: the psychologists, my parents, teachers, society. They told me I was a failure as a human being, as if humanity was a game I had never mastered. I had believed them. But now I could see that life as an Ederran was just another game – a simpler game, more easily mastered, but no better for that.

Somehow, I go on playing. And wishing I could still believe. But wherever I look I see human suffering, human eyes peering sadly through furry masks. Where once I saw peace I now see self-deception. In the calm silence I now hear tension, and a forced forgetting. I wonder how many of them know what I know, but I can never ask.

At night, in my dreams, I am happy and at home in a furry animal body, knowing myself safe among my own kind. And then they look at me, and remove their masks, and I see their furless human faces grinning and mocking me. I wake up crying human tears, realising again that I am a stranger here, and alone.

BIRDS OF THE MOON

The birds who live on the moon have heads very like the heads of men; but they are earless, and their faces, which wear no expression, look curiously dead. They fly slowly, heavily, through the airless night and perch alone on bleak rock and in crater walls.

*

Amalie woke suddenly, as if cold talons had closed about her wrist. Her husband’s slow, regular breathing filled the room like moonlight: he slept. She turned her head on the pillow to look at him, and froze at the sight of his open eyes. They were open, but saw only in his dreams.

Before he went to the moon her husband had slept like any man, with eyes closed. Sometimes Amalie knew that her husband had never come back from the moon: as surely as the men who had died up there he had left the most essential part of himself still circling in space. And now his eyes stared perpetually beyond her, at the harsh landscapes of the moon.

Amalie moved on the bed, away from her husband; slid to the edge and got up. He did not stir. She was wide awake, almost alarmingly so. She rarely felt so awake in the daytime, and she wondered if perhaps she were only dreaming she was awake: that would explain the peculiar quality of her awareness.

In the hall she paused before Carmen’s door, then opened it quietly. The room was brightly lit by the moon: the curtains were open and the window cranked ajar. Amalie scarcely glanced at Carmen’s empty bed; almost without needing to think she had crossed the room and was at the window. She pushed it open and leaned out. The driveway glittered like snow in the moonlight, and the grass that edged it looked black.

And there was Carmen, in a white nightgown that reached to her ankles, her feet bare, her arms outstretched, whirling around on the lawn in a silent dance. Her face was solemn, the dance a ritual of madness. Her mother hesitated, her palms flat against the window sill, ready to climb out after her. Then she turned away and went through the house to the front door.

‘Carmen!’ Her voice shivered the still air. The little girl turned her face away from the flat, silver face of the moon and stopped dancing. Eyes down, moving like a badly made doll, she went into the house. Her mother tried to touch her, but Carmen shrank away, drawing herself close to the wall, her body repelling human touch. Her mother, knowing this response, let her hands drop like useless wings to her sides.

Her husband had turned over in bed.

‘Jim?’ she said. The room was silent; she could not hear him breathing.

‘Jim?’

He started to breathe again, and Amalie let out her own breath. She wondered if he were awake and pretending to sleep. She got back into bed. They slept back to back, a wall of air between them.

*

The birds who live on the moon are built in a peculiar fashion: large and heavy-bodied with wings small for their size. When at rest their wings fit into their sides and seem to vanish. Their feet are large, ugly and strong: their grip is so powerful that the birds can sleep in any position – upside down, projecting outward – so long as the rock they anchor themselves to is firmly fixed.

*

Carmen set the table for breakfast, putting down the place-mats and the silverware and the napkins, the plates, the cereal bowls, a glass for milk and a smaller glass for juice, and coffee cups in saucers for Mummy and Daddy. Carmen moved in metronomic rhythm, taking the same number of steps on every trip to the table, working out her movements as if they were the steps to a boring but precise dance number.

Amalie scrambled eggs and watched her. Jim came in, dressed for work. She thought she remembered that he had told her he wouldn’t have to go in today; that they didn’t need him today; but she didn’t ask. He would only tell her she was wrong. And did it matter? He could go where he wanted, tell her what he liked.

‘Sleep well?’ she asked.

‘Sure. I’ll just have coffee.’

She wondered if he would go to the Centre today, just as if reporting for work. She wondered if that were where he spent most of his time. Or perhaps he would go into Houston, to the museum with the moon rocks and the capsules scarred by space and re-entry and now outfitted with dummy astronauts. She remembered the first time she and Jim had been taken on a tour of NASA, when he had first been transferred to Houston, before he had even told her there was a possibility he might go to the moon (but she had guessed) – she remembered a field, part of which had been covered for some reason with those chalk-white oyster shells so popular for paving dirt roads and driveways and parking lots.

Their guide, joking, had pointed to this section of field and said it was the simulated moonscape used in training astronauts to walk on the moon. Jim had leaped off the side of the road onto the shells and pulled a stray weed that pushed up through them. ‘Yes, Houston Control, there is life on the moon!’

She thought about it now, that small stretch of dead-white shell and rock surrounded by Texas fields. She thought of Jim standing there and wishing for the moon.

‘You should eat breakfast,’ Amalie said. ‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.’

‘I know. I’ll have coffee.’

Carmen was taking Cheerios out of the box in handfuls and layering them into her cereal bowl.

‘Carmen, you want some nice scrambled eggs?’

Carmen shook her head three times sharply back and forth and went on with the business of the Cheerios.

Amalie looked at the eggs with dislike. She was never hungry in the morning; Jim rarely wanted anything more than coffee, and Carmen wouldn’t be interested in anything else until she had finished preparing and eating her Cheerios – by which time the eggs would be cold. She wondered why she bothered, and scraped the steaming eggs into the disposal.

‘Working today?’ she asked Jim. He had ignored the place set for him at the table and was leaning against the wall, blowing on his coffee.

‘Some stuff to do, yeah,’ he said. ‘I may be back for lunch.’

‘I’ll be out with Carmen until two,’ Amalie poured herself a cup of coffee and watched her daughter bathing the neatly stacked oat circles with milk. ‘Anything special you want for dinner?’

He shook his head, sipped his coffee.

She went on in the same tone, ‘You were sleeping with your eyes open again.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Jim, I saw you.’

He shook his head.

‘I did.’

He shrugged and put down his coffee. ‘Well, so what? I don’t believe you, but so what? So I’ve taken to sleeping with my eyes open – it shouldn’t keep you awake; it’s not like I snored.’

‘It’s eerie.’

‘It’s eerie. I find it even eerier that you should keep waking up and catching me at it.’ He turned his head, dismissing her. ‘Daddy’s going to work now, baby girl.’

‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ said Carmen. She did not look up from her cereal when she spoke, and Amalie felt a deepening of her depression. Every morning she took Carmen’s response as a signal of how the day would go – when she looked at her father and spoke it would be a good day. When she did not look at him, it would be a bad day.

‘Bye bye,’ said Amalie listlessly. Her lips and Jim’s bumped like passing strangers.

‘Bye bye,’ he said. ‘Bye bye, Carmen.’

*

The birds who live on the moon are black and white. The moon is black and white, the landscape stark and pure. These birds have no conception of colour; they know only darkness and light. The brilliancy of unhindered sunlight; the blackness of a cold night. They sleep in black shadows cast by white rocks. Their black eyes, pupil-less, soulless, have no lids; are always staring.

*

In the supermarket the colours screamed at her, the bright boxes, jars, cans and bottles seemed to leap off the shelves, daring her, taunting her, begging her to choose, to buy. They strained towards her in the greenish fluorescent light, and the sound of cash registers and muzak, the nearness of other people, scraped at her nerves. She felt the familiar beginning signals of a migraine: the sense of dissociation, the difficulty she had in focusing her eyes to read the names of products, the tingling in her right hand.

She decided to leave without buying anything, to get home to bed before the numbing headache began. Carmen was with the doctor; she had two hours before she had to show up for her part in the day’s therapy. She would go home, crawl into darkness and seek out the cool silence of sleep.

‘Mrs Carter.’ She heard the voice for the first time, but was aware that it had spoken her name once or twice before she heard. She turned and faced a young woman, a stranger with burned-looking eyes and lank, light brown hair. She looked slightly like a babysitter Amalie had once hired, but she did not know this woman.

‘You’re Mrs Carter.’

‘Yes.’

‘I knew it. I’d seen pictures of you, and I followed you here.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I just want to talk to you – I just want to tell you something you should know.’

Amalie had the momentary conviction that this woman did not exist; that this irrationally behaving stranger was only another symptom of her oncoming migraine.

‘I have to go,’ Amalie said vaguely, walking backwards slowly.

‘Wait. I’m having an affair with your husband.’ She looked triumphant. Amalie stopped.

‘And I want to tell you that he loves me, and he’d divorce you in a hot second if he wasn’t worried about hurting your – his – little girl. But I know I’d be a hundred times better mother to her – she’d be happy with me ’cause I’d love her – and when he realises that … well, I just want to tell you that you’ve lost your husband and you aren’t ever going to get him back, so why don’t you just make things easy on all of us and give him a divorce?’

Amalie laughed.

The other woman looked at her, confused, then recovered. ‘Oh, it’s true. Don’t you think you can laugh it off. I could tell you things about him so’s you’d have to know it’s true. We had breakfast this morning at my apartment and then we made love before he went to work. And how about last Wednesday night? When he called and said he was at a poker game in Galveston and since it was so late and he didn’t have much gas he was going to spend the night at his buddy’s house. Well, let me tell you: he was with me, he wasn’t in Galveston at no poker game, he was in Houston sleeping with me at my apartment.’ Her words tumbled and stumbled over each other and out of her mouth, the pitch of her voice going up, her accent becoming more country, more East Texas. Amalie found the noise as annoying as the insistent golds and yellows and oranges stacked around her, glaring in the evil green light of the supermarket. She had to get out.

She didn’t want to laugh any more. She felt too sick for laughter. But the claims of this woman deserved nothing better than ridicule. She didn’t doubt that Jim was having an affair with her, but it was unimportant, the woman was no threat – there was nothing to threaten. The fact that she had sought Amalie out must mean that she saw in Amalie, the wife, some danger, but that also was untrue. Amalie could have told her that Jim had been lost, irretrievably lost, years before, to the moon. The moon was his only mistress, his compelling disease.

Amalie walked away from her shopping cart and the woman who loved her husband, and drove home, squinting to see through the pain of her headache and the tiny, glowing moon which hung in the far right corner of her vision.

*

The birds who live on the moon make no sound – they have no vocal chords – nor do they communicate with each other in any way. Each lives alone, and although groups may cluster together, may roost all together on one wall, each bird knows itself to be forever alone.

*

Carmen in company with other people was like a young animal placed among the wrong litter, the stranger in the tribe. She kept to herself, she tried to keep herself safe from the importunities of others and remain in communion only with herself, but the effort drained her. Whenever she came home, Carmen always went straight to her room and closed the door. Alone in her room, performing the necessary rituals with her toys, Carmen would calm herself.

Jim called to say that he would not be home for dinner, and Amalie wondered if the woman from the supermarket were standing nearby, feeling triumphant. If tonight she would try to bind Amalie’s husband to herself with her flesh and later that night stare hopelessly at his open, dreaming eyes.

Amalie took lamb chops out of the freezer and set them out to defrost. The house was silent. Carmen, who never made any noise, was in her room. But once she had reflected gratefully on the silence of the house, Amalie realised it was not nearly silent enough. Small noises erupted unpredictably, intruding upon the stillness, and there were sounds that went on and on, like the steady buzz of the clock on the wall and the hum of the refrigerator. Outside birds were chirping, all out of harmony with one another, and she could hear the soft wind-rushing sound of cars on the freeway.

The living room was better. When she had shut out the outside world (go, plane, I don’t hear you; birds, cars, bugs do not exist) there was nothing to hear, nothing to bother her. Amalie leaned back in a chair and closed her eyes. Now there was nothing but darkness and silence, the way it must be on the moon. Only the sounds of her own body. She had tried to sleep, earlier, but had been unable, and so the migraine, when it passed, left behind a residue, an unpleasant pressure behind her eyes and a rawness to her nerves.

She wondered if Jim had been considering divorce. She wasn’t certain if the idea was strange or not. They had not been happy together for a long time, but they had never spoken of separating. They simply went on, not as if they were content, but simply as if there were no other road.

Amalie opened her eyes and realised she had been dozing. The house was unnaturally still. Outside the evening air was greying quickly towards night.

‘Carmen?’

The air seemed to wrap itself around the name and absorb the sound. Amalie, ill at ease, stood up. She felt as if the rest of the world had vanished and she had been left here alone.

‘Carmen?’ Amalie stood outside Carmen’s door, hand hesitating in the air before the knob. She let her hand fall against the door, knuckles grazing the wood in a light knock. ‘Sweetheart? You want to come set the table for dinner?’

No reply. Wondering if Carmen had gone outside, Amalie opened the door.

Carmen was sitting on the floor, within her usual circle of dolls and toys, each one in its assigned place. But around the toys, in a greater circle, stood six strange, large birds. They had big round heads with faces – human faces, not the beaky visages of birds – and ponderous black and white feathered bodies. Standing, they were taller than Carmen sitting in their midst.

Amalie was frozen in the doorway by the sight. The birds did not look at her; Carmen did not move. Amalie broke the tableau with a stumbling run into the room.

‘Get! Get!’ She shouted harshly, breathlessly, as if she were shooing away ducks or nosy dogs bothering her child. She waved her arms at them, but they did not move, and finally one outswinging arm touched a bird, and she recoiled from the touch. The bird was cold, unnaturally, deadly cold. The bird turned its head and looked at her. Then all of the birds began to move; they fell into file and waddled past her – she drew away – through the door and down the hall. When the last of the birds had left the room Carmen looked up at her mother.

‘Is it dinner?’ she asked.

Amalie stared at her.

‘Is it dinner?’

‘Carmen – what—’

‘Is it dinner?’ Carmen held out her hand and looked at the Mickey Mouse watch on her wrist. She held one finger to it, taking the pulse of it. ‘Seven o’clock. Is it dinner?’

Amalie nodded, helpless, and Carmen nodded in turn, then carefully, in order, lifted her toys out of the circle and carried them to the shelves where they belonged.

They were in the living room. Amalie avoided looking in the room as she passed, but she knew they were there. As she broiled the lamb chops and emptied a can of corn into a pot she was as aware of the birds in the living room – dreaming their waking dreams, asleep yet fully conscious – as she was of Carmen, precisely placing three settings at the table a few feet away.

When she went to bed that night the birds were still in the living room, still waiting for whatever they were waiting for. Amalie lay in bed and could not sleep. After a while she heard Jim’s car in the driveway, heard him come in and fix himself a drink. Then there was silence for a long time. He didn’t say anything, or put on the light, when he came into the bedroom, and she pretended to be asleep. Through her lashes she watched Jim stand by the window and stare out for a long time at the full moon and the quiet street. Then he pulled the curtains to (but they fell apart: a shaft of moonlight spilled across the floor), undressed and climbed in the far side of the bed. Amalie lay still, listening to his breathing become deeper and more even.

She was lying on her side, facing away from Jim, facing the door. Her eyes were open, and so she saw the birds come in. The door was slightly ajar and the lead bird simply pushed it open and then they all filed in.

Amalie began to tremble. The birds walked (silently: there was no sound, as there should have been, of their talons pulling at the carpet) around the bed, to Jim’s side, and she knew that there they would arrange themselves in a semi-circle and stand and stare at her husband.

She moved closer to him, trying not to whimper. Her trembling shook him, and she burrowed against his back, wishing away the birds. Jim moved and mumbled. He reached over without turning, patted her, and said, ‘Sleep, sleep,’ in an absent way.

She wanted to wake him and make him look at the birds, but she was afraid that if she did he wouldn’t see them. And they would still be there.

She must have fallen asleep, for she became aware that the room was darker, the moon no longer shining through the window, but now on the other side of the house.

She sat up and looked across Jim to the other side of the room. The birds were gone: there were no dark shapes crouching there, or at least no dark shapes she could not identify as furniture.

For a moment she felt relief. Then she was more alert than before. Carmen.

Carmen was not in her room. The bed was empty. Again, the window was open. This time Amalie ran to the window and climbed out, scraping a bare leg on the brick of the house.

‘Carmen!’

The six birds, grouped closely together, were waiting for Carmen to finish her dance to the moon. They would carry her, said their position, away to the moon where she would be alone and free, where she could pile loose rocks in orderly fashion and no one would bother her, no one would interrupt her rituals. They would be an undemanding family, let her perch among the rocks with them, ask her no questions.

‘No!’ cried Amalie in anguish. ‘Don’t take her, please.’

Carmen danced on, heedless. One bird turned its head and looked at Amalie, and she looked into its dead, chill face, its sphinx’s face, and knew that she had misunderstood. They had not come for Carmen, but for her.

Jim had been to the moon and never come back; Carmen had no need to be taken there. Only Amalie longed for the moon and could not attain it.

The birds came to her, and as they drew in closer she felt the cold their bodies gave off the way earth animals gave off heat. They stood close together, in a line before her, and Amalie was reminded of how, in the fairy tale, Snow White sleeps across seven dwarf beds pushed together to take her giant body. Amalie lay down on them and wrapped her arms about one neck.

The birds began to run, and their bodies bumped beneath hers like a line of camels. Just as they left the ground (shifting beneath her like a waterbed) Amalie began to fear that they could not remain together, that they would separate and drop her. She clung tightly.

The birds flew on towards the moon, lifting and lowering their wings dangerously slowly. The birds who live on the moon do not, when they fly, have much gravity to contend with. They fly slowly and glide through breezeless space. The birds who live on the moon are singular and solitary; they depend on no others but themselves; they do not customarily travel in groups, and their rare sense of purpose is never retained long in the minds of more than one at a time.

Flying against the ponderous weight of the earth, with Amalie further weighing them down, the birds lost interest in her and began to separate, beating their wings more strongly now, aiming themselves at the moon, anxious now only to escape the earth’s pull.

Amalie clung with all her might, and felt herself falling, as she had fallen so many times in dreams. Her arms ached, as much from the cold of the birds as from the strain of holding on. She was falling, and pulling the bird down with her. It swivelled its head and bit her on the arm with its large, square, hard teeth. She cried out in shock and pain, her grasp loosening, and the bird flew out from under her, and away up towards the moon again, and she fell.

She came to earth on a lonely road, jarred and shattered, face down, broken against the concrete. The moonlight picked out the whiteness of her skin and nightdress and made them glitter as if she were already no more than bones picked clean.

Acknowledgements

'No Regrets' was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1985. Copyright © 1985 The Mercury Press.

'Wives' was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1979. Copyright © 1979 The Mercury Press; Copyright © 1983 Lisa Tuttle.

'The Family Monkey' was first published in New Voices in Science Fiction, edited by George R. R. Martin, Macmillan. Copyright © 1977 Lisa Tuttle.

'Mrs T.' was first published in Amazing Science Fiction, September 1976. Copyright © 1976 Ultimate Publishing Company.

'The Bone Flute' was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1981. Copyright © 1981 The Mercury Press; Copyright © 1983 Lisa Tuttle.

'A Spaceship Built of Stone' was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1980. Copyright © 1980 Davis Publications Inc.

'The Cure' was first published in Light Years and Dark, edited by Michael Bishop, Berkley Books. Copyright © 1984 Lisa Tuttle.

'The Hollow Man' was first published in New Voices II, edited by George R. R. Martin, Jove HBJ Books. Copyright © 1979 Lisa Tuttle.

' The Other Kind' was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1984. Copyright © 1984 Davis Publications Inc.

'Birds of the Moon' was first published in Fantastic Stories, January 1979. Copyright © 1978 Ultimate Publishing Company.