About to die. And so on.

We’re all going to die.

The Sahara is your back yard, so’s the Pacific trench; die there and you won’t be lonely. On Earth you are never more than 13,000 miles from anywhere, which as the man said is a tough commute, but the rays of light from the scene of your death take little more than a tenth of a second to go … anywhere!

We’re nowhere.

We’ll die alone.

This is space travel. Imagine a flat world, a piece of paper, say, with two spots on it but very far apart. If you were a two-dimensional triangle, how would you get from one spot to the other? Walk? Too far. But fold the paper through the third dimension (ours) so that the spots match exactly—if you were a triangle you couldn’t see or feel this, of course—and you are at the proper place. We do this in the fourth. Don’t ask me how. Only you must be very, very careful, when you fold spacetime, not to sloosh the paper around or let it slide: then you end up not on the spot you wanted but God knows where, maybe entirely out of our galaxy, which is that dust you see in the sky on clear nights when you’re away from cities. The glittering breath of angels. Far, far from home. The light of our dying may not reach you for a thousand million years. That ordinary sun up there, a little hazy now at noon, that smeary spot.

We do not know where we are.

At dawn there was an intensely brilliant flash far, far under the horizon, and about an hour later the noise of the thing; I figured the way you do for thunderstorms, the lag between light and sound: one-hippopotamus, two-hippopotamus, three-hippopotamus, four-hippopotamus, five-hippopotamus—there’s your mile. Seven hundred miles. That’s over a thousand kilometers. In the event of mechanical dysfunction, the ship’s computer goes for the nearest “tagged” planet, i.e. where human life is supposed to be possible, then ejects the passenger compartment separately. Lays an egg, you might say. We won’t be visited without a distress call, however, now the colonization fever’s died down (didn’t take long, divide five billion people by twenty and the remainders start getting clubby again).

Goodbye ship, goodbye crew, goodbye medicine, goodbye books, goodbye freight, goodbye baggage, goodbye computer that could have sent back an instantaneous distress call along the coordinates we came through (provided it had. them, which I doubt), goodbye plodding laser signal, no faster than other light, that might have reached somewhere, sometime, this time, next time, never. You’ll get around to us in a couple of thousand years.

We’re a handful of persons in a metal bungalow: five women, three men, bedding, chemical toilet, simple tools, an even simpler pocket laboratory, freeze-dried food for six months, and a water-distiller with its own sealed powerpack, good for six months (and cast as a unit, unusable for anything else).

Goodbye, everybody.

At dawn I held hands with the other passengers, we all huddled together under that brilliant flash, although I hate them.

O God, I miss my music.

(This is being recorded on a pocket vocoder I always carry; the punctuation is a series of sounds not often used for words in any language: triple gutturals, spits, squeaks, pops, that kind of thing. Sounds like an insane chicken. Hence this parenthesis.)

Of the women: myself. A Mrs. Valeria Graham, actually married to Mr. Graham, in the delicate fifties when alimony becomes mandatory upon divorce (who would pay whom is a conjecture here). Valeria Victrix habitually wears the classical Indian sari, usually gold embroidered on royal blue, like a television hostess’s; this does not suit a petite chemical blonde. Ditto the many-splendored earrings: bells within cages within hoops.

A dark young woman who does yoga on her head, off to some “unimportant job” somewhere (she said), hates everyone, says she’s called Nathalie. Nathalie what? Nathalie nothing. Mind your own business.

Cassie, thirty-ish, beginning to put on weight; you’ll find her waiting, table in any restaurant or nude bar on any world. She looks like an earlier stage in the life-cycle of Mrs. Graham, but that’s an illusion; nothing but a convulsion of nature could let either of these two rise or fall to the other’s level. (Hydrogen fusion, which provided unlimited power and should’ve made us all rich, but of course didn’t.)

A Graham child, female, twelve, a beautiful café-au-lait so she is either Mrs. Graham ’s by a former marriage or Mr. Graham ’s ditto, or neither. Hors de combat all trip with one of the few bacterial diseases left, or rather the treatment for it, which had made her dreadfully ill. We’d see her only when she’d stagger into the lounge, looking beautiful and hopeless, and then vomit (again). For whoever finds this and has no Greek, an iatrogenic disease is one created by the physician and we have plenty of them. The physicians and the diseases.

This will never be found.

Who am I writing for, then?

The men: Mr. Graham, a big powerful male in his early fifties, hollow and handsome in the same style as his wife: coloring, dress, and person. Three days out (we were on the way to find the first spot we can then fold onto the second spot) Cassie took off the mask, stopped being squeezably-soft, and lost all expression. The Grahams stopped speaking to her. I say “ male” because he emphasizes it subtly, so perhaps she’s the buyer and he’s the bought. Or both: money marries money. Relations with men are still apt to be patterned on a few rather dull models, especially among strangers, so I know less about the men than I do about the women, but in one way I know more: I mean the conception of themselves they find it publicly necessary to live up to.

Alan: a young man with a set of shoulders like unto those of one who plays le futbol (says he did). Extremely polite and attentive, with a carefully intent way of listening to everybody and agreeing civilly and much too often (“Oh, I do agree with you, Mr. Graham, I really do”). My theory is that this obviously insincere behavior conceals absolutely nothing; he’s rich enough to take the poor man’s Grand Tour, poor enough to need a job, decent enough not to hurt anyone unless he’s frightened or hurt himself (which could happen pretty easily), and anxious enough to flatter whoever he thinks can help him. The Grahams, you see, are slumming.

An historian of ideas traveling from one University to another and extremely evasive about his work, as they all are, now there’s so little of it to go around; he wears Mr. Graham’s kind of conservative clothes: shorts and sport-shirts, bright but not daylight-fluorescent (Vic Graham in blue, John Ude in red). The only historical analogy to Alan’s costumes is Graustark, all gold braid, epaulettes, and boots (except the shako, which I think he had to leave behind on account of the weight, though he never mentioned it). The professor is John Ude. Thirties. A very minor intellectual. Bland. Often displays The Smile. The first day, in the lounge, when Mrs. Graham actually introduced herself as Mrs. Graham—which is rather like presenting yourself as a Dame of the British Empire or a Roman Tribune—Professor Ude displayed (after a blank moment) The Smile. Then he took out from his sporran The Pipe, gesturing at The Pipe with The Smile to show that he was aware of his own self-mockery. He would have received Valeria as Mistress Anne Brad street, had she so required, because the Grahams are rich. Black-body-suited, perpetually angry Nathalie said audibly, “Missiz! Oh God,” and turned away with an unbelieving, outraged, I-knew-it-was-going-to-be-one-of-those-trips look. Alan gaped hysterically, then shut his mouth. I said nothing. Think of it: Valeria and Victor in blue, Ude in red, Alan indescribable, Cassie in two stars and a cache-sexe (both silver), and Lori Graham in body paint, mostly blue (to match her parents’ clothes). The arrows of Professor Ude’s irony point only down in the social scale, never up; when they occasionally point at himself, he is very careful to blunt them.

Oh, we are a dull bunch! The professor once uncrimped enough to get into a long discussion with Victor Graham about the new lease on life given capitalism by the unlimited power of hydrogen fusion, the poor fool. He believes in free enterprise, competition, achievement-orientation, the meritocracy. He’s never been behind the crew panels where the technocrats live. Travel enough and you can make friends with the crew, what’s this, what’s that, ask questions; they even let you fiddle about in sick bay if you’re careful. You see things, then.

Meritocracy? We’re being kept off the streets, that’s all, rich or poor. (Foundations pay me to lecture on music and play tapes of it; that’s why I travel. I’m a scrounge.)

I once said to Ude, “How fast do you think things really change?”

He said, “That’s not my field.”

Cassie, determined, bitter, exhausted, full-breasted, wanted to know what a musicologist was and what kind of music.

“Very old,” I said. “European twelfth century to Baroque. No farther.”

“How nice,” Mrs. Graham said. “We must tell Lori.”

“Who cares,” Cassie said.

I wear body-suits and sandals, like Nathalie, and keep a low profile, especially with passengers. This isn’t a luxury liner; you don’t have to eat with anybody, just dial a meal out of the locker.

And visit the crew. And envy them.

Behold the new irrelevants: parasites, scum, proles, scroungers. People who do nothing real.

No, dinosaurs.

Isn’t… wasn’t, I mean, a luxury liner.

Stranded dinosaurs.

Day first. I’m sitting in the corner on the empty tool chest after a little nap. Already excited talk of “colonization,” whatever that is. Our tiny laboratory tells us the air is safe, although perhaps a little thin; there’s nothing directly poisonous outside. Nathalie’s unexpected talent for cataloguing and arranging tools (which is why the tool box is empty). The sun up for at least fifteen hours, taking a slow tour of the horizon at what my childhood tells me is 4 P.M. late autumn, so we have either a very great axial tilt or are in very high latitudes. A few weeks’ observation and perhaps we can guess if we’re approaching the summer solstice or going the other way, which could give us some idea of how long the seasons will be: could be ten years of summer (and it’s hot outside now, about 30 C, they tell me). Through the window you can see ordinary green trees, hilly up-and-downish but not much, some little natural clearings. Very much like New Jersey a hundred and thirty-five years ago, when my ancestors came to Ellis Island: about nineteen-aught-five that was. My maternal something-great-grandfather was a plumber, my maternal something-great-grandmother a sheitel-maker. (A sheitel is a wig which Orthodox Jewish women used to wear after marriage, over their shorn hair. But what do you care.) We don’t remember the actual genealogy of the other side nearly so far back, but I’ve inherited their looks; little, dark, Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish frontier at night with rubies, emeralds, and uncut diamonds sewn into the hems of their cloaks. At least I like to think of them that way. I carry the modern equivalent, the only currency that passes everywhere, sewn into my jacket, my neckband, my belt, so flat you couldn’t detect it. I mean a whole pharmacopoeia. Because you never know what you will need. (I filched a little from the ship, too: nothing important)

Our equipment isn’t good enough to test whether the life here is edible. We’re not supposed to do that. Commonly the problem has been people contaminating the planet, but there have been striking instances of vice-versa. We’re supposed to stay inside.

Everybody is getting on everybody else’s nerves.

Victor, in his hearty, overemphasized, hollow voice: “I believe I should.” (Tail end of a conversation about who’s to go out first. Not that it matters. We either go out eventually or cut our throats.)

“Why?” says Nathalie instantly.

“Because I’m old. Expendable. Why else?” (Lori Graham is looking adoring and anxious.)

“Very sensible,” says Nathalie. “So should Mrs. Graham.” (Lori outraged.)

“Well, if there’s any harm….” This is John Ude.

“The Grahams will go,” says Nathalie over her shoulder, and continues putting together our shovels, our hammers, our axes— “half an hour, no less, no more”—and something longer that comes in sections.

The Grahams go out the air-lock, Victor stooping, Alan kindly restraining Lori when she tries to slip out with them. They have an intense, whispered conversation, with Lori close to tears.

“My, you are just an ordinary traveler, aren’t you!” I say to Nathalie, hoping to get a rise from her, maybe learn something. No answer. She’s engaged in jointing together what we both realize at the same instant is a single-passenger hovercraft: sealed motor, no cab, kicks up so much dust that you have to wear an air-filter (included in the box; by Saint George, I was right), flies over any terrain with ease, including water (at under 32 kph, however), and looks like nothing so much as a stick with a saddle; hence its name.

“A br—” (she catches herself).

“Broomstick,” I finish. On her knees, in the midst of spare parts, in her black skin-tights, Nathalie gives me (for a moment only) a glance of shock, of wild surmise—are you one, too?

“Where were you really going?” I say.

She inspects her fingernails, comes to a quick decision, licks her lips wolfishly.

“Government trainee,” she says in a low voice but so naturally, that is to say pretend-naturally, that Cassie (who is lying on a bunk, holding to one ear a cheap, battery-powered music library that will wear out within days, I can tell) can’t hear us.

“At what?” say I.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says sharply. “Not to tell. And I shan’t now, not because it matters but because it doesn’t.”

For a moment she’s a death’s-head.

Then “What!” says Lori Graham, a little desperately, with the natural irritation of someone whose Mummy and Daddy may, after all, have been eaten by megatheria. “Nothing,” answers Nathalie. “Go on screwing with Alan or whatever it is you were doing.” (Lori makes a disgusted face and Alan turns aside to blush or giggle.) “If he can,” she adds. In the low, trained voice she says to me, “Who are you.”

“A musicologist,” I say. “Sorry. Nobody like you. I’ve picked things up because I’ve traveled a lot, that’s all.”

Cassie sits up, shaking her radio. She says to Nathalie, “Can you do something with this thing?”

“The batteries are worn down and they’re electric; we can’t recharge them. You’ve been playing that ever since we started this trip and you’ve probably played it before, quite a lot. I know you’ve recharged them but the case is worn. So that’s probably two hundred hours and a couple of rechargings; they do deteriorate each time, you know. And there’s nothing we can do—our gadgets are all sealed and shielded. It’s a different kind of energy; we can’t transform the one to the other. Besides if we tried opening any of the power-packs, we’d probably go boom, you know, just like the ship.” This is me. I add, “I’m awfully sorry, Cassie.”

“So if you’re a goddamn music student,” says Cassie at her most insulting, “where’s your goddamn music, huh?”

I’m tempted to answer “in the ionosphere” (reduced to its constituent atoms, or even smaller pieces) but I say, “It was in the baggage compartment.”

“Oh,” says Alan, clearly disappointed. I guess he has been planning on hearing some music. Cassie draws up her knees in the bunk, exasperated, and presses the side of her face against the sealed window.

Alan adds in a friendly way, “Hey, don’t you have any of it with you?” Forgetting to be polite, that one.

“Tapes,” I say. “Want to use them for ribbons? I have the amplifier and the recorder—see? they fit in my hand—but the speakers are too big. Two meters diameter.”

He opens his mouth, probably to inquire why a speaker has to be two meters across, but Lori—who is very well educated, as her parents have been telling us for three weeks—breaks in importantly with a disquisition on the physical reproduction of sound, and how the lowest musical note that can be heard by the human ear is fourteen cycles per second and the lowest sounds that can be felt are even lower, and if you want a really good bass, say for Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for Organ, or Vestal’s Electronic

Mass, you just have to have these enormous speakers for your sound environment because otherwise the sounds just won’t fit mechanically on the speakers. “Literally,” she says.

“O-o-oh,” says Alan in mock awe.

Cassie breaks in furiously with, “Your goddamn education—”

(John Ude has been asleep all this time, worn out, poor man; that’s why you haven’t heard from him.)

Thank God the Grahams come back in. The air-lock jams. We are now testing the atmosphere just as much as they, something Mr. Ude (waked by the noise of Lori’s rejoicings and questionings) seems to notice, but nobody’s going to call attention to such things in the presence of an hysterical twelve-year-old with the habit of psychosomatic vomiting. (Her Momma says.)

Joy all around.

(I’m not, of course, recording this at the time it happened. I stole half-an-hour from the long, long dawn. Two and a half hours of twilight, then three more of real dark, and again two and a half hours of dusk-turned-backward: slow, creeping, endless, unadvancing grey.)

We’re very high on the world’s shoulder. Labrador perhaps. Even within the Pole circle. If the sun goes lower, if it sets closer to the place of its rising, if the dark shrinks, if red-sunset evolves without darkness into red-sunrise. Is this spring? Summer? Fall? We might be heading into a ten-month summer, a twenty-year summer. Desert? Everything dead, brown, burned? Think anyway of midwinter with the sun even lower and only three hours of daylight out of twenty-eight. A night twenty-five hours long.

In the brief, black, real dark we all went outside to look at the sky. A shiver of the nerves as the night air struck us, a kind of blind claustrophilia, wishing to get back into our own, closed-in, stale smell, away from the living odors of night coolness. Everyone stayed together. Black velvet, must be overcast; this awful sense of being outside. Vast space.

We looked up.

Nothing.

I mean there was almost nothing in the sky: a few bright stars near the zenith and halfway to the equatorial horizon a far, faint, dim blur. Island universes. From anywhere on Earth (they say) you can see about three thousand stars with the naked eye. You can also see that arch of powder which we call the Milky Way; it’s the center of the galaxy. We’re located in one of its arms; it’s a kind of flattened ellipse. From anywhere near any galaxy, unless one is very far above or below its major plane, and in the wrong hemisphere to boot, you ought to be able to see something. Not that it matters, of course, for space travel. Still. Nothing matched the star maps Nathalie had (she would!) but then on the other side of the Equator, who knows? And none of us is very good at this sort of thing. But six stars and a blur … which might be, God knows, the Crab Nebula or our own, or unidentified astronomical object number goodness-knows-what, something so far away that (as I said) the light of our dying will reach you (whoever you are) only after you yourselves are long dead, after your own Sun has engulfed you and then shrunk to a collapsed cinder with no more light in it than what we saw that night.

Whoever, wherever, whenever.

Lori cried in her mother’s arms. Mrs. Graham very clumsy at comforting her daughter, perhaps always was. John, the professor of the history of ideas, saying something like “Uh!” low, a sort of groan.

That empty.

Well, we might be visited in a routine check of the tagged worlds in as little as a couple of centuries, a century, eighty years even. Even little Lori will be dead.

John Ude said, “Come on now, come on, dears. It’s a tagged planet. It has to be. Too much coincidence otherwise, eh? The air, the gravity. Now if it’s tagged, that means it’s like Earth. And we know Earth. Most of us were born on it. So what’s there to be afraid of, hey? We’re just colonizing a little early, that’s all. You wouldn’t be afraid of Earth, would you?”

Oh, sure. Think of Earth. Kind old home. Think of the Arctic. Of Labrador. Of Southern India in June. Think of smallpox and plague and earthquakes and ringworm and pit vipers. Think of a nice case of poison ivy all over, including your eyes. Status asthmaticus. Amoebic dysentery. The Minnesota pioneers who tied a rope from the house to the barn in winter because you could lose your way in a blizzard and die three feet from the house. Think (while you’re at it) of tsunamis, liver fluke, the Asian brown bear. Kind old home. The sweetheart. The darling place.

Think of Death Valley … in August.

Day two. It began. I just couldn’t keep my damned mouth shut. Everybody running around cheerily into the Upper Paleolithic. We’re going to build huts. We’re going to have a Village Fire that Lori Graham will tend because she is the Fire Virgin or something. Mrs. Graham is suddenly person-of-least-value. Victor says, “Excuse me, dear,” with immense firmness and then goes about his business. He’s going to go somewhere with John Ude to search for water. They won’t drink it, of course, but will carry back samples and then we will analyze it, which is impossible because we don’t have the equipment. But it will certainly help the water-distiller; our tanks are almost empty. Mrs. Graham has suddenly become very cuddly with Lori, who keeps squirming away, saying, “Valeria, please!” With twenty-five hours of daylight there’s no rush, and besides we have to move everything outside (to find out if that will kill us). Outside it goes, mattresses and bedding (to get rained on or infested), tools and toolkit, all of this superficially showing immense order but in fact about as rational as the ooze of algae from a pond. Our nice, destructible laboratory (like litmus paper, use it once and it’s done for) has told us that the sun will not burn us, although it has a small amount of ultra-violet, and more than the usual infrared (too low in the sky, anyhow); that the local vegetation does not contain mineral poisons; that the (local) air does not, either; and that the gravitation is o.93, which is so close to terrestrial as makes no difference.

Nathalie’s digging experimental sanitation pits with a collapsible shovel. And every once in a while it does.

I seek out Ude, who’s unpacking the first-aid kit, and say, “Benzedrine and bobby-pins!” but the joke’s too old for either of us to have ever heard it, and too vulgar, base, and popular for him to have ever read it.

I say, “Look, you’ve got an anti-pyretic, two wide-spectrum antibiotics, pain-killers, and a nice little pamphlet about how to make a splint out of a bunk-rail. It’s not enough.”

“We’ll make do,” he said heartily, flashing The Smile.

I said, “My God, man, what will you do when Lori’s wisdom teeth come in?” and the child, who must have clairaudience (she was a good five meters away) instantly emitted a nervous “What!” and came over to join us. She had been watching Alan Bobby Whitehouse ponder about trying to start to learn to just possibly swing an axe without cutting his own foot.

“Your impacted wisdom teeth,” I said. “Everybody gets impacted wisdom teeth. I’m the only adult I know whose wisdom teeth came in straight. Of course I had gingivitis, and dental surgery, and fillings, and your mother has transplants. So where are we going to get all this?”

“Huh?” said Lori.

“They might just lie there for years,” I said. “I know someone who didn’t get them until they were thirty. On the other hand, you might have intense pain for a month before they die and rot inside your gums and take a couple of molars with them, which Daddy can knock out with a rock.

“O pioneers,” I added rather sourly.

“Now come on,” said John Ude.

(Funny. Everyone’s around us now. I’ve attracted a crowd. The old raise-the-voice bit. And I wasn’t even thinking of it.) I said, “I don’t want to make a speech—”

“Then don’t,” said Cassie, who’s been flapping our linens in the breeze just to make sure we get a nice dose of the local pollens.

“Well, fuck you then!” I said. “I will.”

And I did. I must have talked for five or six minutes. I told them (and more):

That a tagged planet is not colonizable but means only bearable gravity, a decent temperature range, and air that won’t kill you.

That survey teams sample only one square kilometer of a planet, doubtless not this one.

That there were no mineral poisons, but that we couldn’t test for organics or allergens.

That there could be incompatible proteins, vitamin deficiencies, chelating agents, dozens of things that could mess us up biologically in dozens of ways.

That if we could eat the local macro-life, the local micro-life could eat us.

That we could die of exposure in the winter because we had no way to make heat after our bungalow wore out and that was in six months.

That we could die of heat in a summer whose length we didn’t yet know.

That a breech birth could kill. That a three-days’ labor and no dilation could kill. That septicemia could kill.

That heart failure could kill.

That none of us could even recognize flint, let alone know what to do with it.

That plastic was a lousy building material.

That each of us carried five to eight lethal genes, and that even without them, humanity had not exactly been breeding for survival for the past hundred years.

That there weren’t enough of us.

And more. So much more.

I stopped. Too much of the old stiff-necked pride coming back. Giant Alan Bobby, with his axe, says, “I think you better go on,” and I only hope Nathalie’s training has included eye-gouging and larynx-smashing because this boy is beginning to find out—in two days!—that we are far, far from any law. I hope he can be shamed. I said:

“Well, I hope we find volcanic glass, because I could recognize that; I saw it once in a museum.”

This falls flat.

“What do you suggest we do?” says the Professor, with The Smile. “You seem to think we have no chance.” Humor her.

I nodded.

The professor repeated, “Just what do you suggest we do?”

Silence.

“Well, anything you please,” I said. “Only leave me out of it.”

“That,” says Nathalie, “will make three women and two men, if we exclude Victor, which puts the numbers considerably lower, doesn’t it?”

“Jesus,” I said; “Oh Jesus Christ, I’m forty-two years old. Do you think I can have my first child now? Besides you don’t want me; my father was a bleeder.”

“Liar,” says Nathalie. “I saw your medical records. You’re not the only one who can get past the crew doors.”

“All right,” I said. (Nathalie the leader. Wait ’til Alan finds out he can beat you up.) “All right, so you think you have the chance of a snowball in hell. Maybe you do. But I think that some kinds of survival are damned idiotic. Do you want your children to live in the Old Stone Age? Do you want them to forget how to read? Do you want to lose your teeth? Do you want your great-grandchildren to die at thirty? That’s obscene.”

Here the ground came up and hit me, as it always does when you get carried away; it was Cassie, standing over me and shouting, “Shut up! Shut up, you!” I don’t think she hit me, only pushed. I wasn’t ready, that’s all. Rabble-rousing that used to work, but that doesn’t work now because it’s the wrong rabble and the wrong rouse. Well, we all know that.

And in everyone’s face the flash of realization: no law.

John Ude said, “Come, come, dears, don’t lose your temper. She’ll get over it. Nathalie, what do you carry?” And the whole thing was over.

Much later Cassie, her face grey in the grey dusk, woke me accidentally. She’s hunting in the first-aid kit, her face drawn.

She says, “Oh, you! Go back to sleep.”

I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Migraine,” she said. “I lost my pills. But this stuff is no good.” (The last with a little wail; I judged it hadn’t come on yet, maybe just the flashes of light or whatever it is she gets first.) I said, “Hold on,” and fished something out of my belt. Should help.

“So what’s that, cyanide?” she whispered, closing her eyes as if to concentrate. It must be starting.

“No,” I said. “It’s like your pills. Better than that all-purpose painkiller nonsense, anyway. Go on.” I held them out in my palm.

“Bet it’s poison,” she said, but she took it. I saw her feel her way to the water-dispenser over the uneven ground, cup a little water in her hand, and throw her head back. She came back and lay down on the mattress, out under the nothing sky. Still clear. Still no stars. One keeps getting the oddest feeling that it must be cloudy, though we’ve only seen morning fog. The temperature doesn’t go down much at night. There’s too much light, though; it’s like living naked. Sometimes this place looks like a stage set or a little alleyway or back yard of somebody’s familiar country home; only in the true dark does it become real.

(Like the Australian outback, as I told them in my great lecture, which looks like New Jersey and can kill you in two hours.)

She said, “What happens now, I blow up?” She cocked an eyebrow at me.

“No,” I said, smiling (I couldn’t help it). “The pain stops, and if it doesn’t you won’t care; it’s got a euphoric in it, too.”

“Ooh, I’m gonna get high,” she said. “Jollies …” (Taking hold already?) “Say, hon, how come you carry all that stuff?”

I explained: it’s better than money. And you never know.

“All you’d need is a jack-knife,” she said, “if you feel like cutting your throat, which is a goddamn cowardly thing to do, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Good night,” I said, and turned over. I wasn’t facing her anymore.

“Hey!” (comes the voice at my back). “You really want to kill yourself? You like getting hurt?”

“Yes, I want to do it before I get didded,” I said. “And no. No follows from yes.”

She chuckled sleepily. “Sorry I hit you. Forgive me, huh? What’s that you said about the whozis and the old guy?”

(The old guy preached a sermon in his shroud a week before his death. The whozis were the Northmen; folks used to say Deliver us from fire, plague, the fury of the Northmen, and sudden death. Those crazy people who took months to die. They had things to think about.)

“Go to sleep,” I said. “Dream about your migraines.”

And all the things. Such a beautiful world, really. But no music, no friends. If Earth had been hit by plague, by fire, by war, by radiation, sterility, a thousand things, you name it, I’d still stand by her; I love her; I would fight every inch of the way there because my whole life is knit to her. And she’d need mourners. To die on a dying Earth—I’d live, if only to weep.

But this stranger has never seen us before. She says: Hey, what are you funny little things? We are (O listeners, note) one quarter the height of the trees, we are hairless, give birth to our young alive, are bipedal with two manipulating limbs, have binocular vision, we regulate our internal temperatures by the slow oxidation of various compounds (food), and we live no more than a century at the very, very most (at least it feels that way, as the joke goes) and we are caught rather nastily, very badly, and sometimes even comically, between different aspirations. That is the fault of the cerebral cortex. (People are turning over, sighing, mumbling in their sleep, as the light slowly grows.)

Note: ars moriendi is Latin. It is a lost skill. It is ridiculed and is practiced by few.

It is very, very important.

It is the art of dying.

Day Three. Alan-Bobby found a medallion among my personal effects (he was sorting everyone’s; somehow they haven’t gone looking for water yet), and being a nice, obedient little boy, took it to Victor Graham, who took it to John Ude.

“What is it?” said they (in chorus, as I imagine).

He told them. He came over to me (I was making a deck of playing cards from Mrs. Graham’s collection of antique post cards by first trying to peel the backs off) and swung the medallion at me, just far enough away so I couldn’t grab it. Picture one early Christian, sitting cross-legged on the ground with lap covered by bed-sheets, in case the cards didn’t work out, and one professor—but not John Donne—who has decided to Tease.

“Now we know!” said John Ude, looking much less cosmopolitan than before.

“That? That’s not mine,” I said. (When in doubt, deny.)

“Come! Who cares?” he said. (Alan and Victor have gone back to whatever they were doing; I’m sure he asked them to leave “so I can get her to talk” or something.) “Be anything you like. Only it explains what happened yesterday, and if I explain to everyone else, they might feel a little better about you. ”

“You mean they’ll dismiss me as a nut,” I said. “All right, it’s mine.” He held it out to me, but I really have no particular use for the thing, and the metal chain might be useful to someone else. I said:

“Look, it’s only a symbol. You know, the quartered circle, symbol of Earth and all that. Keep it. Use the chain.”

“Don’t you want it?”

“No. It’s only a piece of jewelry.”

“Then you’re not…?”

“I am. But I don’t use the Tarot, believe in the I Ching, tell fortunes, make sacrifices, have rituals, believe in the Bible—not literally, anyway—the Tao Te Ching, or anything else. So keep it.”

“An apostate!” he said.

“Oh, don’t be silly.” And I went on trying my fingernails on the post cards. Don’t see why she can’t collect holovision cubes like everyone else. Have to use sheets, anyway. I said, “Do you know how to play poker?”

But he had levered himself down on the grass next to me. No poison ivy so far. I said:

“Well, when are you guys going to find water?”

“A Trembler,” he said. “My God, a Trembler in our very midst.” I shut my eyes.

“The Quakers,” I said, “called themselves the Society of Friends. They were called Quakers because some fool heard John Fox say he quaked in the presence of his God. Actually I like to think of myself as a temblor. Never mind.”

“But you tremble.”

“Oh, all the time.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“No.”

“But you believe in something?”

“Everywhere. Always. See Lao-tse: Tao is in the excrement, in the broken tile. Cleave the rock and there am I. Now go away.”

“But tell me,” he said, professional passion rising, “what does your church—”

“No church.”

“Well, what do you say about—about, say, sex?”

“Nothing.”

Mrs. Graham, within earshot, having found that the tool chest was water-tight by filling it with water and having Lori take a bath in it, along with most of our clothes, caught guess-what-word. She wiped her hands free of suds and strolled over.

“May I join you?”

“I’m asking,” said John Donne, “what the Tremblers have to say about sex.”

“Oh, that,” said Mrs. Graham, looking knowing. It was real knowledge, too; you’d think Cassie, with her silver nipples, was the expert, but I think Cassie’s frigid. She only sells it. Mrs. G has been a buyer, and buyers do what buyers want.

“Well, what do they say?” says Valeria.

“Nothing,” I said. “Look, Mrs. Graham, I think you’d better keep your post cards to entertain your great-grandchildren. My fingers hurt and besides, there’s no reason to sacrifice them; they’re entertaining. I’ll cut up a sheet.”

“And about—”

“Look, John,” I said, “we are not a church, only an attitude. Our principal subjects are work and mortality, not fucking. On those two I could tell you a lot but you heard it all yesterday and didn’t like it. So why don’t you get Nathalie to activate the broomstick and let her go look for water on it? It’s a hell of a lot faster than walking.”

“No, one of us will have to go,” said he, “unless Mrs. Graham can drive…?”

“You see,” he went on, “Nathalie’s life and yours and Lori’s and Cassie’s are too valuable to put in danger. You are childbearers. What does your religion say about that?”

“Genetic drift—” I said.

“Civilization must be preserved,” says he.

“Civilization’s doing fine,” I said. “We just don’t happen to be where it is.”

“Your church—”

“My religion,” said I, rising from my cross-legged position without uncrossing my legs (which rather surprised him, but it’s easy for short people), “says a lot about power. Bad things! It says thou owest God a death. It says that the first thing a sane civilization does with cryogenic corpses is to pull the plug on those damned popsicles, and if you want to live forever you are dreadfully dangerous because you’re not living now. It says that you must die, because otherwise how can you be saved? It says that without meaningful work you might as well be dead. It also says death hurts. And it says if you try to be strong and perfect and good and powerful, you’re a damned fool and liar and the truth is not in you. So don’t try my patience. It also says God is in you and you are in God, as the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish. Saint Theresa. It also says—”

“You’re a remarkably eclectic bunch,” said John Ude, laughing. “Do you believe all this stolen theology?”

“Why not?” I said. “I stole it myself.”

“Anyway, that’s your field,” I added. He laughed. Indulgently.

“I’ll spread the word,” he said. He walked off—even a twenty-five-hour day ends eventually—and happened to pass by Lori in the tool, chest, who crossed her arms over herself with great rapidity and looked sheer murder at him. Odd morés: body paint’s O.K. but bathing is private. Surrounded by clothes, too, all colors, bobbing about in the water. Barely room enough for the lot of them, her knees under her chin.

Mrs. Graham said, “Do you believe in life after death?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh. And when was the last time you slept with anyone?” I stared at her. She did not even look much interested.

I shrugged. “Years ago. Dunno. A long time.”

“And you’re living in the present?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Well!” Valeria Victrix. My God, yes, she must have been. In her own element.

“There’s other things,” I said.

“Like—?

“Oh look, Mrs. G—”

“Don’t call me Mrs. Gee,” she said. “It’s tasteless, don’t you think? Call me Valeria. And tell me what all those wonderful other things are, besides sex. And money. Because you can turn money into anything, you know.”

Ah. I’m at the bottom of the pecking order now. Well, there are worse places, like the top. Inciting to riot. Destroying government property. (Symbolic?) I got arrested and was in jail overnight but I certainly wasn’t at the center of it. No doubt one of those thirty-year cycles of rebellion Our Man John writes about. And as if they had no connection with physical fact. At the bottom you can hide effectively. I said:

“I was a Communist. I was in the ’twenties riots. Not very important, mind you, but it seemed to be going somewhere.”

“Just after hydrogen fusion,” said she. “Which took the steam out of your sails, didn’t it? And made me rich. So you’re a Communist. Good Heavens! And a Trembler, too? I thought they didn’t go together.”

“They do,” I said. “Very well. And I’d prefer it if you called me what we call ourselves: Nobodies—I’m Nobody, who are you? Are you Nobody, too? How nice. Which is no bar to being a Communist. Which I was.”

“You’re not one any longer?” she said.

“Mrs. Gee,” I said, “none of us is anything any longer.”

“Frigid little woman,” she said, stepping back. I said, “Oh, call me a salad, why don’t you, that makes as much sense. And think of what I could call you.”

“Motherrrr!” (Lori) She’s tired of intimacies with everybody’s washing.

“Oh, Valeria,” I went on, “the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, who can know it?” (She doesn’t recognize, thinks I’m crazy.) I said, more prosaically, “If you bother me again, I’ll poison Lori’s mind against you.”

She got up slowly, saying, “At least I remember that I had something,” and went to pull Lori out of the washtub. A sensible woman, really, but she’s going to learn she has no money here. I yelled, “Hey, don’t bug Victor, he’s bigger’n you!”

“Victor Graham is my father,” cried Lori, reaching a glass for the cold-water dispenser, to rinse herself. “Agh!” she cried. She shouted at me, “My father would never do anything wrong!”

“Absolutely, love!” I shouted back. That child will grow up in a perfect mess of illusions.

Did grow up.

George Fox went to jail because he could not forbear rushing into Anglican services and denouncing their priesthood as mummery; he said the great bell struck upon his heart. I was not there, of course; read it in a book. The scores of thousands of books and musical compositions that are preserved in nitrogen at the British Museum in London. Prisoners and political exiles write books. Would you write a book if you were alone on a desert island? Would you scratch in the sand?

Note: We communicate by organs that produce vibrations in the air (gaseous medium). We hear, roughly, sounds from 14 to 8,000 cycles per second. “Sound” is a series of concentric rings made of the rarefaction and compression of air, water, or some other medium. We can’t exist completely submerged in water (this may come as a shock to you), as the oxygen we use in our metabolisms comes out of the air. We’re not equipped the other way. We draw air into ourselves and push it out. We are extremely fragile, propaganda to the contrary. “Speaking” comes from a different place than “breathing.” You must understand this. Those marks,“—” indicate speech. Communication. You must listen. You must understand that the patriarchy is coming back, has returned (in fact) in two days. By no design. You must understand that I have no music, no books, no friends, no love. No civilization without industrialization! I’m very much afraid of death. But I must. I must. I must.

Deliver me from the body of this. This body. This damned life.

Day four. Nathalie finally went off on the broomstick because nobody knew how to operate it but her and me. I was not allowed, naturally. I relented and showed Alan-Bobby how to use the axe without cutting off his feet. He took it away from me. He was cutting wood and so was Mr. Graham, with the little hand hatchet; when they managed to collect some branches, they lit them to see if they could make a fire. Bravo! It burned. And the smoke gave Lori a violent allergic reaction; she ran away clawing at her throat, crying, viciously rotating her fingers in her ears, and making the tongue motions of someone trying (ineffectually) to scratch her soft palate. Perfect for the long winter evenings. So they put the fire out.

Mrs. Graham played gin with Mr. Graham, with the cards I’d made from bed linen; she kept beating him.

Then she played gin with John Ude and kept beating him.

He said he wished to walk about, still being gracious; Mrs. G tried to get Mr. G back into playing. He said, “I don’t wish to.”

“But I want to, dear,” said Valeria quietly. (A simple, domestic request, repeated many times; Valeria in blue and gold, the nail of her left little finger a gold sheath, inches long, Victor in blue, the evening game, Mrs. Graham saying, “Get me a drink, dear,” and Victor eager and compliant. Now I know.)

Victor got up and went to talk to Alan-Bobby, who chuckled and nodded; then they got really serious, about drainage ditches or log cabins, or burning other wood, for Victor would not hurt his daughter, that I do know, not for the world.

Something odd about Valeria’s face. See, Victrix?

She said, “Lori, I’m afraid your silly father has given you hives.”

“Daddy isn’t silly,” (says oblivious young Graham, cleaning her toenails with a complicated spiral device that was apparently part of her personal baggage) “and I don’t think you should ask him to play cards if he doesn’t want to. You can be awfully mean, Mother.”

I walked over to—no, I thought of walking over—

She came over to me. “Do you play gin?” I shook my head.

“You see how they treat me,” and she tossed back that old-young face, that surgically lifted neck, with hair that has begun to come in gray at the roots. It’s a beautiful gesture and I myself would be quite content simply to admire it no matter the age of the one who makes it, but I don’t think the men will feel the same way.

“Oh, they’re bored,” I said. “It’s nothing. Cultural reversion. We’re in the late nineteenth century is all. Do you want to bet how far back we’ll be next week? Five to ten it’ll be the eighth A.D.”

“You’re crazy,” said Mrs. Graham, not without affection, and went into the bungalow to make friends with Cassie.

I hid the crucial parts of my pharmacopoeia under a rock, in the tin box I will use for the vocoder, eventually. I thought of telling them I’m a vegetarian, just to make them discount even more of what I do (and they would!) but I couldn’t do it with a straight face.

An endless afternoon.

John Ude: “You play Go? Chess?” I said No, dunno why, never learned.

Lori remarked that she didn’t see what was wrong with the Australian outback because she’d been there, in the special hotel, and it was very, very nice.

I donate my mini-sewing-kit to the communal possessions heap.

Finally, after Cassie had walked six ways around a bedsheet, deciding how to cut it up and sew it for herself, after everyone had memorized the kind of tree whose burning had made Lori sick (“This is very important” said her father), after Lori said, “Oh, I am like to die of tedium” only a dozen times, before we all went mad—

Nathalie returned on the broomstick, covered with dust. There’s running water not far from here, that way (she gestures) which rises (she says) in a spring some two hundred kilometers to the North, in hilly country, and passes us only a couple of km away.

“Did you have to go all that way?” says Alan-Bobby, in grave complaint. “We’ve been just waiting around.”

She throws over her shoulder, “Of course I had to,” and sponging off the mask near the water tank, starts drawing on one of my playing cards where the stream is, where we are, and in which direction everything is. “North” is provincial. She means Polewards. At this time of year you can’t tell East or West from the sun; though perhaps the sunset (a little to the right) and the sunrise (a little to the left) could tell us if we are facing North or South. Arbitrary. I study it very carefully.

“Will you just stop that!” cries Nathalie furiously, for Alan is taking a bath in the tool chest, a real bath (insofar as he can fit in) and singing lustily, though nothing recognizable. He’s tune-deaf. Nathalie shouts, “Goddamn it, you’re wasting water!”

“But we’ve got water,” says he, bewildered. “You just said so.”

“We’ve got the raw material for the distiller,” she said. “That’s all. We haven’t even measured the flow yet. Now get out of there!”

He does, tipping the soapy water on to the ground, where it might make the grass wither or blow up (but it doesn’t) and prepares to fill the tool box again.

“You…!” says Nathalie, white. “You imbecile!”

“I don’t think,” says Alan, slowly, like a man to whom a new idea has just occurred, “that you ought to talk to me like that.”

“We could’ve put that back through the distiller!” (Which is what we’ve been doing with our chemical toilet.)

“I think you are much too bossy,” says Alan, sponging himself off with a few inches of cold water. He’s looking at the ground and something’s happening in his head. John Ude has backed off, smiling nervously. Victor’s frowning.

Nobody likes her, not Cassie, not Mrs. Gee, not her husband, certainly. Lori and I don’t count.

Dried off and in his shorts, Alan advances up to dirty, dust-streaked Nathalie, who has always been Top. He looks sly.

“Say, how come you’re boss?” he says.

“Brains,” she says. “How come you’re such a damn fool?”

“I could take you over my knee and spank you, ” he says.

Nobody is interfering.

“Idiot,” says she. Clearly, in government training schools people don’t do these things.

She turns her back on him, superbly.

“Look, nobody else can fly that thing,” I say, very quickly. “And since you won’t let me because you don’t trust me, you’d better—”

“Turn around,” he says.

She props the broomstick against a tree, stripping off her shirt and beating the dust out of it.

“Turn around, you bitch!” he says.

Surprised, she does. Not even afraid. Only surprised.

And Alan-Bobby, who could probably uproot a tree, with those shoulders and arms and that neck, and the little face in between looking peculiarly lost—but very angry now—socks her right in the jaw, knocking her down.

He’s red. He says, “Maybe now you’ll treat other people with respect. Now that you know there’s other people in the world.”

She whispers, sprawled on the ground, white as one of my playing cards, “You bloody, blazing, impossible ass—”

He hits her powerfully on the side of the face, snapping her head about.

“That’s enough,” says Victor, he and John Ude, by some mysterious calculus, speaking almost at the same moment, and each coming forward to hold one arm of this baby colossus. Enough for what? Alan looks happy. I mean it: not triumphant, not overbearing, simply happy. He glows. The twenty-first century can’t have been kind to this enormous fellow, and now he’s discovering other interesting things to do: chopping down trees, lifting rock with his bare hands, fighting, knocking down women. Too bad he’s so young; Victor Graham now, there’s a hypertensive if I ever saw one; once his medication runs out, we might do a job like the old Jewish story: the Rabbi and the Count both tied to chairs, alone in the Count’s cellar for a whole night, and in the morning the rabbi serene and fresh and the Count a dead man. Apoplexy.

But Alan’s useful.

Any day now he’ll discover Protecting Women. I hope.

Valeria Victrix got the first-aid kit, and she and I anointed and bandaged Nathalie, who was still shaking—more from anger than from shock. Cassie pushed us aside, claiming she could do it better. She was right.

I said, “Nathalie, I thought a government trainee would know—”

“I will, I will,” she said.

“My God, why didn’t you duck?” I said. “Or just drop under his punch? Or give him a good knee-over when you were on your back? Or stick your fingers in his eyes?”

Well, he had surprised her. Cassie thought any woman who even got into such a position was a fool to begin with. “Just tell him Lori is watching,” she said. “And cry a lot. You’re both cuckoo.”

I said, “Look here, Nathalie, just how much training have you really had?”

Silence.

Of course. She was going to it, not coming from it

I said quickly, “Never mind. Don’t speak; your mouth is puffing up.”

Sitting, holding rags soaked in cold water to her face. Streaked with dirt. John, Victor, and Alan making ecstatic plans how to move everything nearer the stream. We go to bed when the sun reaches a certain clump of trees; there’s hours of daylight yet to go and nobody can tell if the day is getting shorter or longer. It remains warm, too light, but better that than that dreadful, empty, black sky.

You see the rewards of being Nobody.

The penalty: everybody comes to me for advice. Because my public word would not be trusted, I can be told anything privately. Alan whispers:

“Hey, wake up. Please?”

Dusk all around us. Scarlatti in my head. I said, “What?”

“Are you awake?” he whispered. I mumbled something and opened my eyes. Dusk or dawn, everybody’s mattresses scattered all over the ground, farther apart than last night. I’ve got to get away from these insane people. Alan is lying by my mattress on the damp ground, his woeful face propped in his hands. He says, in a low voice so as not to waken anyone:

“Do you think what I did was really so bad?”

“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”

“Lori chewed me out something awful,” he said. “So did Mrs. Graham. And Cassie won’t speak to me. ”

I sat up. I said, “I bet Ude gave you a lecture on civilization and Vic said you’d have him to reckon with if you tried it again.”

“How’d you know!”

“Oh, just guessing,” I said.

“Well, do you think it was so bad?” Looking anxious.

“Yes. Now let me sleep. Git.”

“Hell, you sound just like Nathalie! I’ll tell you, maybe it wasn’t right, but I bet it taught her something!”

“What did it teach her?” I said. “Never to approach you without a broken bottle in her hand? Now Lori thinks you’re real sweet. And Vie Graham knows that some day you’re going to pull something like that on him. It taught us all to love and trust you. Right?”

He sat back on his heels. He said sulkily, “I could do it to you, too, you know.”

I said, “Really, Victor? Sorry—slip of the tongue,” and was on my feet, holding straight out in that treacherous light the screwdriver I had abstracted from the tool chest on day one.

You surely don’t think I’m fool enough to walk about without a weapon, do you?

He reached for it, and I gave his hand a good slash. He withdrew it, extremely astonished.

“Oh, go away,” I said. “I haven’t the slightest intention of hurting you and you don’t have the slightest intention of really hurting me. You’re just showing off. You’re a good, big, strong, decent, beautiful man, and you can pride yourself on that all you like. But don’t forget; even though she’s exasperating, Nathalie is smart and if you start throwing your weight around nobody else will like you and she’ll take advantage of that. Remember: you’re not stronger than all of us put together. Besides, Lori’s stuck on you.”

He lit up. “Yeah!”

“So go to sleep now, huh?”

He said, “How old do you think Lori would have to be before she can have babies?”

“Sixteen,” I said (guessing). “Now go to sleep.”

Day five: we’ll move everything nearer the river, like lemmings. Nathalie will start turning bruise-blue in the face. Alan will creep about like a wounded pup, ostracized by all, scorned by Lori Graham, the worst burdens loaden on his back, meke as the knyght that suffereth for his ladye’s sake.

Which won’t last.

Day five: we worked eighteen hours, slept, worked again. Alan has reverted to the intensely polite, self-suppressing youth everybody knew and loathed. My feet hurt. I tried to explain about orthopedic malfunctions and was told I was malingering. Then my ankles swelled out most satisfactorily in the evening, looking distressingly like small cantaloupes, and everyone was most apologetic. I said No, no, I had to carry my share. Then my ankles got even more so. Cassie washed them, the great nurse, sexpot, earth-mother. We went to bed. She says: “Sssst!”

Me: What?

She: You ever had an orgasm?

Me: Can’t remember.

She: Liar. I mean during fucking. I never did. Women are all liars about it, like Vicki Graham. She just pretends, to show off, you know.

(Silence.)

She: Ever want babies?

Me: I dunno, Sort of. Not really.

She: I do.

(Silence.)

She: They don’t let you, if you’re poor. But here—

Me: I see. Well, good luck. How are you going to handle the men?

She just laughed. Then she said with perfect certainty, “Those babies’ll love me, not their daddies.” She nudged me. “Hey, mad-head, Ude and Graham are going to take your pills away from you in the morning.”

“And who told them, you bloody traitor!” said I.

“Sssssh!” She looked around uneasily, then whispered, “I did.”

She added, “But I told you too, didn’t I?”

Day six: I am set upon from behind, bound, and searched, protesting indignantly. They slit the lining of my jacket (Cassie: “Oh, don’t take on so; I’ll sew it up again!”), violate my leather belt (“Hey, look, it’s got pop-outs,” says Alan), and pinch my body-suit up and down (without me in it, of course). They collect all the psychedelics. I cry, very very hard. They free my hands so I can blow my nose and I whack Cassie, who looks startled. Then they let me put on my bodysuit and Victor Graham stands very impressively in front of me, hands out: “More.”

“Me?” I said. “Me have anything more? I swear—”

Finally I unscrew my left shoe-heel and give them Cassie’s headache medicine. Then I unscrew my right shoe-heel and hand over a glass vial. Victor starts to crush the thing, and this part of the scene is genuine, believe me; I yelled “Don’t! Stop!”

Consternation.

I said, “That’s lethal. It’s a nerve poison, works right through the skin. You don’t have to drink it. Victor! Just put it down. No, it’s not bio-degradable, so you can’t put it in the chemical toilet. Just leave it in the sun for a while. That’ll ruin it. But don’t let anybody touch it.”

Victor confers with John Ude, both of them gingerly handling the vial. Ude nods. I’ve told the truth. (And I have. What I did not tell them was how many more I’ve got hidden back at the old site.) I started to cry harder, which isn’t difficult because I’m thinking of how damned unfair it is that I shall never hear again my melancholy Dowland: semper Dowland, semper dolens. Ever Dowland, ever doleful. No tee-hee-hee-quoth-she for him. I noticed through my tears that Nathalie appears to have formed some kind of alliance with John Ude, her moral impressiveness having proved unequal to Alan’s muscles. The two intellectuals. The two bureaucrats. Tee-hee-hee in the mattress. They don’t want to set me free, but that is foolish, as I tell them at great length, and I cry a lot harder, and even rock back and forth, which is nine parts fury, until Cassie says, “Oh stop it, hon, I’ll fix your jacket. What were you going to do with those things, anyway? Kill yourself by an overdose?”

“No,” said I. “I just feel humiliated.” She put her arm around me, which is enough to make you feel an awful bemmon. She then promised to fix my jacket.

I gave them back the screwdriver.

Oh, it went like a charm!

John Ude, still uncontrollably curious, says to me on the last trek back to the old place: “Really, I cannot understand why you want to die.”

“Neither can I,” I said.

“Well, then?”

I said, “John Donne, John-John-with-your-britches-on, John-Whittington-turn-again-lord-mayor-of-London-Town, we are dead. We died the minute we crashed. Plague, toxic food, deficiency diseases, broken bones, infection, gangrene, cold, heat, and just plain starvation. I’m just a Trembler. My God, you’re the ones who want to suffer: conquer and control, conquer and control, when you haven’t even got stone spears. You’re dead.”

“For dead people, we’re acting pretty brisk,” says Ude, with The Smile. Haven’t seen that for a while; Nathalie must’ve bucked him up quite a bit.

“It’s one of the symptoms,” I said. “Galvanism. Corpse jerking. Planning. Power. Inheritance. You know, survival. My genes shall conquer the world. That’s death.”

“Hear you were quite big in that power and planning stuff about fifteen years back,” he says.

“Then you heard wrong. I walked out one day and gave it all up. Hideously ineffectual.”

“Still—”

“For everything there is a time and a season under Heaven; now you ought to know that.”

He keeps on smiling The Smile. No recognition.

I said, “You’re not a historian of ideas.”

“Clever,” says he. “I wondered when you’d tumble to it. I was what you’d call a bureaucrat. That’s why Nathalie and I get along. She says we think alike.”

“Sure, after yesterday,” said I. Ude halted.

“Don’t push us,” he said. “Don’t you push us too much now.” “Then leave me alone,” I said. “Just leave me alone and I’ll have no reason to push anybody, huh?”

But they won’t be able to leave me alone. I know. Not because of the child-bearing, because of the disagreement. The disagreement is what matters.

How far will I push them? To where? All the way?

Day seven: as lunatics or lemmings will, we dragged our glass-and-plastic bungalow, the only dwelling with a heater this side of God-knows-what, two kilometers to the stream, the travois being its own light-but-stubborn bottom. It took all day. Too tired to do anything else. Lying on the mattress outdoors, Nathalie sketching in the dirt the plans of sanitary latrines (downstream). Quickly goes in and washes and disinfects her hands. No one has yet deliberately ingested one morsel of anything in this place; still we must have been breathing in and swallowing a good deal, and no one’s dead yet. We live on the freeze-dried. How to test it out? A fruitless (sorry) question.

They asked me to sing. My memory was stuck on Dowland; I thought of “Flow, My Tears,” “In Darkness Let Me Dwell,” “A Heart That’s Broken”—well! This is not good public relations. “Come All Ye Sons of Art”? Nothing with polyphony. Finally I sang “Sweet Kate” with all the tee-hee-hee. Taught Cassie, who has a good natural voice, to come in on it, and added a few nasty Renaissance songs about jealousy (dreadful people), “Farewell, Unkind,” and finished with a sudden burst of remembrance, swooping in great fake arcs, those posh-velveteen melodies:

Blue desert

And you and I…

(Where on earth did I learn “The Desert Song”?)

Lori sang Gilbert and Sullivan and forgot the middles.

“Oh, you can sing!” cried Alan, in a burst of admiration (at me, not at Lori; the mystic maiden can, of course, do anything).

Schubert! Of course. I said, “More tomorrow.” But can I do the eleven-note jumps upward on an o-umlaut? Never. Ah! Sea songs and folk songs.

(Did I learn them in high school?)

Good night, court jester.

Day eight: the great womb robbery. The day started out well enough, with me limping so badly (at least I tried to) that I was excused work by John Ude, told, “oh, that’s too bad,” by several others, and ended up playing cards with Lori (I mean the bedsheet cards). For some reason nobody mentions she’s never expected to do any work, God knows why. She kept beating me at Casino, while I rubbed my ankles.

“Are those orthopedic shoes?”

I said uh huh.

She yelled excitedly, “I’ve got the ten of diamonds!” and took in an eight of clubs and a two of hearts. (That’s three points.) She looked at me sideways, then stuck her nose up in the air.

“So you want us to kill ourselves!” she said, with contempt.

I just made a face and threw up my hands.

“You think nobody’ll find us?” she added, a little sharper.

“Oh, I was just talking,” I said. She was counting up her winnings so far. She said, frowning, “You’re a coward!” and put her cards down in a neat little pile, with a stone on top of it.

I said uh huh again.

“The one thing my Mummy and Daddy taught me when they got me from the crèche when I was seven,” she said, still sharply, “was never to give up on anything. And never to be a coward.” Five years of money, that’s five years of enforced childishness. She started shuffling the cards in a very slow method invented by herself: put them in piles of three each, with a pebble on top, then take one off the top of each pile, then subtract every fourth card and put them on the bottom. I can’t figure it. Daddy had set up a kind of awning with four stakes chopped from a tree and one of the sheets; we were sitting under this and watching the others sweat at the foundation of the communal house, about fifty meters away from the water and several meters above it on a slight elevation. Nathalie had suggested some kind of wooden rockers under the house, like the type used in Colonial New England: good for winds, for shifting ground, and floods. I don’t know what they think they’re going to insulate it with—wood shavings, chopped by hand?

Lori started to deal the cards. You have to pick each of them up with both hands and hold it taut: otherwise it drapes and you can see the other side. Managing a handful of them isn’t easy. I said:

“Shall I tell your fortune?”

“Huh?” said she.

“Do you know how to read palms?”

She shook her head. “That’s silly.” She stuck out her hand, then giggled and drew it back.

“All right,” she said, after a moment. “Go ahead. But I know what you’ll say!”

“Hmm,” I said, “do you now, little miss.” That struck her as excruciating: Me, the gypsy. She put on an expression very like her mother’s only far more exaggerated: eyes rolled up, corners of the mouth pulled down.

I said, “You have an immensely long life-line.” (I cannot tell a life-line from a thumb.) “Here,” I said at random. “You will die sometime in your eighty-ninth year. You will be well-known. Even famous. Extraordinary!”

“Known to how many?” said Lori quickly.

“Millions,” I said (acting out vast surprise). “Your life-line is interrupted here by… by relative isolation for a period of years… not many years, perhaps eight or nine. And then there’s a great blossoming of renown, almost as great as what I see at the end of your life.”

“Well, obviously we’re going to be saved,” she said pedantically.

“So it would seem. Here” (I think I was somewhere in the middle of her palm) “is the line which indicates either children or good work, fruitful work. It branches four—five—no, many more times. But I don’t know if that means children or work. ”

“Work,” she said promptly. “I’m a musician.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yes,” (and she nodded); “I’m a composer.”

“Are you? Think of that!”

“Well, I will be,” she said. Then she added, “That’s the same thing. But I’ll tell you a secret—” (she all but whispered this, leaning over the piles of cards) “I don’t like commercial music.”

“Oh,” I said. What hearts did I wring when I was a child? Just a biological device, Nature keeping us old ones in the service of the young.

She said, frowning, “You look funny.”

Then she added, without the slightest transition, “I like serial music. You know, the late twentieth-century stuff where it goes deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle for half an hour and then it goes doodle just once, and you could die with excitement.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“I’ve written one—well, half of one—composition.” She stuck out her hand. “Go on.”

I said, “You know, Lori, what I think your fortune means is that you will not only be famous for music, but also for having been rescued here. They’ll probably call the place after you. They do things like that, you know.”

“Of course,” she said. “And everybody gets rescued. As my father was trying to tell you.”

“John Ude was trying to tell me, I believe,” I said.

“My father!” She stuck out her hand. “Go on.”

“It’s a musician’s hand,” I said shamelessly, “that’s true. And the rest… well, I can’t see much out of the ordinary except riches, of course… you know that… I think you will write a book about your experiences—here” (pointing) “but of course I can’t tell whether that’s a book or music. The wealth line increases at that point. And marriage—”

“I’ll never get married.”

“Yes, there’s hardly anything. Though your love line is quite another thing. But who, of course, or even what, I can’t tell.”

“Artistic passion?” said she.

“Mm hm. And the rest… well, it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know. Sensitive. Intellectual. But animal vitality, mustn’t forget that. That’s about it.”

“Oh,” she said. She was disappointed.

“It changes,” I said, “almost day to day. Most people don’t know that. Small changes, of course, nothing big. But that’s all I can see today.”

“You’ll do it again in a week,” said Lori decisively, beginning to deal her cards. It did not seem to occur to her that she was giving me orders. I pictured her giving orders to Alan-Bobby.

No.

She dealt the cards, a very finicky young woman, concentrating deeply.

Suddenly she said, “Are you really a coward?”

“No,” I said.

“Yes you are,” she said. “Pick up your cards. If you teach me to read palms, I’ll read your palm. That’ll tell us.”

She won the next game, too.

We were well into our third and Lori was singing something from Gilbert and Sullivan about not telling him, her, or it, because etiquette didn’t permit, and not even hinting, whispering, or pointing it out—yes, very apposite—and I was bored—when Alan shouted “Over here, everyone!” because he had the big voice. They had been slacking work for some time, with a lot of talk between Nathalie, the ex-professor, and Victor. (One to dig, two to chop, and two to carry either logs or dirt in the tool chest: Nathalie, Alan, Valeria— with the hand hatchet—Victor, Ude.) Symptoms of a conference.

“Bring your tent!” shouted Alan conscientiously.

So we did—rather, I did; Lori wouldn’t touch it for fear that she might break out in hives. I told her while I was uprooting it (and not entirely out of compassion; she could be a real whiner when she chose) that she’d live to be eighty, name all the plants in the region, lose her allergies as she grew up, and end up writing the first book about Lori’s Planet.

The court. Under another jury-rigged tent. After this my memories get a little muddled. Disturbance: ripples in a pond. I smiled mechanically. Won’t be thought a good, reliable witness—

(By whom?)

reliable witness.

Victor’s very big. Very polite. So you can’t get at him, perhaps. Valeria was off to one side, with Cassie. Victrix patted the ground next to her invitingly and Lori stared carefully in another direction. Alan, awed, with his mouth open; John Ude peculiarly cool; and Nathalie grimly watching the ground.

Mister-not-Professor Ude said, “I call this meeting to order.”

Oh. Oh my. Important.

“You’re chairman?” I said. “Well! Who made you chairman?”

Nathalie: “I did.”

That is, they both did. Things are going to be very interesting.

Victor: “That’s a valid objection. I suggest we begin by selecting a chair.”

Silence. Then Nathalie said wearily, “I nominate”—Guess Who?—well, he was nominated, seconded, and voted in. Almost unanimously.

John Ude: “Do you have any more objections?”

Me: “No.”

(Almost unanimously means me and Lori, Lori because she wanted her father to be, and I abstained.)

“We have to talk about something very important,” said Ude. “I mean having children.”

Hand up, me. He recognized me—does this sound as crazy to you as it does to me?—and I said, “Priorities backwards. First we have to poison Lori.”

“Huh?” she said; “you’re crazy.”

“Mr. Chairman,” I said, “point of order. Is it necessary for us to pretend that we’ve never met before?”

He smiled. Oh, the universes tremble when John Ude smiles! He said, “I suppose we can afford to be somewhat more informal. In fact, I think it will be a very good thing. Please go ahead.”

I said, “I’m only trying to suggest that before we start any babies, we’d better start finding out what we can eat around here.”

(Lori, sotto voce, with a dig in the ribs, “Why’d you say poison?”)

Cassie said, “Sure, why the baby?”

“I was joking,” I said. “I meant she’s allergic to so many things. She should be the last person to eat anything.”

Nathalie: “Will you volunteer to be the first?”

“No,” I said. “Will you?”

Nathalie got up, very angry. “We have food and water for five months and three weeks! Perhaps you’d like the rest of us to eat grass and leave it all to you?”

“I waive it,” I said. “I leave it alone. Give me the broomstick and I’ll go up to the head of the stream and drink the water without the purifier. If I start hurting, I’ll kill myself.”

“This is no time for joking.” (John Ude)

I said, “I’m not joking. It’s a genuine offer.”

Silence.

“About the children,” said Ude. “Mister Graham, as the oldest of us, has offered to donate his genetic material first.”

Cassie giggled.

Nathalie glared at her. But Nathalie also sat down.

(Was Victor on a special diet, on the ship?)

I got up and ambled toward the stream. By all that’s alive, a melodramatic “Stop!” and then “Stop her!” from John Ude, and here was Alan-Bobby running ahead of me, like some crazy postman with a Special Delivery (excuse me) and turning sheepishly to stand in front, his arms stretched out.

“All right,” I said, “all right, I can go taste the river when you’re asleep, can’t I?” and I headed back toward the improvised council tent, feeling in my palm the pellet-gun. Reflex. Not here, not now. Back in the sleeve of the jacket you go.

How’d it get there?

Oh, I forgot to tell you

Between yesterday and today, when everyone was asleep, I went back to the old site and dug everything up. Including my pharmacopoeia. Left them lying on the ground with dreams of “The Desert Song” ringing in their ears. (I had mist-spray hypnotics in my underwear. I’m not that quiet.) I tiptoed off, anyway, felling Alan-Bobby as he sat up, probably talking in his sleep, with a swift squish to the nostrils and very daring, went off on the trudge to the old camp, where it took me forever to pry up that rock. I left in the dusk; I returned at the end of the dark: the sky ragged where the sun rises and sets, one patch of cloud red, red as blood, red as fury. I gave them each a last spray as I came, too. Except Lori. (She might be allergic.) She was wiggling and muttering uncomfortably to herself. Watched her face slowly settle itself and become clarified as the light grew and grew. Without getting anywhere—I mean the light—for hours and hours more.

“Hey, you better go back,” says Alan.

“Oh.” I sigh. “Okay.” And go back, helpless.

Now I’m going to be first. I said, “Well, you’ll have to wait until I’m off the pills. And then it sometimes takes a few months to restore fertility. And we don’t want septuplets, so that’s another couple of months. ”

“You’re not taking any pills,” said Nathalie.

“Because you’ve never seen me do it? Whew!” said I. (That last’s a whistle.)

“What are you taking?” said Ude.

I made up a name.

“Then you don’t,” (he said, blinking slightly but looking steadily at me the while) “have to worry about multiple births. There haven’t been any on that since ’07. I don’t see why you and Victor can’t start now, if you like.”

Victor said politely that he certainly wouldn’t mind as long as I wouldn’t mind.

I said I would mind.

“Why?” said Nathalie.

“Personal preference,” said I.

“It’s her religion!” said Cassie, a little indignantly. “You should respect a person’s religion, you know.”

“She’s probably left-handed.” This is Mrs. Graham, spitefully. Cassie obviously wasn’t sure what “left-handed” meant; she leaned towards Mrs. Graham, who whispered to her.

Cassie colored to the roots of her hair—and her neckline (a sheet).

“In a month, if you don’t mind,” I said to Victor, with a sort of little bow. “When it’ll do most good.” Now he can’t have liked that. But he looked unmoved and nodded his head. Polite. Cairn. Great, handsome, hollow monument of a man. Perhaps he’s run out of something. Perhaps he’s going to be ill. Hypertensive or cardiac, I can almost smell it. Or some other fatality hanging in the air and nobody wants to talk about it in front of the daughter. Get him before he dies.

“Before that month, then,” said John Ude, grinning in my direction, “Nathalie has suggested herself, and afterwards the other lady, Cassie. The—uh—persons involved can certainly find privacy almost anywhere, I suppose. Anyway, it’s none of our business.”

Cassie, who was folding the hem of her improvised dress under and over with her fingers, again and again, said:

“I’m going to be called by my full name. I don’t like Cassie. That’s only a professional name.”

“Of course,” said John Ude.

“Tell us,” said Victor.

Alan looked blankly receptive.

“My name is Cassandra,” said Cassie.

Nobody caught it. Lori said, “That’s a nice name,” (possibly to annoy her mother). I inhaled when I should’ve swallowed and for thirty seconds there until I stopped coughing John Ude was very tender and careful with his walking womb.

“Cassandra’s always wanted children,” be said pleasantly to me when I could breathe again. Nathalie was behind him, looking over his shoulder.

I tried to call him a son-of-a-prick and only croaked.

“Yes?” he said, very alert—but he always seems alert; it’s part of the window-dressing.

“Listen,” I whispered, just managing to speak. “I’ll go away. Take the broomstick and send it back, very slow, so you can catch it. Go upstream—downstream—doesn’t matter—try the water. Take no food. Just leave me.”

“No!” said Nathalie.

“Why?” I coughed some more.

“If I’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it,” said Nathalie.

“You… don’t have to.” And I cleared my throat. At last.

“We’d better keep an eye on her,” said Nathalie to John Ude.

I think I put my head in my hands. Suppose they found my gun? My things? Wait long enough and it won’t matter. Although I can always do it. Anyone can do it. Easy enough to kill if it doesn’t matter about being found out. Then perhaps they’d kill me, and it would be over, and that’s all right.

But I’m afraid of waiting too long. Eroding. Purpose all gone. Slipping into no-decision, no-purpose; hard enough as it is. God knows. I think everyone loves it here because their choices are all made for them; we were never very comfortable with our fate in our own hands, were we? Better to act on the modern religion: an incarnation of the immortal germplasm. Nostalgia for the mud. Simplicities.

I said, “Cassandra!” and burst out laughing, coughing again.

“You’re going mad,” said Nathalie, with a certain satisfaction and she and John Ude stepped backwards so they could talk, I suppose, about keeping an eye on me.

And nobody knows. Nobody knows anything about anything.

“Aren’t you going to play cards with me?” said Lori, suddenly turning up with the cards in a sort of bag she’d made out of a scarf of her mother’s. It was bright, bright blue. Royal blue.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” And did.

Day nine. I took my turn digging and carrying. I was watched, always by someone. Nathalie and Victor disappeared dutifully over the hill while the rest of us snored (presumably).