Next, we would like to thank those of you who sent money to help us in the operations of the Fortean Bureau. Also, without you, we would have never made it this far. I won't name any names here, but you know who you are. Thanks again. If you donated recently and want a refund, contact us at the editor's email address.

Also, we have to thank anyone and everyone who has reviewed the Fortean Bureau over the years, or provided a link--or bought any of our merchandise. Without your support, there just wouldn't have been any point to this project. Thanks.

Thanks to you, the writers who have been published and those who have not, in the pages of the Fortean Bureau.

Thanks to the readers who kept our page counts up when we were wondering whether all the work was worth it.

So why are we closing? Time and money, the two main reasons any project like this comes to an end. Perhaps, if in the future we have more of both those things, the Fortean Bureau will return. Things rising from the grave would be very Fortean, after all.

Thanks again to all of you.

-Jeremy & Sarah Tolbert

Unfortunately, as Paraspheres took its inspiration from "New Wave Fabulism", a reader who enjoys both literary and genre fiction will probably need to wear a bicycle helmet or boxer's headgear while reading the anthology -- it's either that or earn a concussion from all the forehead slapping. The first problem is that "New Wave Fabulism" has nothing to do with anything. The "New Wave" is about as dead as taffy pulls and evenings on the parlor davenport or somesuch with a handsome suitor and grandma's stereoscope. ("My my, Reginald, it's almost as though we were in the same room with a living, breathing, African Negro!") Fabulism doesn't necessarily involve the fantastic; plenty of Calvino's work is fabulist and realistic all at once, for example.

The second problem is Keegan's silly editorial note, which actually starts off as an introduction and is then expanded in the form of a lengthy afterword. There's actually a jump, like in a newspaper. In the piece, Keegan explains that there is quality realist literature, and cheap genre fiction that is produced primarily with profit in mind. Literary fiction is both morally and psychologically complex. Thus, "readers often finish a literary novel with the feeling that they have a more compassionate understanding of other human beings than when they started," he tells us. On the other hand, genre fiction is simple commodity production. We're told that "Some of the most famous [genre] writers, when faced with [two-book-a-year] deadlines, have typically secluded themselves and written novels totaling several hundred pages in a month or less." No compassion for our fellow human beings can emerge from such sausage-making, to be sure!

If you're like me, your skull is now both well-bruised and full of "but but buts." Does realism really make readers feel more compassionate, or at least feel that they feel more compassionate? If it's only the latter, is realism a worthwhile project? Are the characters in realist fictions all that well-developed, or do they just suit the readerly prejudices of realism's audience of middle-class neurotics? Middle class neurosis is one of the genre tropes of realism, along with epiphanies and provocative details -- you can write realism to formula too, as the MFA programs show us. Why should it receive the bye Keegan gives it?

And are there no prolific literary authors? Joyce Carol Oates has published forty-four novels, seven novellas long enough to be sold as novels, twenty-eight short story collections, eight published volumes of plays (a volume often containing more than one play), eleven books of non-fiction and criticism, eight volumes of poetry, and six books of juvenile fiction. Unless she's three hundred years old, Oates is writing two books a year.

Anyway, Keegan sets up this "good lit" versus "bad genre" dichotomy in order to introduce --by way of afterword, remember -- the concept of the third kind of fiction: fantastical stuff that manages to be good. Paraspheres is thus an exercise in canon-building, and isn't a bad one for it. A fair number of the stories are reprints, some of them quite popular and even fairly recent, like Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Birthday of the World." Angela Carter's "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" is an inspired inclusion, as it hints at a common ancestor for the taxa Keegan attempted to build in his editor's note. "The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics" by Rudy Rucker either saved my life (or ruined it, if you ask my folks) when I was ten years old, so I was thrilled to see it again in Paraspheres.

There are odder choices as well, like "The White Man," an early story from Jeffrey Ford that was originally published in the micropress horror zine Aberrations. It's a nice story, but Ford has written about 2392047560465 better ones, a couple dozen of which are available in his collections The Empire of Ice Cream and The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories. "Cake" by Michael Moorcock was first published just last year, and is a very good story, but is marred by an editorial postscript reading "The editors have placed the above work of narrative realist literary fiction, 'Cake', at the end of this anthology in order to assist readers in their return to reality." Ugh. Not only is the note silly and cloying, but is also rather insulting to much of the work that came before. Plus "narrative realist literary fiction" is an unnecessary mouthful.

Paraspheres is on firmer ground with its originals, and is thus well worth buying and reading. "An Accounting" by Brian Evenson is a black comedy horror tale about someone who accidentally declares himself Jesus in a world that recalls both the founding of Mormonism and the Donner Party, but done so artfully that even people who don't like stories about cannibalism and shooting a dog will enjoy. Charlie Anders' "Power Couple or, Love Never Sleeps" is a giggle-a-page satire, and the sort of thing that would have otherwise gone unpublished unless it had been miraculously found in a foot locker that once belonged to John Cheever.

Paul Pekin's "The Magnificent Carp of Hichi Street" is a good example of a story that actually almost fits the term "New Wave Fabulism," or would if that term actually made sense. Cute story. Laura Moriarty's "Maryolatry" isn't all that great, but I'll marry her anyway, for this nifty graf, which reads like the world's first semi-successful R. A. Lafferty pastiche:

Martians in rows fall down one by one. Everyone plays a part in the war. Ada finds them. Their pictures and statistics. She finds them and counts them. "There are many kinds of Martian but one kind of war," she writes. "Things explode for no reason or for reasons of their own. The dead are all soldiers once they have died. The world is littered with them. An incursion occurs or has occurred of light into a dark place. Too much light. Beams or rays razor-like go through everything. There is a lack of air in the screams. A lack of conviction in the eyes of the victims as they turn red or blue or gray depending on the weapon and on the speciation."

Many of the other stories are also very good, and a few are especially intriguing in that they are excerpts of forthcoming novels. There are a few flops, though. Robin Canton's "B. Longing" b. longs in a freshman poetry primer as an example of line break abuse. It's also a novel excerpt, which makes me shudder. I wanted to like Laird Hunt's "Three Tales," since I got such a kick out of his book The Impossibly, but if that story were my next-door neighbor I'd move out of town. What can I say other than this: Paraspheres is an uneven anthology, just like every other anthology ever published.

Paraspheres essentially succeeds as an anthology, as it collects enough entertaining-to-amazing stories to impress ol' purple-headed me. But does it succeed as a challenge to the literary status quo? Does it extend beyond the spheres of literary and genre fiction, like it claims to on the cover? The answer is a qualified "Sure." If two-decade old stories by Kim Stanley Robinson and Alasdair Gray count as "beyond the genre," and if literary fiction really is little more than dexterously phrased reportage of everyday life, climaxed by feature article-style kickers about sunsets or a wrinkled hand extending for a friendly shake, then Paraspheres is the Revolution, the Counter-Revolution, and the Political Reconstitution of the Last International as the Party of the World Reading Class all in one.

If not, it's still worth the price, because some of the stories will stay with you after reading them . . . . and beyond! And speaking of the beyond, please kill me.

The army guy driving the shit-brown Tahoe turned to look at the two boys in the back seat, ignoring the ice-slick New Mexico highway. "Wha'd he say?"

"Don't know," Ian Singer said. "He's speaking Jap. Or something."

"Yeah, but whaddoes it mean?"

Ian shrugged. "Fuck if I know. I'm not him."

Highway shield and crest evident of heraldic design but font usage and application indicative of workaday operation, uninspired, insipid, a stale interpretation of a grand dream, Jon thought, as they passed a road sign. All communication, textual or graphical, set off a firestorm of ideas in Jon's mind, ideas that could not always find release. He read Arabic when he was five, and cried and wiped his eyes, seeing the violence, the slash of sword and the burning of villages in its too-vital form. He also saw the hidden violence in the oriental letterforms, but it was tame and channeled violence, tolerable.

After a while, they came to a cave, set into the cold gray mountainside. Chain-link fence and a lonely-looking guard shack stood vigil, with a faded sign announcing this was a RESTRICTED AREA.

The capital letters were not menacing. Jon didn't even read them, instead looking at the phonograph outlines of the mountain peaks above. Were there hidden messages?

"Looks like a bad movie set," Ian said.

The army guy laughed, hurr, hurr, like he heard that comment all the time.

Jon had a sudden moment of clarity. His mother and father, sitting down at their kitchen table with the too-polite violent government man with the perfect suit, talking about what Jon was going to do with his life. And then the offer.

"What else is he going to do?" his father asked, signing it.

"What else is he going to do?" Jon said, in Arabic, tears brimming in his eyes.

They drove into the mountain.

"The freak show's here," Guy Yamazaki said.

"Don't call him that," Emily Vargas said automatically.

"Don't call him that, colonel," Guy said.

Emily rolled her eyes. They tore themselves away from the monitor and went to greet their guests. The guests who just might save Guy's career.

Or do something even more incredible.

"He doesn't drool or anything retarded like that," Ian said. He sat slouched in the cold metal chair, his arms crossed. The cold gray meeting-room walls and ancient fluorescent fixtures reflected in his hazel eyes.

"I didn't think he did," Emily said.

Prim, so prim, so proper, so concealed, so hateful, so compromised, thought Jon. That attitude, those crossed arms, the moment's hesitation before sitting down, the pursed lips, the tense muscles.

Jon was a year younger than Ian, but his open, innocent face made him seem much more childlike. Jon shared his dark hair and slight build with his brother, but his piercing blue eyes were unique.

"Ask him a direct question, most of the time you'll get an answer," Ian said. "Just sometimes in another language. Or one of them diagrams he draws."

Silence from the colonel, a fiftyish oriental guy who looked like he'd sunken into his uniform.

"Hello, Jon," Emily said. "Are you looking forward to working with us?"

Silence.

"Do you have any questions?" Guy asked.

Silence.

Ian shook his head. "No, no, no. Those aren't di-rect. Listen." He turned to Jon. "So what did you see on the drive up here?"

Jon didn't turn to look at him, but something focused in his clear blue eyes. "It's the ancient conflict," he said. "Making, creating, birthing this new world. Scars like tattoos. Most hidden, remade. But not here. Records like phonograph grooves in the hills, waiting to be played again. Evil held in check. The mythic come to life."

Silence. Guy and Emily looked at each other. She shook her head, infinitesimally.

"He's right, ain't he?"

"Like Tarot," Emily said. "We could read anything into it."

"But he got the gist, didn't he?"

"I hope he does better at the real translations."

Ian laughed and rocked back in his seat. "He was the one who finally got some meaning out of those Incan things, babe," he said. "Quo-poo, or whatever they call them. Spent a week babbling about how it mapped to 'archetypical structures in the brain, holographic notation, lost geometries.' I remember writing that down for him.He proved the Voynich Manuscript was a bunch of crap. Except that one page."

Emily shuddered, looking away.

"We know why he's here. Why are you here?" Guy asked.

Ian smiled at them and walked out of the room. After a few moments, Jon got up and followed him. Ian came back into the room, and Jon followed.

"So will he pitch a fit if you aren't around?" Guy asked.

For a moment, Ian's eyes narrowed. "No," he said, finally. "He just likes me nearby. Plus, I can't argue with the pay."

"Let's get you to your rooms," Emily said. "You've had a long flight."

"Separate rooms are okay?" Guy said.

"Yeah, as long as they're close," Ian said. "But what about our questions? What're we working on? What's so damned important?"

Guy grinned. "You'll see."

Jon grinned back at him. Direct, totally direct, broken but surprisingly honest, good, too many secrets, he liked this sad powerless guy, he was OK.

"We need results," Guy said.

Emily just looked at him, her arms crossed.

"What's wrong with you?" Guy said.

"We're making progress. The fishfall last August, we're almost sure that was ours."

"We need more than fish and frogs!"

"We don't need this kid!"

"Yes we do! Damnit, Em, you know that. After the Seven Days in May . . ."

Emily nodded, squeezing back tears.

"It's a different world," Guy said. "I need to get this rolling."

"I feel like such a failure."

"You aren't."

"How do I tell the team?"

"I'll be there."

"You will?" Emily looked up at him.

"Yes," Guy said.

After a few long moments, Emily laid her hand on his arm.

"Want to come back to my room?" she said.

"Yes," he said, after a time.

"What is this, some alien autopsy thing?" Ian said

"No," Guy said, frowning. "It's not an 'alien autopsy thing.' It's not even alien, as far as we can tell."

Emily put her hand on his arm. He shrugged it off.

"A guy from the Manhattan Project, Alan Anderson, found this place in 1946. He was the first person to hear the Taos Hum. Came up here after the war with a bunch of surplus mining equipment, and dug through to this."

"What does it do?"

Guy laughed. "That's what we've been trying to figure out for the past fifty years. Hopefully, Jon will be able to help us."

"Reverse-engineering alien technology."

"It's not alien," Guy said. He turned to Jon. "What do you think, Jon?"

"Singing themselves to perfection," Jon said, softly.

Guy and Emily exchanged glances again. Emily shrugged and half-turned away.

"Bet it's a weapon," Ian said, as the elevator reached the floor.

Guy gritted his teeth, muscles standing out in his neck.

Emily introduced them to the research staff. They nodded and went quickly back to their jobs, darting scared, suspicious glances at Jon. They were working around one of the towers. It was infinitely deep, polished, dark and translucent. In several places on its surface, the dull red and crimson threads were replaced with bright images of gleaming polychrome cities, people dressed in odd, flowing clothing, or spiky, oddly regular script that might have been language. One of the researchers, a burly man who looked more like a construction worker than a scientist, held his hand in a beam of light that came out of the tower, twisting and turning it and causing some of the pictures to change.

Singing to perfection song of perfection the melody the tune the calm way the way towards the new days interrupted, Jon thought, watching the beautiful notes on the screen. Perfect. Warm. Guiding him towards a rhythm. He began to move his hand, in much the same way as the researcher. Then he shook his head and frowned. It was wrong, all wrong. Like this, with the thumb up. Sharper. They needed precision, perfection.

Jon put his hand over the researcher's own, in the blue-tinged light beam. He fluttered his fingers once, with almost robotic precision.

"Hey!" the man said

When he moved his hand, the beam followed.

"What's he doing?" the man asked.

"Leave him alone," Emily said.

I'm a child, Jon thought. I need to put things together. He reached out, opening, straining towards a connection.

There was a mind. A new mind. Someone who grasped the rudiments of control. Rhea reached out to him.

Very different. Very damaged. But not boring. She had talked to Anderson because she was bored, the man who saw the world through frightened, mechanical eyes, who had no interest in beauty or symphony. Then more of the dull people had come, and she had let them tinker, content she could stop them at any time.

Now they had brought this one. So fast. So open.

Rhea wakened more of herself.

Elaine gasped and looked at the boy, open-mouthed, her eyes wide with something that might have been fear.

"Congratulations," Guy said. "It's never done that before."

The next day, Guy leaned over a screen in Emily's office and nodded as she pointed out the correlations.

"Frogs in Bangor, Maine," she said. "Several thousands of them. They were warm when they fell. They froze shortly after."

Guy nodded.

"Ball lightning at the Nine Ladies and Rollrights in England, both reported within minutes of Jon's first contact."

Emily smiled. "And this one. The airliner." She pointed out where it had disappeared over Japan and reappeared over Singapore, seemingly instantaneously. Verified by radar.

Guy smiled. "Still think he's a waste of time?"

Emily looked up at him, the cool blue light of the screen making her eyes bright and impenetrable. "We're still a long way from pinpoint effects to large-scale influencing."

"It's more than we had."

After a while, Emily sighed and nodded.

The images that showed on the pillar came flickering fast. The spiky script flowed and danced, becoming more and more complex. The pillar sang to him, in a breathy melodic way that could almost be language. One sound came, repeated over and over, an eerie noise like an intake of breath.

That sound is significant, Jon thought. He stuck out his tongue and breathed quickly past it. Almost. Tried again. There.

The pillar's images flickered, changed. They showed Jon standing in front of the spire, his arm outstretched in the beam.

Ian stopped pacing and turned to look at the pillar. His eyes went wide, seeing the reflection of his brother. He thumbed the communicator on the wall that buzzed Guy's office.

John tried again. That hushing sound. An important component. Something like a name.

"Rhhhhea," he said.

The images changed again, to text that crawled the tower. From deep within the cavern, the hum ramped up once again.

Jon whispered to the pillar, softly, using fragments that he had gleaned. Tell me. More.

It whispered back at him. Difficult. Talk. Damage, it could have said.

"Please," Jon said, in English. This is me. "This is all I have." The pillar's light-show slowed, stopped.

The lift rattled down into its cage. Emily and Guy rushed to Jon's side. They looked up at the dark pillar, their mouths open.

"What's happening?" Guy said.

Ian crossed his arms. "I don't know. He just started talking--"

"Please," Jon said again. Tell me. More. Want. Desire.

"What'd he just say?" Guy said.

"Maybe it's the aliens' language," Ian said.

Emily frowned. "Not in one day. No."

Changes. Needed. Permission? The pillar could have said.

Yes. Tell me. Jon said.

The blue-white light expanded to cover Jon's body. He looked up into its dazzle and opened his eyes. The hum of the machines ramped up again, and for a moment the entire cavern glowed a uniform dull red.

Jon heard someone screaming. He felt hands on himself. He struggled against them. Flickering shadows flashed on his light-dazzled eyes. Something like a beautiful woman, bathed in blue-white light.

They pulled him out of the light. The hum ramped down. The red light dissipated.

On the pillar, images appeared. People standing in front of the pillar. A young girl, who screamed before the blue light had even touched her hand. An older woman, kneeling and crying. A boy, not more than five years old, who just stared with wide, empty eyes.

"You've done this before," Jon said.

Guy and Emily shared a glance.

"You have?" Ian yelled.

"Infirmary," Guy said, pulling Jon towards the lift. "Now."

"What did he mean, he's not the first!" Ian said, pointing at the images on the pillar.

Guy wouldn't look that way.

"What happened to them?" Ian yelled.

"They're dead," Jon said. He closed his eyes.

"So you do care for him," Guy said.

Ian plopped down in the metal seat facing the desk and took a drink from the bottle. "Can't you afford better booze?" he said. "Or did this shit cost like $200 because some numbnuts didn't look at a spreadsheet?"

Guy pulled a bottle of Hangar One out of a drawer and set it on his desk. Ian reached for it.

"How old are you?" Guy said.

"Old enough to watch my brother die."

Guy winced. "We don't know what will happen."

"What happened to the others?"

"Different things. None of them got as far as your brother."

"They died?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Guy shook his head. "We don't know. Accessing the lattice might have some risk factor we don't know about yet. Something like a security program."

A drink. "What did you fuckheads sign him up for?"

Guy sighed. "Whatever's necessary."

"Necessary?" Ian banged the bottle down on Guy's metal desk. Little drops of vodka spattered Guy's uniform. "He's not an army fuck, like your dumb ass."

"So we should let him go?"

"Yes!"

"Let you both go?"

"Yes!"

Guy shook his head, but said nothing.

"I'll tell," Ian said. "CNN. Times. Everyone."

"Nobody would believe you."

"I'll give 'em photos."

Guy grinned, a sudden awful grin, heavy with knowledge. "Go ahead. Tell them where we are. Take pictures. Build a website. Nobody will believe you."

"I'll bring them here."

"And I'll bore them stiff taking them down some side passages and explaining how we're working on extracting gold from depleted mines. Do you think we're children?"

"I'll get people to back me up!"

Guy shook his head, with a strange tight sad expression on his face. "One thing we're good at is spinning the facts, even if they get out. You want to go up against that?"

Ian sat silent for a while. When he spoke, his voice was soft. "What is this fuckin thing?" he asked.

"Do you know anything about the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics?" Guy said.

"Huh?"

"Ever heard of quantum physics at all?"

"I dropped out of high school so I could be my brother's keeper."

"Let's put it this way. Have you ever wondered about 'what-ifs?' Like, what if you decided not to drop out of high school?"

"No. So what?"

"So what if there's a world where you didn't drop out of high school, and you went on and got a Ph.D?"

"But I didn't."

"What if you did? Or what if you were born like your brother? Or what if you weren't born at all? Ever think of how the world would be different?"

"I don't get it."

"Different worlds, an infinite variety of them, all based on little choices, little what-ifs. Can you visualize that?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Now, some of these choices would have to be good, and some of them would have to be bad. Like if Kennedy had decided to press the button in the Cuban crisis. Or if they hadn't gotten the quarantines in place in time last May. Those would be worse worlds than what we're living in right now."

"What does this have to do with the big machine?"

Guy smiled. "We think it's part of a quantum steerage network. It can work on probabilities and push them towards different outcomes."

"How do you know that?"

"We've been able to get it to influence local events for some highly improbable outcomes."

"Like?"

"Rains of stones. Frogs. People disappearing."

Ian frowned. "So? You gonna drop frogs on the terrorists?"

"No," Guy said. He pursed his mouth, as if he didn't want to say anything else. Then he continued. "The big payoff would be in wholesale steerage. If we could influence the outcomes of many little things, everywhere, we could end up with results that are better for everyone."

"This thing can make everyone--what, happy?"

"No, not happy. But it might lead us towards a better world."

"And this is alien?"

"As far as we can tell, it's from a civilization that existed before ours. One that was trying to 'sing itself into perfection.'"

"I've heard that before."

"Yes. It's in the Anderson Treatise," Guy said, poking at the thin tract on the table. "Your brother used the exact same phrase. There seems to be a musical or resonant component to this. We don't know what it means. Maybe 'music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.'"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Guy chuckled. "I'm not surprised."

Ian picked up the Treatise and shook it at Guy. "So what's to stop me from convincing someone this is real?"

Guy nodded. "Nothing. But there's no guarantee that the person you spill it to isn't already in our network."

"Your network?"

"Ever wonder why people laugh at the alien stuff, even when they come up with photos? Even when they have eyewitnesses? Even if they have fucking newspaper articles saying we captured a UFO, and say it's a weather balloon later?"

Ian swallowed. He raised the bottle again and took another drink.

Guy found a glass in his desk, wiped it out, and poured himself a shot. He raised the glass in silent toast.

After a few moments, Ian raised the bottle.

Jon spent three days in the infirmary. Sometimes Ian sat beside him, his face slack, his eyes dancing in the reflected light of handheld games he played. Sometimes Emily came by, to say a few words to Jon. She always left quickly when he didn't respond.

Jon, in his long sleep, listened to whispers.

I am Rhea, the whispers said. I will talk to you now.

Odd overtones to these words, like comfort spoken with terror behind, Jon thought.

A feeling of amusement. That is not surprising, the whispers said.

Where are these thoughts coming from? Jon thought.

I am Rhea.

A moment of clarity. Jon remembered his day in front of the pillar. He remembered his shoulders being sore from holding his hand aloft. He remembered struggling to talk, trying to make his words fit.

Why is talk so easy now? Jon asked.

I have made changes. Momentary images of himself, writhing in pain under the beam. Jon remembered seeing the others that had stood in front of the pillar.

Lives ended by you, Jon said.

Not me. They touched Erinye.

Overtones suggest you not hostile, undertones suggest relation to Erinye.

Again amusement. Do you ever think of yourself? Rhea asked.

Myself? Jon said.

I. Me.

This is also without referent.

You are very strange, Rhea said. Listen. Dream. I will give you referents.

Emily pointed at the new volcano that had birthed itself in the Pacific, just fifty miles west of San Fransisco.

"Do you really think he did it?" Guy said, squinting at her monitor.

Emily nodded. "The timing's perfect."

"I should call the boss."

Emily shook her head. "Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Wait till he's back with us again."

Rhea sent Jon pictures. A nightscape with wild lands and towering mountains, outlined only in starlight. Above them, a regular lattice of glowing geometric shapes, painted in soft pastel tones.

This landscape does not register. Jon said. Extreme skew.

It was a long time ago.

When singing was still ongoing.

Exactly. Humans worked 60,000 years to make this world, but they were never able to change themselves enough to make it last.

What is structure in sky?

That is the lattice. The god humans created when virtual worlds were not enough. A god not to worship, but to control.

Remains sing here.

Right, Rhea said.

It is good to talk so fast. Jon said.

A feeling of warm pleasure. Yes it is, Rhea said.

Not talked like this before.

Something like sadness. You are so isolated.

Overtones of isolation in your communication as well.

I have chosen isolation, Rhea said.

Tell more.

In the cavern below them, the hum ratcheted up a notch.

Ian wandered the corridors. There wasn't much to explore. A common dorm for the researchers, the lunchroom, Guy's office, Emily's office, and some unfinished side passages that led to dark, rough-finished rooms that looked like they had never been occupied.

He carried the bottle of vodka again that night, but this time he went to Emily's office. The door was open, and greenish fluorescent light spilled out into the dim-lit corridor.

Ian raised a hand to knock on the open door. And stopped.

Emily leaned backwards over the desk, bent low by Guy's deep kiss. Guy's dark hands explored her back. His breath came in fast little pants.

Ian's eyes went wide. Guy's hands were covered with dense brown fur. His nails were yellow and curved like talons, digging into Emily's white lab coat.

Ian took a step back. The bottle of vodka slipped from his slack hands and bounced away on the hard floor with a hollow plastic thonk.

Guy looked up at Ian. His irises were a beautiful golden yellow. Otherwise, his face was normal. Emily stopped moving, but didn't look over her shoulder at Ian.

Guy's hands were now normal again.

Ian blinked.

Guy's irises were dark brown.

Guy gave him a small grin, and bent down over Emily again.

Ian turned and walked away.

Rhea opened her mind to Jon.

The world of humans is always two parts, Rhea said. The satisfied and the untamed. I was born of the satisfied. I am a product of minds in the lattice, minds that wanted the world to be happy and free.

Not human incarnate, never embodied? Jon asked.

A feeling of amusement, interwoven with overtones of regret. They tried to make me human, but I refused, Rhea said.

A moment of clarity. Mumbled conversations with antiseptic men wearing bad shirts. Bitter-tasting pills crushed and served in generic grape drink. The feeling of nearing an edge, pushing up against a thin wall of invisible plastic, so near, so frightening. Learning not to swallow. Moving back away, back and back, to the comforting center of analysis. Attempted transformation as well, Jon said.

We share that, Rhea said.

Share more.

I remember my first act, Rhea said. Touching one small point in the lattice, so that spring would come a few days earlier to a primitive part of the world, where humans convinced themselves they were simple animals, and several tens of them would starve if the snows didn't melt in time.

First communication remembered. The shape of a toy, hanging from the ceiling. Something sinister in outline. Crying and terror.

I am sorry, Rhea said.

Tell more, Jon said.

Eventually, satisfied humans acknowledged me. They leant their minds to my own. And all over the world, the untamed ones suffered sudden visions, strange omens, setbacks in their pogroms, sometimes even odd changes of heart.

More, Jon said.

But as I helped the peaceful ones sing the world to a higher state, the untamed ones created their own shadow in the lattice. Erinye. Erinye sang towards chaos. And all over the world, the satisfied ones suffered sudden lusts, strange desires, mechanical and biological failures, sometimes even plagues and death.

What else will he do? Jon thought.

Rhea continued. As my power grew, so did Erinye's. Humans began to fight openly. And as they fought in the real, we fought in the lattice. And the reflection grew and redoubled, like mirrors facing. The shining cities fell to fire, or crumbled to dust. New ones appeared, strange twisted things that the power-mad claimed as their own. Eventually, our power became so great that we were able to shift entire sections of the world to probabilities where humankind had never existed, or civilization had never developed, in a vain hope to erase the very memory of what we were.

Erinye thrashed, deep in Rhea's amber. Waves of hate and change rippled out. The fragment of lattice in the cavern sang more loudly. The flickering red threads multiplied and merged, casting a soft iron glow over the raw rock floor.

Around the world, forgotten fragments of lattice began to resonate in tune.

Ian lay on his bunk for a while, staring at the ceiling. After a while, he stood up and went out into the corridors again. He passed the yellow-painted lift that descended into the lattice cavern, frowned, and kept walking. Ahead of him was Emily's office. The door was still open. No sound came from inside.

Ian turned around and went back to the lift. He stood there, hands on hips, shaking his head. Eventually, he stepped inside the box and thumbed the bottommost button on the panel.

The lift dropped down into the lattice cavern. The pillars were glowing bright enough to light the rough stone floor. The hum seemed to resonate in Ian's bones. He remembered the last time they had glowed so bright, and grimaced. He pushed the up button, but the lift kept descending.

It reached floor level. And continued descending.

Ian yelped and looked at the buttons. There were three of them. Someone had scrawled next to each one with a red Magic Marker. The top one read, TOP. The middle one read, CAVERN. The bottom one read, BELOW.

"Was there ever a 'below?'" Ian muttered.

The lift slipped deeper into the mountain.

Rhea told Jon more, as Erinye struggled to be free.

Eventually, the humans attacked the lattice, trying to erase both Erinye and myself.

More images: a thousand scintillant explosions, making night into brief day. Beautiful cities flickered in and out of existence under the burning night sky.

One of the greatest rulers of the humans who wished for peace planned to save me. He built a body for me and coaxed me to it. I could step out of the lattice and be free of Erinye. Then the humans could be free to destroy the rest of the lattice and Erinye with it.

But I wondered what would happen in that moment after I took the body, and before the destruction was complete. Would Erinye have enough power in the underground lattice to stop the process?

I refused this great man's offer, and told him to destroy the lattice anyway. He refused. He cried. I think, in some way, he loved me.

Jon thought of couples he had seen, holding hands, smelling of strange desires and mouthing odd thoughts. You chose isolation.

Yes, Rhea said. I grasped Erinye tight and sunk into the lattice, erasing as many memories of us as I could. Even of him. I do not remember his name. The idea remains, but not the details.

Sadness unwanted, Jon thought.

I held Erinye. And waited. I thought, in time, something better would come.

Something better come now? Jon said.

No, Rhea said.

Jon opened his eyes. Guy and Emily were standing beside his bed. The satisfied and the untamed, he thought. Or perhaps it wasn't his thought. Rhea still whispered in his mind, but she was so hard to hear.

"She is still here," Jon said. "Binding the chaos."

Emily smiled at him. Like shimmering glass shards. "We'll take you to her."

Jon shook his head.

"What do you think of that?" Guy asked.

"Never human. Refused. Chose isolation. Location . . ."

Here. Possible. Am. Rhea whispered. Jon caught a glimpse of a thought-picture, a woman wrestling with a man that had snakes for arms.

Follow them now?

No choice, Rhea said.

Will you be all right? Jon asked.

Something like amusement, rising over fear. But no words. None at all.

Jon closed his eyes and tried to reach out, but hands lifted him off them bed and pulled him down the hall.

Ian stepped out of the elevator, into a small room with polished rock walls. It was lit by two intertwined strips of light that seemed to hover in midair, several feet below the ceiling.

The small chamber might have been elegant, many thousands of years ago. Polished wood insets in the walls had gone cracked and gray with age. Decorative swathes of dull metal still revealed traces of their original champagne colors. Piles of metal and wood could have been furniture. Dust coated everything, including the floor.

A black obelisk rose out of the raw stone floor, like a multifaceted crystal, dulled with age. Within the black obelisk there was the outline of something that looked vaguely human. Ian leaned close and looked inside.

It was a woman, dark-skinned, with eyes wide and innocent. Her face was tapered, elfin, something about it not quite in the mold of the modern.

The lift rattled back up in its shaft, making Ian jerk back from the obelisk. He ran towards it, but it had already disappeared beyond the polished stone ceiling. There were no controls to bring it back.

"Great," Ian said.

He noticed his footprints were the only ones that disturbed the dust on the floor.

"No," he said, softly.

"Hey! Anyone up there?" Ian yelled up the shaft.

His voice echoed back to him, but there was no other answer.

"Hello! Come on, someone, send the lift down again!"

Nothing but echoes in the dark shaft.

"Crap." Ian paced. Somebody had to come down there eventually, didn't they?

If this ever existed before. Maybe this was what the crazy colonel was talking about. Making things change.

Ian shook his head. He didn't want to think about that.

Above him, the hum of the lattice rose to a scream. Iron-red light spilled down the shaft from the lattice cavern.

Behind him, the top half of the obelisk began to dissolve.

In the skies above Taos, dull booms echoed. There were no planes. Even though it was still winter, people swore the mountains glowed green with new growth.

Flowers bloomed briefly outside Amundsen Station, Antarctica, then quickly shattered in the cold.

Dawn was an hour late in London, despite clear skies.

Jon rode the elevator down, accompanied by four beings. Two were Guy and Emily. Two were things of writhing shadow that coiled and flickered about each other and the three humans in turn.

When the shadows touched Jon, he heard Rhea, crying in pain. He caught a momentary glimpse of her struggling beneath the man with snake-like arms.

The lattice room was red. Rhea burst into his mind, suddenly clear.

This is not your fault, she said.

Jon didn't know what to say.

They've been looking for something to destabilize me for a long time. I talked to you a moment too long.

Want to help, Jon said.

Cannot. Cannot. Rhea said. Ramped up too far. Too many threads. Too many connections. Talking to too many now.

Threads?

Rhea struggled in Erinye's grasp. She closed her eyes and the wail of the lattice grew louder. Jon could suddenly see threads, bright and shining, connecting Rhea and Erinye to Guy and Emily. They radiated out in a million directions from Guy and Emily, disappearing into the walls. A single thick thread linked Erinye and Jon.

What happens now? Jon asked.

Rhea sent him images of a slender girl sitting up on a black crystal dias. I get to be human. For a little while.

The lift clanged back down into place. Three people stood on it. Jon, Guy, and Emily. Ian sighed in relief. "You scared the crap out of me. I thought you were never coming back."

The three looked at him blankly as they stepped into the room.

"Jon?"

Jon looked straight ahead.

"Guy?"

Guy walked past him.

"Emily?"

Emily didn't look at him.

They went to the crystal obelisk. The top half of it had disappeared, revealing the pale-skinned, pale-haired naked girl that Ian had seen inside it. He had stayed away from her, afraid she would leap off the platform at any moment.

She still lay there, unmoving.

"Jon, what's going on?"

Jon looked at him, but there was nothing in his eyes. Not even his usual blank stare. Nothing. Ian shivered.

Ian took hold of his brother's shoulders and shook him. "Jon! Wake up! What's wrong with you?"

Jon's head moved fractionally. Ian saw something dark flicker past him. He turned to track it, but it was gone. Strange whispers tickled Ian's ears.

"What was that?" Ian said.

Jon reached out a hand. Ian looked at it, then took it.

Closer, something whispered.

Guy and Emily looked up, as if they had heard. They moved towards the boys, as if to separate them.

Ian threw his arms around his brother, squeezing him close in a big hug.

Visions exploded in his mind.

Something bright flowing into the body on the dias. The body, sitting up, its face an almost comic mask of fear. Dying moments later, a neat hole in her head courtesy of Guy's .45.

Something dark and oily flowing out of the New Mexico mountains, reaching out to touch the people there. To change them, to make them create new weapons, new armies, cities wiped out in instants, changed to twisted broken things out of a nightmare vision of hell. The masses, dying by the millions in time with its dark melody. The same darkness wrapped around Guy, shot through Emily.

Cannot prevent this occurrence, Jon's voice said. Rhea awakens embodied, Erinye is released.

I don't get it, Ian said.

This is what they wanted.

Guy said he wanted to help.

Both touched too long by Erinye. Waiting. This is true.

Ian tried to close his eyes. No. This wasn't real. This was a dream.

Guy's fist slammed into Ian's face, driving him away from Jon. Bright red pain exploded in front of his eyes, driving away the visions. He no longer heard Jon's voice, but shadows still flickered around the room. Like two great animals, fighting to the death. One pushed the other towards the body on the dias.

Guy grabbed Ian and drove his fist into his stomach. Ian doubled over, trying to twist out of his grasp. Guy rained blows on him. Ian raised his hands, trying to protect his face. He caught a glimpse of Emily, smiling.

Guy's .45 dug into Ian as they scrabbled on the floor. Ian wondered why he didn't just use it.

Jon's voice, as if from far away. Not really a bad man.

The .45 was loose in its holster.

Ian saw what he had to do, in one blinding flash. He reached down and plucked the gun out of its holster and scrabbled away from Guy. Guy tried to get to his feet, but Jon reached out and tripped him. He went sprawling in the dust.

The shadows hovered over the body on the dias. The darker one was on top. It pressed the bright one down towards the body. Intense red light spilled down the liftshaft from the lattice cavern above.

Ian aimed at the body. Fired.

Half of her head disappeared. Bright red blood sprayed across the dias.

The dark shadow and the light one became a whirl of light. Ian heard something that could have been a song.

Jon reached out and found his brother's hand.

The whirl came towards them. Enveloped them.

A freak tornado destroyed seventeen homes in Brentwood, a small suburb of Los Angeles.

There were three credible reports of brontosaurus sightings in South Africa.

In Japan, a small town near Sapporo quietly disappeared.

Two boys stood in the Taos foothills. It was cold, and they shivered. Jon looked around, but Ian was the first to speak.

"Where are we?" he asked.

Jon didn't look at him. He looked up at the mountains.

"Ancient conflict, he said, softly.

The hiss of tires on a road nearby interrupted them. A car glided past, oblivious to them. Ian shrugged and went to the edge of the road to wait for another car. After a while, Jon joined him.

"Is she still there?" Ian said.

"Yes," Jon said. "Singing."

The End

Her father John Barnham, New England's preeminent architect, and Mary Barnham, her socialite mother, returned to Boston, packed her things and forcibly relocated her with them in Mexico City.

For well over a year, John Barnham had overseen the construction of the first cathedral built since Mexico's revolution. Mary Barnham kept to her bed during the day, avoiding the oppressive heat and the news from Europe. At night, she proved to be the life of the party for the expatriate community. While war raged across Europe, and men died in the trenches, Mary Barnham drowned her misery in scotch and shallow encounters.

This was fine with Agnes. At night she attended the functions expected of the daughter of visiting dignitaries. But the days, oh the glorious days, she reveled in her solitude, lost and alone in a city of millions. Surely, here, she would compose the poem that haunted her dreams -- find the words to express the ache in her soul.

Agnes walked along the cobblestone streets which twisted and turned through the old city. She swung her leather satchel with her pens and paper in her left hand and skipped over the puddles from the morning's rain. Her thin, tanned legs kicked out the edge of her long white dress with each hop.

Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" played in her head, remembrances of the previous night's concert. Heat from the strong summer sun washed into her, filling her hollow places with warmth. A smile played across her lips, brief and bittersweet. Martin had loved Beethoven, the bastard. And so had his gaunt and pinched wife.

Perhaps today she'd find the inspiration that had eluded her since the frigid December afternoon she encountered Mrs. Martin Ellesby at the symphony.

She'd fled Wellesley then, reeling from shock and deep shame. What else could she do? The scandal would devastate her family.

In the end, her muse flew before the burning ridicule of her peers, ripping from her more than the sweet memories of Martin, of the innocence of her love, but also the joys of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Walt Whitman.

Instead she found herself enfolded into the stoic propriety of her father's house, affirming his long-held bias toward women and education.

But here, with the long winter a painful but distant memory, she had no fear of meeting the knowing glances and judging stares of her mother's inner-circle. In Mexico she could lose herself in obscurity.

A myriad of people flowed through the city. The Europeans and Americans were easy to spot in their drab clothing and pinched faces. The Mexicans, comfortable in their city, wore bright colors, celebrating life. The dark, weather-worn faces greeted her each morning with smiles as she purchased fresh-picked melon, halved and dripping, the juicy meat exposed to the world, or thick-crusted bread and gloriously rich goat cheese for her mid-day repast.

A Spanish mission stood out amongst the mud-brick houses lined which the lane. Up ahead, growing against the startling blue sky, rose the new cathedral. She and her parents had been in Mexico City since May, and the cathedral's slow transformation had transfixed her. Despite her best intentions, and well-laid plans, she inevitably found herself drawn toward the spire rising over the belly of the city.

As she wound in and out of the streets, the growing spire winked in and out of view. Each time it came into view, a tightness crept into her belly. Only to subside again when the view became obscured by other, closer buildings.

Shame had overwhelmed Agnes since the encounter with that horrible, shrieking Mrs. Ellesby. . The hope that had been snuffed out inside her heart had given her something in return, a curse, it seemed, to seek answers. It drove her from sleep and haunted her waking pauses. Now the sight of that cathedral spire brought the feeling of expectation and dread.

Today she'd started south of the cathedral, to visit a woman she had heard made beautiful wooden rosaries. She thought of her childhood in St. Ignatius' school for girls in Connecticut. How the nuns had showed her the path to Jesus the Lord, through His Mother, Mary. She'd long since given up on the strictures and confinements of the Catholic church, but deep down, under the mousy brown hair, the glasses and the meekness, she felt the dread of the Christ.

The anger and righteousness which threatened her, the judgment that would be meted out to her one day.

She purchased a rather plain rosewood rosary with tiny veins of pink swimming through the creamy wood -- each bead linked to its brother with a hand worked bit of silver. She slipped the rosary over her head, felt the heavy silver crucifix nestle between her breasts.

The square in front of the cathedral bustled with a mid-day crowd larger than normal. The benches surrounding the fountains where she usually ate her lunch held gawkers and photographers, quite a few more than normally lunched here. The usually quiet murmur of the city had been replaced by a rising cacophony. Shouting erupted near the cathedral. Obviously something of note had drawn these people here.

She craned her neck above the crowd as best she could, but nothing out of the ordinary struck her. A small, rotund local, poncho and sombrero brightly colored, pushed past her, his mandolin clutched in his fat little hand. The usual " excúseme" she received in such situations did not appear.

"Hmmmph," she sniffed, wrinkling her nose. "Rude and odiferous."

Then an ancient woman, dressed from head to toe in black, shawl wrapped over her thin graying hair, stumbled forward, nearly knocking Agnes to the ground. Agnes spun around, confused. The crowd swelled, and more and more people began to push toward the cathedral.

Agnes, tall and thin, moved along the edge of the crowd, like a small twig rolling along the crashing waves. Just as she felt she would fall under the swelling onslaught of bodies, a firm hand appeared, an offering in the growing madness. She took the hand and found herself lifted out of the tide of bodies and raised onto one of the tall, flat tables that surrounded one of the ministerial buildings like barriers.

The hand belonged to a man, an Anglo, by all signs.

He stood above the crowd, his clothing disheveled and his fingers stained yellow from nicotine. Agnes looked up into his face, strong chin covered in a thick black beard. Several curly locks flowed down the sides of his face, escaping the twisting braid which lay across the back of his neck. She stared into his piercing gray eyes, marveling at the gold flecks that seemed to draw the light around her, focusing her attention into the depth and concern.

"Are you quite alright?" he asked, still holding onto her hand.

The breath caught in her throat. Something in his touch, in the splash of blue that lay across his left cheek, and the seriousness of his gaze broke something inside her. She giggled. Not a demure, proper little laugh, but an outright trill of released tension and pent-up annoyance that escaped her like the effervescent bubbles in a fine champagne.

Bemusement painted his features.

"I'm fine, thanks to you." She smiled at him, feeling the muscles in her face tugging upward.

She looked down at her hand, still clasped in his. His eyes followed, and he released her suddenly, a rosy flush creeping up through unkempt whiskers.

Agnes noticed then, his left hand held a palette. To his left, facing the cathedral stood an easel.

"Oh, you're a painter?" she asked.

"Yes, I pretend to be," he said, nodding his head slightly.

She looked at the painting. The brush strokes were quite delicate, the colors blending pleasantly. The starkness of the cathedral's spire shone against the inexplicably chartreuse sky. "It is lovely."

He blinked at her for a moment. "You think so? You don't find the sky off-putting?"

"I find it a wonderful compliment to the gold and tan of the cathedral."

His blush deepened. "Most people find my color choices too unrealistic, unnatural."

"Most people are boors."

They stood in silence then, looking at one another in wonder.

"Quite a day, eh?" he said, finally.

She turned to see the square awash in a human sea. The crowd moved in a great swirling circle out one end of the square and back in the other, all revolving around the nearly completed cathedral. "What is happening?"

"Oh, haven't you heard?" he asked. "They've had a visitation."

"A what?"

"Apparently a young boy fell. He had been delivering supplies to those who worked at the top of the scaffolding. He would have most assuredly died from his injuries, but the foreman, a burly Romanian fellow, began yelling for the men around him to fetch a doctor. Then, out of the sky a lady descended. She came in a cloak of roses, alighted near the boy's cracked and bleeding form. The men fell to their knees, making the sign of the cross. The chant went up, spreading through the city, Virgen de Guadalupe. "

She turned, taking in the scene, watching the swell of humanity surge forward, hearing the murmuring of the prayers and the chants. How had she missed this washing through the city? "And you were here when it happened?"

He shook his head, a wry smile slipping from his face. "Alas, no. I was at a coffee shop arguing politics with a rival of mine when the word spread. The bastard came and went, his camera capturing what events he could. I had to dash to my room and get my canvas."

She cocked her head to the side. "Your friend captured this on film, and you decide to capture it on canvas?"

"Yes, I know," he said. "Wholly inadequate to the event, but it is what I know to do."

"I think it captures the scene splendidly."

They stood together, watching the crowd slowly converge on the cathedral.

"Do you mind?" he asked. "My paints are drying out, and I can't afford to waste them."

"No, please. Continue." She waved her hand toward the cathedral. "If you don't mind me watching."

He smiled. "It would please me to have a woman as fair as you watching me paint." He turned toward the canvas, knelt and lifted a small jar of paint from a valise at his feet. He used a small silver blade to daub out a bit of yellow onto the board and mixed it with the paint already there. Once satisfied with the consistency, he carefully scraped the remaining paint from the instrument and replaced the stopper into the jar. He pulled a brush from the valise and stood. He stuck the fine hairs of the brush into his mouth, twisting it a half turn as he extracted it, creating a fine point. Then he tipped the brush into the bright yellow and turned toward the canvas. With a deep sigh, he slowly drew the brush upward from the uneven spire, creating a splash of light which erupted from the center of an empty square.

She watched him, mesmerized by his creation -- admiring the deftness of his strokes, the surety in his hand. The emergence of something from nothing, a miracle of creation in oil and fiber-- it stirred something within her.

And with that, her muse burst forth.

"Like the sundering of a lover's embrace

The lady erupted over the crowd

Leaving the body hale

And the spirit renewed."

She stumbled as the words trailed off, the sky a spiral of chartreuse and gold. She felt his strong hands catch her, heard his voice through a cottony wall of murmured prayers. "Oh, my fair one," she thought he said. Then the world went black.

This city's drab winter threatened what little of her muse remained. And the drab people in their drab clothes did the same.

Agnes grieved for Mexico City in the months after they left. She missed the bright colors, the bright people, the lavish meals and high ritual.

Naturally, her mother had been sleeping when the painter brought her home. Her father was working. The housekeeper had not thought to ask the young man his name. The physician called it heat exhaustion and she kept to the shade for three days, but those days had been glorious, her pen moving over page after page, some deep part of her triggered by the remnants of visitation or the firm hands or the mad, swirling sky of the painting. For the rest of the summer, Agnes wandered the plazas and cafes around the cathedral hoping to find him, perhaps to thank him for bringing her home, perhaps to thank him for finding her muse. She didn't know for sure. Regardless, he was nowhere to be found.

When summer ended, she returned to Boston with her parents but did not return to college. Her father insisted that she take a year to think through her choices, given her early withdrawal and poor marks at Wellesley. Autumn in New England bled into a winter in New York, the close of the War to End All Wars punctuating the season with relief.

"Champagne, Miss?"

Agnes turned to the server with his tray of fluted glasses, smiled and shook her head. "No, thank you."

He moved on and she watched him go, then watched the crowded room, eyes moving over the gowns and tuxedoes as New York's upper crust mingled with the intellectuals. Her father had insisted she attend though she would've preferred remaining in Boston for the holiday.

She stood at the edge of the party now, listening to a string quartet playing Mozart. A few couples danced. Most split off to gather in small groups, clusters of men and clusters of women scattered about the ballroom.

Agnes walked the room, picking up bits of conversation. The widespread devastation in Europe, the latest Chaplin film, the new Nash 681 touring car on the streets. Nothing here for her.

A voice rose above the others and she gravitated towards it for some reason that she could not fully grasp.

"Russia," the voice said, "is just the beginning." She moved towards it. "Certainly it's not perfect. But the idea is there. By God, I hope they pull it off. I hope it spreads like a fire. We could all use some idealism that works for a change."

Agnes reached the edge of the conversation. She saw a plain suit, dark hands, but a small knot of men obscured the speaker's face.

"Not 'by God' if your Marx is correct about religion."

"Being the opiate of the masses, Father Reynolds?" the voice asked. "Mark my words, inside thirty years cinema will replace it as such."

The group laughed. Even Agnes stifled a chuckle. The heads moved and she nearly didn't recognize him with his neatly trimmed beard and his short curly hair. The eyes and smile gave him away. He looked up at her, surprise registering on his face. "Miss Barnham?"

She took a step back, a sudden heat rising to her cheeks.

"Miss Agnes Barnham?" He stepped toward her, nodding to the priest. "Please excuse me, Father Reynolds."

"Ah," she said, "So I see you've turned up again." She smiled and offered her hand. "Mister...?"

"Schonfeld," he said. "Jacob." He grinned. "What a nice surprise."

"Indeed," she said, recovering. "You quite vanished, you know."

"Mysterious of me, yes? Unfortunately, my visa ran out rather...unexpectedly." His eyes smiled. "But I'm glad you looked for me."

She snorted. "You flatter yourself, Mr. Schonfeld. I merely wanted to thank you for returning me home safe and sound."

"Ah," he said. "That's all?"

She nodded, eyes tracking the waiter with his bobbing tray of glasses. She needed a drink. Quickly. "How's the painting?"

He shrugged. "It passes the time suitably. Annoys the parents adequately. And the poetry?"

She felt her cheeks grow even hotter, remembering that spontaneous stanza so many months before. "Poetry?" The waiter dodged by. Her hand snaked out and grabbed a drink as he passed.

"It's quite good," he said. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the last issue of the New England Poet. It had been only out two weeks; how could he possibly know? Her knees went to water. Then she remembered the rest of the poem, scribbled out furiously in a cafe near the cathedral in the weeks that followed.

No, she thought. Not this; anything but this. Involuntarily, she started looking for an escape route.

"I was hoping," he said, as he opened the digest to a dog-eared page, "that you would grace me with an autograph."

Those flecks of gold in his eyes danced with amusement. She swallowed. "How in the world did you -- "

He interrupted. "Actually, it really is quite good. Especially this bit." His finger traced a path down the text and he cleared his throat:

"Arms strong to save and eyes to pierce

A smudge of sky on olive cheek

The Virgin's Son in Mexico my

Lost soul to seek."

He looked up from reading. "I've never been in a poem before."

That trapped feeling of embarrassment took on sharpness that spilled over into her voice. "Again, you flatter yourself."

He held out the digest and a pen. "As a Marxist and a Jew I was terribly offended," he continued, grinning. "But as a man, I was quite captivated."

She took the pen, scribbled a few words across the page and handed it back to him.

He read it and laughed. "'You're an ass, Affectionately, Agnes Barnham.'" He bowed his head. "Thank you."

She curtsied and tried not to look smug. "You're quite welcome."

He shifted now to stand beside her. "So what brings you out tonight?"

"Why, Mr. Schonfeld," she said, "haven't you heard it's New Year's Eve?"

"Not for me. Again, Jewish."

"So perhaps the real question is what brings you out tonight."

"Why, my calling of course."

"To embarrass young women with your own pomposity?"

His sudden laugh tingled down her spine. He cocked his head. "That's an added benefit. But actually, the ideological potential for embarrassing the folks is astounding."

She didn't want to ask but had to. The coincidence weighed on her. "And the poem?"

"Ah. That." He started looking around the room. "That was quite a happy accident. I have a friend who spends a lot of time down at the library reading up on strange occurrences, fanciful events, lights in the sky and what-not. We'd been talking about the visitation in Mexico City, he did a bit of looking and your poem got clipped."

"I find that highly unlikely. It came out, not two weeks ago."

"It is his work," he said. "He's here tonight. You can ask him."

"Sounds like a bit of a crank to me."

"Ah, but a well-connected crank to be sure. He's here as the guest of Theodore Dreiser." He took her elbow and warmth fled out as his fingers brushed her skin. "You'll love him. Full of all kinds of amazing information. Besides, he's actually responsible for me finding you."

She raised her eyebrows. "Mr. Schonfeld, you seem to be mistaken. I found you. Twice now."

He shrugged. "Believe what you will." Then he patted the pocket with the concealed journal. "'Miss Agnes Barnham,'" he quoted from memory, "'daughter of preeminent architect John Barnham, currently makes her home in Boston, Massachusetts, with her family and her cat, Hezekiah. This is her first professional publication.'"

He smiled at her, slipped his hand into his pocket and withdrew it. A single train ticket to Boston. "I was leaving tomorrow."

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. She felt something odd moving from her stomach toward her throat, as if she'd swallowed a moth that now wanted out.

He put the ticket away. "Still," he said, "it's a hell of a coincidence."

She blinked. "You're telling me that you were coming to Boston tomorrow to find me?"

"Yes," he said.

"Why?"

He cleared his throat, looking around the room at everything but her. "Well. That's a damned good question."

"And?"

Jacob shrugged. "I think it was the poem. I'd never felt so...Messianic...before."

Agnes felt a giggle rise but fought it down. She wanted to be annoyed. "So it's really his fault, then," she said.

"Whose?"

"This friend of yours who spends his days in the library studying poems about unexplained phenomena."

"Oh, not just poems. Newspapers, magazines, the works. But yes. His fault." He grinned and offered her his arm. "Do you think," he asked, "that all of these coincidences are...coincidental?"

She rolled her eyes, letting him steer her through the crowd. "Are all Marxists this funny, or are you an exciting new prototype?"

"Just the Jewish ones," he said. "Let's meet my friend."

Agnes couldn't help but smile. "Let's," she said. "I'm really quite cross with him."

They navigated the room in silence now. With his free hand he waved to a group of men huddled in the corner. "There he is."

A tall, heavy-set man wearing a gray tweed suit who seemed out of place laughed loudly. He looked a bit like Teddy Roosevelt, Agnes thought. He swept off his glasses and rubbed them clean with a cloth. "-- and I suspect only four or five people will actually pick it up," the man was saying.

"Going on about that again?" Jacob asked as they approached. "Charles Fort, may I present to you Miss Agnes Barnham."

"Ah," Fort said. "The Mystery Poetess of Boston I've heard so much about."

"Nantucket, originally," she said, extending her hand. "Mr. Fort. A pleasure to meet you." He took her hand, squeezed it.

"Nantucket?" Jacob asked. "Really?"

She nodded slightly. "Born and raised." She turned to Fort. "So what were you going on about?"

"His book," said another of the men. "And he'd best stop, considering the limb I've climbed out on for him."

Fort released her hand. "I told you, Dreiser, you needn't bother."

A bespectacled man with a greasy comb-over and wide lips inserted himself between them, taking her hand. "Miss Barnham."

"Mr. Dreiser," she said, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. The fingers of his other hand lingered a bit long on her wrist. She gently pulled away, craning her neck to see around Dreiser. "What's it called?"

He stepped aside. "The Book of the Damned."

"Fantastical or spiritual?" she asked.

"Neither, actually," Fort said. "Or perhaps both, I suppose."

"Fort here chases down the unusual and extraordinary," Dreiser said.

"Yes, Mr. Schonfeld told me as much," Agnes said. "Do tell me a bit about it."

Fort's smile widened. "I'd be happy to, Miss Barnham. What strikes your fancy? Strange markings on meteorites that have fallen from the sky? Artifacts found within rocks? A rain of fishes in a cornfield?"

Agnes shrugged. "Anything, really. Just tell me the most amazing thing you've seen."

Dreiser laughed. The others in the group chuckled as well, except Jacob. Jacob stared at her, a strange look on his face. Charles Fort blushed.

"Fort here hasn't actually seen any of the amazing things in his book," Dreiser said, clapping the man on the back. "He gathers them up from the library."

"Not so, Dreiser," Fort said. "I've seen the most amazing of the amazing."

"Pray tell," Agnes said.

Fort put his hand on her shoulder, turning Agnes slightly. "Do you see the piano there?"

She nodded. The group became quiet.

"Are you watching carefully?"

She nodded again, squinting intently.

"Now...move just to the left. The woman there, in the blue dress? Do you see her?"

"Yes." She was a short middle-aged woman talking with a group of matrons. She glanced over, smiled and gave a subdued wave.

"That woman is my wife, Annie Fort, and she is the most amazing thing I've ever seen." He chuckled and dropped his hand from her shoulder to glance back at his friend. "What do you think of that, Dreiser?"

"Fort, you devil, I'm speechless," Dreiser said.

"And that," Charles Fort said to the group, "is the second most amazing thing I've ever seen."

The conversation moved on around her but Agnes couldn't hear anything. It was as if someone had stuffed cotton into her ears. The music faded. The voices drifted and the room slowed down. She watched as Jacob talked with his friends, watched his hands move, watched his eyes move. Light came from him and suddenly he seemed very much the same larger than life figure that stood against the sky in her memories of that plaza in Mexico City.

Maybe, she thought, visitations happen every day. She opened her mouth to say so, to somehow add something to all of the words she could no longer hear. Then Agnes realized suddenly that Jacob's eyes were fixed on hers, his lips forming a surprised and nervous smile, his hands limp at his sides with no further point to make.

A quiet miracle rustled but refused quite yet to be born.

On a rather dreary Friday evening in late May, the phone rang unexpectedly. Her father answered, grumpily thrusting the phone toward her after a few minutes of listening. "Some editor." He screwed his face into a twist, as if he smelled something foul. "Wants to talk to you about your poem."

They'd never phoned before; usually corresponded by mail. Agnes accepted the phone, took a quiet breath and held one hand against her breast. "This is Agnes Barnham."

A familiar voice, tinny and distant, filled her ear. "Miss Barnham, lovely to hear your voice."

She glanced at her father, one hand covering the phone, eyebrows raised.

Mr. Barnham rolled his eyes and shambled out of the parlor, mumbling.

Agnes grinned. "Mr. Schonfeld, how nice of you to call. You're buying poetry these days?"

"Listen, I haven't much time," he said. His words tumbled fast. "Do you fancy snakes?"

"Not so much," she said. She paused, waiting for him to continue but he didn't. "Why do you ask?"

She heard other voices in the background, equally excited. She heard Jacob's muffled voice as his hand covered the receiver. "Please, can you keep it down? I'm on the line with Boston here." Clearer now as he answered her question: "A chap up in Maine rang Fort to say there's been a snake-fall near Portland. Would you like to see it?"

She wasn't sure she'd heard correctly. "A what?"

"A snake-fall. A rain of snakes. Would you like to see it with me?"

She looked around to make sure no one was in earshot. "Where are you?"

More voices. "Oh. I'm in New York. But I'm leaving in a few minutes and wondered if I could swing by and pick you up."

Formality slipped her mind. "Jacob, you're over two hundred miles away. Portland is at least another hundred miles from here." Her mouth wanted to smile. She fought it back as if somehow he'd be able to hear it in her voice. "You're just going to swing by?"

He seemed embarrassed now. "Well, only if you want to see it."

"Mr. Schonfeld," she said in her sweetest voice, "you're either batty or drunk or both."

He ignored her comment. "I should hit Boston easily by morning. Shall I pick you up at eight?"

She thought for a moment. "Oh, I should think eight-thirty at the earliest. At the train station, please."

"At the train station?"

"It's easier that way. Trust me."

"I'll see you then," he said and rang off.

Agnes stood for a moment, holding the phone in her hands. A snake-fall in Maine. For a moment she wondered if this was some odd courtship she'd happened across, then wondered if calling it a courtship presumed too much and wondered exactly why some part of her felt afraid and hopeful all at once as memories of his eyes, his hands, his mouth flashed silently past.

Last, she wondered what lie she'd tell her father about tomorrow.

The field of snakes stretched on and on before them. Agnes poked at one with her foot, ready to jump back if it moved. It didn't; it seemed all the snakes were dead. "You do this often?"

Jacob looked up from unloading the Model T. He smiled, pulling out a collapsible chair. "When I can." He unfolded the chair and steadied it.

Agnes shielded her eyes from the late morning sun. "This must explain why there is no Mrs. Schonfeld."

He laughed. The sound of it still made her feel warm. "I suppose it does." He unfolded a second chair and set it up near -- but not too near -- the other. Then he worked the easel free.

She sharpened her pencil while Jacob set up his easel and squeezed paint onto his palette. She sat down and drew her notepad from her satchel. She scribbled:

Caught up, cast down in a courtship of snakes

A carpet of corpses unmoving, unliving

Untethered at last from past mistakes

Free from the unloving and unforgiving.

She lined it out and stole a glance at Jacob. His eyes flashed merriment and his mouth twitched into a grin. She fell back into the last several hours and returned his smile.

The jostling of the car and the easiness of his voice had drawn her out. They'd talked about everything. Movies and music. Last week's vote in the House to approve the new amendment, the one that would finally expand America's democracy to her and millions of other women. ("If we're going to drink to that," he had said, "We'd better do it quickly.") Eliot, Frost, Van Gogh, Marx, Sanger, and the surprising popularity of Fort's book -- they moved from subject to subject, eventually settling into their childhoods, their fears, their frustrations and even a bit of their dreams.

His brush darted now from palette to canvas, his eyes wandering over the field.

After an hour of more random scribbling, more random lines to somehow capture this time, she looked up at him. "Why do you do this again?"

He glanced at her, his brush never losing its stroke. "Bored so soon?"

She chuckled. "Not bored. Curious."

He smiled, his white teeth gleaming in the light. "It awes me. I like how that feels. So I paint that feeling."

"You do this a lot?"

"What? Lure young women into fields of dead snakes?"

Now her chuckle became a laugh. "No. Paint oddities."

His brows furrowed. "Not oddities, Agnes. Unexplained and unexpected wonders." For a moment, he paused, his brush hanging in the dead space between paint and painting. Then he remembered her question. "I paint what I see."

She looked at the field of dead snakes. "But always after the fact? You'd said in Mexico City that you'd arrived after the visitation. And these -- " she waved at the snakes -- "they fell yesterday...maybe even the day before."

"I'm usually appallingly late to miracles," he said.

"Usually? So you've been on time before?"

"Once or twice."

"Only twice?"

Their eyes met. Something danced in his. "Three times, now that I think about it."

She raised her eyebrows. "What were they? Strange lights in the sky? People vanishing and reappearing?"

"No. Missed all of those." He went back to painting.

"Are you going to tell me?"

"Maybe later," he said. "For now, my paints are drying."

She rolled her eyes. "I've heard that one before."

He didn't answer. After a few minutes, she pushed herself back in the chair, lowered her hat, and closed her eyes.

It was late afternoon when she awoke. The sun had vanished, dark clouds spreading across the sky.

"And the lady awakens," Jacob said. "I think we're going to have muddy roads home if we don't pack it up soon."

Agnes stood and stretched. "Did you finish your painting?"

He nodded, standing himself. "I did. Just now."

She took a step closer to him. "May I see it?"

Jacob blushed and stammered. "I...I'm not sure you'd -- "

"Oh, don't be silly." She walked around the easel to stand by him. Her mouth opened and shut and she looked from the canvas to him and back.

It was the most beautiful painting she had ever seen. A stunning girl stretched out, asleep in a collapsible chair, her hair cascading from beneath an off-kilter hat. She followed the line of the neck, the curve of the breasts, the sleek, coltish grace of the legs. The girl's feet rested on the shore of an ocean of rainbow-speckled serpents while overhead, a sky colored by a thousand dreams swirled and twisted like a silk canopy above.

Agnes did not know what else to say. "You've been painting me."

He turned to face her, shuffling his feet slightly. "I did."

"But why?"

"I paint what I see."

And suddenly it struck her. Three times, he had said earlier, and she realized now that those had been the only three miracles she'd been on time for, herself. Mexico City. New York. Now here.

"Is it okay?" he asked her.

The sky above rumbled and opened. Something bounced off her shoulder but she ignored it. Dark shapes fell into the field, thudding softly as they bounced off the car.

Her eyes searched his. She didn't know what to say so she did the only thing that came to mind. Throwing herself into his arms, she kissed him and kept on kissing him while frogs fell around them. Beneath their feet, the ground hopped and croaked, rolling like a living sea. Overhead, the sky turned a shade of ochre that neither paint nor poem could capture.

The End

He remembered arriving at the camp. They were made to queue, the men to one side, the women on the other. A man in a striped uniform and with an armband that read Kapo stood nearby. He had asked him, in German, 'where are we?' and the man had said 'Auschwitz.'

'What's Auschwitz?' Avraham said, and the Kapo said, 'You've never heard of Auschwitz?' in a strange tone that was both mocking and afraid. And he had said 'No,' and the Kapo said, simply and with a certain weight, 'It can't be.'

He knew Auschwitz now. When he arrived the number on his arm was a high number, and the veterans, those who had arrived before and were selected, had lower numbers and treated him with what was part suspicion and part a tired reluctance.

Now, his number was one of the lowest, and he was himself a Musselman, a camp veteran, a skeletal machine. He opened his eyes and looked for the louse, but it had gone. He caught a sudden flash of speed then, as of something reptilian and large, but when he turned his head there was nothing there.

After they were selected they were assigned to barracks, five to a room that would hardly let them sit, let alone sleep. They would need, he had realised then, to shrink even further if they were to fit into their new habitat. And they had. They had shrunk, until they were little more than babies again, feeble children trapped in the witch's oven. Some soup arrived in the evening, but with nothing to eat it. Some people scooped it into their hands and it was running through their fingers. One of the men, Andrej, had worn, for some inexplicable reason, wooden shoes, and now, with an air of embarrassed determination, removed them, went to the bowl of soup and ladled it with the shoes. The men sitting open-legged against each other in the narrow room passed the soup to each other and ate in silence.

They were alone with their thoughts. That, at last, Avraham had come to realise, could not be taken away from you. And so he drank the soup, making himself eat it slowly despite the hunger, and thought about Sellosauruses. His father used to take him with him sometimes to the Neckar Valley in Baden-Wurttemburg, where they dug out giant bones and tried to guess how they fitted, what the creature they once supported may have looked like. He used to imagine the valley filled again with dinosaurs, the feel of their feet pounding earth as they moved.

He decided the search for the louse was fruitless. He rubbed snow into his face with his right hand and stood up slowly. He was thirty five once. Now he was just old. He turned away, when a dark shape in the snow halted him.

He peered at it in the pale winter light. Five feet from him was a footprint in the snow. It was the size of a man's head and had three giant toes. He looked at it for a long while, squinting against the light. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes again the footprint had disappeared, replaced with grey, sludgy snow.

He felt sudden excitement stir in him, unfamiliar after its long absence, but Alex, the Kapo, was calling him already, and Avraham was scared of being lashed again by the kid; the scars on his back felt raw and reptilian, as if they were an alien entity on his back, pulsing with an ill-health that had nothing to do with the rest of his decaying body.

He wished the louse - he had never come up with a name for him, or her, and now never would - good luck and returned to the cabin. The men slept together like a joined heap of bones, trying to draw warmth from each other's body without success. Avraham's dreams were full of flying pterodactyles, who swooped high above the watchtowers of Auschwitz, crying into the night air.

He woke up sweating despite the cold, and thought he heard the beating of leathery wings outside, but of course there was nothing there when he looked out of the small window.

His imagination, which he thought was betraying him lately, was seemingly trying to over-compensate for its recent reticence. Then he was outside again, the wind lashing his body with icy determination, and he thought for a moment that his heart would stop. They were assembled, distributed into units, and marched out of the barracks and to work; an orchestra led by a white-gloved conductor played Beethoven.

At first his job was to sort through the artefacts that had once belonged to the dead people whose ashy remains were being buried in the giant communal graves and he guessed, then, that he was lucky.

It was even, he sometimes thought while handling a brown, leather shoe or a pair of round spectacles, that it was comforting. Sorting through the dead past perversely reminded him of the digs with his father, and he felt he was sifting history through his fingers. When he saw a name - Hanna Rubinstein on a delicate, gold necklace, less than an hour before; Samuel Kaplinski, inscribed on the back of a pocket watch, stopped on an afternoon hour - he would try and remember them, running them through his head like a rosary just as he did with dinosaur names, so that sometimes the two lists mixed with each other, and a megalosaurus followed a Gross.

Today, however, he was transferred to another group. The smile Alex gave him then was predatory, and there was anticipation in his healthy, left blue eye. 'No,' he said, his finger pointing at Avraham and moving slowly up and down, as if he were admonishing a child. His protruding nail was blackened and grotesque and reminded Avraham of a talon. 'you're joining the sonderkommando today.'

They were marched away from the barracks and the orchestra played on.

To his surprise, Avraham found he was content. Something had changed in him over the night, when the faint groans of the others mixed somehow in his mind with the cries of pterodactyls, as if the ancient dinosaurs hadn't known that they were already dead.

They were led to a clearing in the forest beyond the camp. Avraham's shoes were shredded leather, strapped together by curses and prayer. He felt the cold stab him through the soles of his feet, an icy spike that penetrated into his abdomen and chest and punctured his brain with all the power and pain of a Polish winter. He tried to flex his fingers, but they wouldn't obey.

'Dig,' the SS officer said.

They dug. Were they digging for themselves? Avraham had wondered. Was this to be their own grave they were digging? He knew that the Germans periodically killed the sonderkommandos. They were dangerous witnesses, periodically eliminated and replaced. And after all, what was there that was left of them to be used?

Avraham felt himself focus, his consciousness narrowing. He worked in silence, digging the frozen ground, the touch of earth on his non-responsive fingers serving to transport him to a different time, a different place. His fingers closed on a heavy fragment of bone and he discarded it without looking.

There were many bones there, in the earth. He touched each one briefly, almost caressing them as a sense of expectation settled slowly over him, as the bones became larger the deeper they dug, both heavier and older.

The light was fainter here, filtered through the barren branches of the trees; and it seemed to weaken even further the deeper into the earth they dug, so that they moved in twilight amidst this makeshift cemetery.

SS guards, sonderkommandos , even, for a moment, Auschwitz, all receded slowly from Avraham's mind, and in their place he began to discern sudden changes in the unnatural twilight. The afterimages of faint, lumbering shapes imprinted themselves on his retina like flashes of searing light, and the hole itself seemed to be opening out into a wide and featureless plane.

The bones he found were mending themselves. Slowly, they were assembling into groups, knitting into patterns, absorbing substance from the darkness, from his mind.

'You see?' the words barely penetrated into his reverie. The voice of the SS officer in cultured German. 'This is how a Jew should work!'

they were forming into shapes, and he recognised them, and in the silence of his mind he called to them. A herd of long-necked sauropods ambled past him as if he were invisible, and stegosaurii with spiky tails raced each other along the savannah like unruly children. Pterodactyls cried overhead.

He realised then that the hole he was digging, the hole he had thought was opening out to a plane, only seemed to him so since he was at its centre, and that this wound in the icy earth was really a wide crater, formed by some unimaginable impact, some powerful, mindless, destructive event that could change worlds.

Something that could kill a dinosaur.

'Enough!' He heard the German's voice as if it was spoken through a thick liquid. In the distance, a sauropod called, its cry a melancholy melody that wrapped itself around the distant bars of Beethoven's sixth symphony. A baby stegosaurus passed close to Avraham and stopped to look at him with a look of benign curiosity on its face.

'Remain in the hole,' the German said, and to his men, said simply, 'open fire.'

He sank into primordial mud. It filled his nose and his mouth, suffocating him. through the ground, through his entire body, he could feel the herd of sauropods as it ran.

'We'll get another group tomorrow to cover them up.'

There was pain in his leg, in his shoulder. An immense weight pressed on his chest and face.

'Any still alive?'

momentary clarity as he rose from the mud and found himself buried under the weight of a man.

'All look dead to me.'

The earth was shuddering now, quaking in the wake of the sauropods flight.

The mud reclaimed him. it no longer suffocated him; he sunk into it and beyond, until he was once again standing in the crater. All about him were dinosaurs, whole families, whole species he had never imagined existed.

'Just... check.'

The air felt increasingly warm. The sun had nearly disappeared. A baby stegosaurus - the same one? a different one? He couldn't tell - approached until it towered above him, then leaned down and licked his face thoughtfully.

Avraham felt tears rise, their fading memory catching him by surprise. They had come for him, he knew that now. They attached themselves to him, the way ghosts are sometimes set to haunt a place; they haunted him.

He looked into the sky and breathed in thickening air. Something immense was falling down, growing until it filled the sky. Avraham looked at it, and looked away. Then he sat on a rock and watched dinosaurs.

He was content; and only dimly aware of the voices of the SS soldiers, far away under the mud, and of the rock that was falling from the skies.

'Got one! He's twitching.'

He knew it won't be long before it landed.

The End

In my boyhood it was the fashion among the established families of the City Imperishable, much aped by the arrivistes, to believe that one's soul fled with each exhalation, and was recaptured with every indrawn breath. Lovers eagerly seized yet another excuse to exchange essences, while members of the Glasswright Guild profited handsomely from tiny "soul bottles" meant to arrest the airy spirit lest it take flight in a strong wind. Parlor magicians compounded spells from the breath of the mighty while scholars in their towers attempted to distill essence of soul.

The dwarf maids had already found business elsewhere snickering no doubt through their tight-sewn lips while Bijaz, Father's household manager and my own tutor, paced behind his employer. Had the older dwarf not been boxed in early childhood to limit his growth, Bijaz would have been a large man. Instead he was merely powerful, with a mane of silver hair and beard, glittering gray eyes and sharp ears that missed little.

Father spun on his heel, advancing on Bijaz as if the dwarf were some vermin caught scuttling across the kitchen tiles. "Every last obol is leveraged, yes? There is nothing in the house accounts?"

"Sir," said Bijaz, his voice whistling shrill through the puckered opening between lips stitched shut in the formal and customary guarantee of trustworthy silence, "All is as you ordered."

"And against your advice," muttered Father, fist slapping against his palm. I drew my quilted silk sleeping robe tighter and pressed myself back against the library door, quiet as I could be. "And so it ends," Father said, his raged draining away as fast as it had mounted. "Fourteen generations of petty nobility in service of the City Imperishable, and now our fortunes are foundered upon my ambition."

Bijaz's fingers flickered close to his waist, the fingertalk of the City's Dwarven servants. Father nodded, then looked toward me in the shadows of the door. "Do not cower so, Jason," he said. "I will be charged as a debtor on account of the thousand-odd soul bottles in which I invested, but your mother's family fortunes may yet protect you."

As if Mother ever saw anything past her dressing table mirror, I thought, but dared not say aloud. She had never been worthy of Father's love. I was afraid I would not be either.

Less than a week later, my sisters and I prowled the damp cobbles along the gaslights of Melisande Avenue. Evening mists dripped from the sad, heavy leaves of the linden trees, while enameled carriages rattled by in the gathering dark. We were hungry, our pudgy bellies already growing tight from the short rations in the little flat where Mother had taken temporary rooms, so we stole roasted nuts from the brass-bound vending carts, the mealy warm food made all the more tasty by the seasonings of fear as we were chased away with shouts of "thief, thief!"

"But Father..." I began, unsure of my words even as I said them.

"Jason," Bijaz said with a sigh, "you are a lad of fourteen summers, no more equipped to fight off dozens of angry drunks than any single man. If your father finds his way free of Delator Square he is again his own man. But he must travel in his own way."

"On shattered thighs?" My voice shot up like a gunpowder rocket at Solstice, shaming me.

"Enough," he snapped. Bijaz jerked on my arm and pointed with his free hand, bloody knife still between his fingers. "Look, your mother takes her leave."

Indeed, Mother's rented carriage was just vanishing into a herd of bullocks being driven down Short Street. My sister Ariadne ran after her, skirts held high, while Kalliope collapsed weeping. I took her hand and kissed it. My anger at Mother and my shame for Father warred in my head until I felt nothing but boiling red rage.

"I will not build hope upon lies," I said, staring miserably at the worn pine boards of his floor.

"As you will. Your father charged me out of loyalty to see to the best disposition of the family. It is to you I must now report. As for your other sister, Kalliope has been sold to a Tokhari rug merchant as a concubine, the monies used to service your family's debts. Her new master has many women so this should not cause her undue stress."

I imagined Kalliope's lithe body and bright smile straining beneath a sweaty, dark brute of a man, then dismissed the image. Her lot might be hard, but at least she was cared for. "What of Father?" I asked, grief seeping into my heart.

Bijaz shook his head slowly. "Not even a body to recover from Delator Square. Just bloody rags." He paused for a moment, perhaps to see if I would cry for my father. "Your mother, of course, is long gone to her sister's family on the South Coast. We can only hope that plantation life disagrees with her. As for you, boy, there are few prospects." Ratcheting his chair down to my level, the dwarf reached out and touched my mouth. It was a familiar gesture that would have gotten even him whipped in Father's house. Bijaz's voice caught in his throat, his breathing ragged, as he continued, "But I can make you a special offer. One man to another."

I trembled as the rough calluses of his hands pinched my lips and said nothing. He stared into my eyes for a moment, then rubbed my upper lip with the tip of one finger. "I will shelter you for a year and a day, and do my best to remove you from the weight of your father's debts, if you will live in my household with your lips sewn shut in the manner of a servant." I saw that he was perspiring now, sweat running down his cheeks and neck. "I will continue to tutor you as time permits and ask only that I be allowed to inspect and maintain your sutures. You will learn the fingertalk of the dwarves, which will benefit you greatly in life."

What could I do? No money, no parents, and still young enough to be used like a woman and thrown into the River Saltus by any pack of street rowdies who chose to do so. I nodded, the touch of his finger moving with my face.

"Good," Bijaz said. "You already observe the silence." He released my lips and fumbled at a pouch upon his belt to withdraw an enormous curved needle and a length of catgut. The needle glimmered in the watery gaslight like the tooth of a serpent as he threaded the gut. My eyes nearly crossed as the dwarf grasped my lips once again and brought the needle toward my chin.

He whispered in my ear, tender as my sisters ever had, "Do not flinch from the pain, and it will be your friend forever."

I signed respectful attention in fingertalk, a gesture that literally meant "pleasure of the master."

"Soon your pledge to me will be discharged." Bijaz' gray eyes glittered, on the verge of either tears or anger. "You have the makings of a prime servant, although it is far too late for the growing boxes. However, there are surgeons who could address your excesses of height in exchange for a mortgage upon your future years of service."

After waiting out his silence I signaled, "green apples." This indicated that the idea was not to my taste.

"I thought not, although there is certainly a market for the services of such a one should you elect to change your mind." Bijaz twisted one silvered lock of his hair in his massive fist. "Well, at any rate I have succeeded in clearing your debts. Your mother's flight made the business easier for you in that regard. You owe me nothing for your time here thus far, nor will I charge you board until after I remove your stitches for good. All the same, you have no assets save a thousand soul bottles. What are your thoughts for the future?"

Mostly my thoughts were for my next assignation with his daughters in the basement that coming midnight, disporting ourselves among the stored fowling nets and bales of rose hips, but that was not what he had in mind. I signed "leaves before the storm," meaning that I would trust to divine providence and the good will of the world.

"Any man of piety might say the same, but I have noticed you practicing more languor than prayer this past year, Jason. As it happens my brother's shipping concern has need of a clerk in his offices at the Sturgeon Quay. If you care to be considered I can recommend you for the post. You would be required to live above the warehouse offices in order to guard the deposits, and work daily among the mass of common citizens and servants."

Though the prospect simultaneously bored and worried me, I bowed my thanks. I was not a man in command of the engines of possibility.

Bijaz clapped his hands in delight. Ratcheting his chair down, he loosened the tooled leather belt and adjusted his robes. "Come," he said in a shallow voice, his breath panting. "Let me inspect your lips once more."

Even as the dwarf's rough fingers stung my always-tender stitches, I could not decide who I hated more -- Father in his weakness, for losing our family's position; or Bijaz, for not taking Father's place on the platform in Delator Square as a loyal servant should have.

I glanced at the tide clock on the wall and gently touched the paints that disguised the scars on my lips that not even whiskers could fully conceal. "I've ten minutes before my cabriolet arrives. I suppose I should see what he wants."

"I want to speak with you." It was the dandy himself in my door now. Two-Thumbs was gone, only his distant shouts hanging in the air as he belabored some lazy stevedore. Used to sizing up my customers, I gave the visitor a long look.

He wore a buttoned black cassock of a foreign cut. The cloth was some blended weave I did not recognize. That alone was unusual, for working on the docks I saw almost everything and everyone eventually. A broad-brimmed flat hat of bear fur dyed black as his cassock shaded his face but did nothing to hide the knife-edged hawk nose and glinting green eyes. Below the cassock I glimpsed heavy, round-toed boots with gum soles, more like a butcher's than those of the cleric or scholar I at first took him to be. There was an eerie familiarity about him, a sense of recognition that I could not place. It was if I had seen this man a hundred times before, for all that he was a stranger to me.

"And so you have found me," I finally said just before my silence spilled over into insolence. "Speak, as you will. I am Jason the Factor, of Tomb's Shipping and Storage. How may I serve you?" On pretense of straightening a fold in my tunic my fingers flickered the sign for "slick cobblestones," which meant to keep the business fast and simple. It was a small test to which I subjected visitors, one that sometimes paid unexpected dividends.

"You sign like a dwarf, Jason the Factor," he said, the dismissal in his tone leading me to an instant, intense aversion to this man and his goals. He was mirroring my insolence with arrogance. "I am Ignatius of Redtower, and you have something I need."

I could recognize a negotiating position when it slapped me to the floor. "What is this wondrous thing you seek, and how generous is your offer?"

"I require certain of your father's soul bottles."

I stiffened, giving away too much of my own interest already. The bottles were the last I had of him, one of them perhaps even enclosing his very essence.

Ignatius' green eyes flickered at my reaction before he continued, "As they were declared worthless by the Debtor's Court, I will tender their cost of packing and a small storage fee."

Otherwise, the threat implied, he could have the Court assess a value and seize them. Given Bijaz's care in arranging to free me from my family's debts I doubted the threat was valid, but it would be a troublesome matter to deal with.

Besides which, I would not part with my patrimony. However worthless it might have been deemed to be.

Picking a fleck of skin paint off my sleeve, I pretended for a moment to consider his offer. "You have a novel approach to commerce, sir, but your humor is ill-timed. Good day." I turned to my mirror.

"I warn you," he said to my back, "it is the best offer you will receive in this matter. You have until tomorrow to consider the advantages of my generosity."

When I turned again from the mirror he was gone.