Issue 33, October 2017

© Wyrm Publishing, 2017
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the October 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

This month will start off with a bang for me. Ken Liu and I are Guests of Honor at Capclave in Gaithersburg, Maryland. It’s my first time as a GoH and I’m looking forward to the experience. Since I haven’t been traveling for the last two months, I feel well-rested (socially) enough. I’ll also be seeing Sean and Kate (from Clarkesworld) there and it’s been too long since we’ve all been in the same room.

After the con, I’ll be diving right back into work. September featured some distractions in the form of medical issues, so I’m a bit behind schedule. I also have to rush through some Visa paperwork because it looks like I’ll be spending some time in China in November. I’m looking forward to that trip and will share some of the details with you in the next issue—we’re still working that out.

Hope to see some of you at Capclave!

Until next time . . .

-Neil

Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)

Rachel Swirsky

ACT I: MARA

Tombé

(Fall)

As dawn approached, the snow outside Mara’s window slowed, spiky white stars melting into streaks on the pane. Her abba stood in the doorway, unaware that she was already awake. Mara watched his silhouette in the gloom. Shadows hung in the folds of his jowls where he’d shaved his beard in solidarity after she’d lost her hair. Although it had been months, his face still looked pink and plucked.

Some nights, Mara woke four or five times to find him watching from the doorway. She didn’t want him to know how poorly she slept and so she pretended to be dreaming until he eventually departed.

This morning, he didn’t leave. He stepped into the room. “Marale,” he said softly. His fingers worried the edges of the green apron that he wore in his workshop. A layer of sawdust obscured older scorch marks and grease stains. “Mara, please wake up. I’ve made you a gift.”

Mara tried to sit. Her stomach reeled. Abba rushed to her bedside. “I’m fine,” she said, pushing him away as she waited for the pain to recede.

He drew back, hands disappearing into his apron pockets. The corners of his mouth tugged down, wrinkling his face like a bulldog’s. He was a big man with broad shoulders and disproportionately large hands. Everything he did looked comical when wrought on such a large scale. When he felt jovial, he played into the foolishness with broad, dramatic gestures that would have made an actor proud. In sadness, his gestures became reticent, hesitating, miniature.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

In deep winter, their house was always cold. Icy wind curled through cracks in the insulation. Even the heater that abba had installed at the foot of Mara’s bed couldn’t keep her from dreaming of snow.

Abba pulled a lace shawl that had once belonged to Mara’s ima from the back of her little wooden chair. He draped it across her shoulders. Fringe covered her ragged fingernails.

As Mara rose from her bed, he tried to help with her crutches, but Mara fended him off. He gave her a worried look. “The gift is in my workshop,” he said. With a concerned backward glance, he moved ahead, allowing her the privacy to make her own way.

Their white German Shepherd, Abel, met Mara as she shifted her weight onto her crutches. She paused to let him nuzzle her hand, tongue rough against her knuckles. At thirteen, all his other senses were fading, and so he tasted everything he could. He walked by her side until they reached the stairs, and then followed her down, tail thumping against the railing with every step.

The door to abba’s workshop was painted red and stenciled with white flowers that Mara had helped ima paint when she was five. Inside, half-finished apparatuses sprawled across workbenches covered in sawdust and disassembled electronics. Hanging from the ceiling, a marionette stared blankly at Mara and Abel as they passed, the glint on its pupils moving back and forth as its strings swayed. A mechanical hand sprang to life, its motion sensor triggered by Abel’s tail. Abel whuffed at its palm and then hid behind Mara. The thing’s fingers grasped at Mara’s sleeve, leaving an impression of dusty, concentric whorls.

Abba stood at the back of the workshop, next to a child-sized doll that sat on a metal stool. Its limbs fell in slack, uncomfortable positions. Its face looked like the one Mara still expected to see in the mirror: a broad forehead over flushed cheeks scattered with freckles. Skin peeled away in places, revealing wire streams.

Mara moved to stand in front of the doll. It seemed even eerier, examined face to face, its expression a lifeless twin of hers. She reached out to touch its soft, brown hair. Her bald scalp tingled.

Gently, abba took Mara’s hand and pressed her right palm against the doll’s. Apart from how thin Mara’s fingers had become over the past few months, they matched perfectly.

Abba made a triumphant noise. “The shape is right.”

Mara pulled her hand out of abba’s. She squinted at the doll’s imitation flesh. Horrifyingly, its palm shared each of the creases on hers, as if it, too, had spent twelve years dancing and reading books and learning to cook.

Abel circled the doll. He sniffed its feet and ankles and then paused at the back of its knees, whuffing as if he’d expected to smell something that wasn’t there. After completing his circuit, he collapsed on the floor, equidistant from the three human-shaped figures.

“What do you think of her?” abba asked.

Goosebumps prickled Mara’s neck. “What is she?”

Abba cradled the doll’s head in his hands. Its eyes rolled back, and the light highlighted its lashes, fair and short, just like Mara’s own. “She’s a prototype. Empty-headed. A friend of mine is working on new technology for the government—”

“A prototype?” repeated Mara. “Of what?”

“The body is simple mechanics. Anyone could build it. The technology in the mind is new. It takes pictures of the brain in motion, all three dimensions, and then creates schematics for artificial neural clusters that will function like the original biological matter—”

Mara’s head ached. Her mouth was sore and her stomach hurt and she wanted to go back to bed even if she couldn’t sleep. She eyed the doll. The wires under its skin were vivid red and blue as if they were veins and arteries connecting to viscera.

“The military will make use of the technology,” abba continued. “They wish to recreate soldiers with advanced training. They are not ready for human tests, not yet. They are still experimenting with animals. They’ve made rats with mechanical brains that can solve mazes the original rats were trained to run. Now they are working with chimpanzees.”

Abba’s accent deepened as he continued, his gestures increasingly emphatic.

“But I am better. I can make it work in humans now, without more experiments.” Urgently, he lowered his voice. “My friend was not supposed to send me the schematics. I paid him much money, but his reason for helping is that I have promised him that when I fix the problems, I will show him the solution and he can take the credit. This technology is not for civilians. No one else will be able to do this. We are very fortunate.”

Abba touched the doll’s shoulder so lightly that only his fingertips brushed her.

“I will need you to sit for some scans so that I can make the images that will preserve you. They will be painless. I can set up when you sleep.” Quietly, he added, “She is my gift to you. She will hold you and keep you . . . if the worst . . . ” His voice faded, and he swallowed twice, three times, before beginning again. “She will protect you.”

Mara’s voice came out hoarse. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You needed to see her when she was complete.”

Her throat constricted. “I wish I’d never seen her at all!”

From the cradle, Mara had been even-tempered. Now, at twelve, she shouted and cried. Abba said it was only what happened to children as they grew older, but they both knew that wasn’t why.

Neither was used to her new temper. The lash of her shout startled them both. Abba’s expression turned stricken.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“You made a new daughter!”

“No, no.” Abba held up his hands to protect himself from her accusation. “She is made for you.”

“I’m sure she’ll be a better daughter than I am,” Mara said bitterly.

She grabbed a hank of the doll’s hair. Its head tilted toward her in a parody of curiosity. She pushed it away. The thing tumbled to the floor, limbs awkwardly splayed.

Abba glanced toward the doll, but did not move to see if it was broken. “I—No, Marale—You don’t—” His face grew drawn with sudden resolution. He pulled a hammer off of one of the work benches. “Then I will smash her to pieces.”

There had been a time when, with the hammer in his hand and a determined expression on his face, he’d have looked like a smith from old legends. Now he’d lost so much weight that his skin hung loosely from his enormous frame as if he were a giant coat suspended from a hanger. Tears sprang to Mara’s eyes.

She slapped at his hands and the hammer in them. “Stop it!”

“If you want her to—”

“Stop it! Stop it!” she shouted.

Abba released the hammer. It fell against the cement with a hollow, mournful sound.

Guilt shot through her, at his confusion, at his fear. What should she do, let him destroy this thing he’d made? What should she do, let the hammer blow strike, watch herself be shattered?

Sawdust billowed where the hammer hit. Abel whined and fled the room, tail between his legs.

Softly, abba said, “I don’t know what else to give.”

Abba had always been the emotional heart of the family, even when ima was alive. His anger flared; his tears flowed; his laughter roared from his gut. Mara rested her head on his chest until his tears slowed, and then walked with him upstairs.

The house was too small for Mara to fight with abba for long, especially during winters when they both spent every hour together in the house, Mara home-schooling via her attic space program while abba tinkered in his workshop. Even on good days, the house felt claustrophobic with two people trapped inside. Sometimes one of them would tug on a coat and ski cap and trudge across the hard-packed snow, but even the outdoors provided minimal escape. Their house sat alone at the end of a mile-long driveway that wound through bare-branched woods before reaching the lonely road that eventually led to their neighbors. Weather permitting, in winter it took an hour and a half to get the truck running and drive into town.

It was dawn by the time they had made their way upstairs, still drained from the scene in the basement. Mara went to lie down on her bed so she could try for the illusion of privacy. Through the closed door, she heard her father venting his frustration on the cabinets. Pans clanged. Drawers slammed. She thought she could hear the quiet, gulping sound of him beginning to weep again under the cacophony.

She waited until he was engrossed in his cooking and then crept out of her bedroom. She made her way down the hallway, taking each step slowly and carefully so as to minimize the clicking of her crutches against the floor.

Ima’s dance studio was the only room in the house where abba never went. It faced east; at dawn, rose- and peach-colored light shimmered across the full-length mirrors and polished hardwood. An old television hung on the southern wall, its antiquated technology jury-rigged to connect with the household AI.

Mara closed the door most of the way, enough to muffle any sound, but not enough to make the telltale thump that would attract her father’s attention. She walked up to the television so that she could speak softly and still be heard by its implanted AI sensors. She’d long ago mastered the trick of enunciating clearly enough for the AI to understand her even when she was whispering. “I’d like to access a DVD of ima’s performances.”

The AI whirred. “Okay, Mara,” said its genial, masculine voice. “Which one would you like to view?”

“Giselle.”

More clicks and whirs. The television blinked on, showing the backs of several rows of red velvet seats. Well-dressed figures navigated the aisles, careful not to wrinkle expensive suits and dresses. Before them, a curtain hid the stage from view, the house lights emphasizing its sumptuous folds.

Mara sat carefully on the floor near the ballet barre so that she would be able to use it like a lever when she wanted to stand again. She crossed the crutches at her feet. On the television screen, the lights dimmed as the overture began.

Sitting alone in this place where no one else went, watching things that no one else watched, she felt as if she were somewhere safe. A mouse in its hole, a bird in its nest—a shelter built precisely for her body, neither too large nor too small.

The curtain fluttered. The overture began. Mara felt her breath flowing more easily as the tension eased from her shoulders. She could forget about abba and his weeping for a moment, just allow herself to enter the ballet.

Even as an infant, Mara had adored the rich, satiny colors on ima’s old DVDs. She watched the tragedies, but her heart belonged to the comedies. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pineapple Poll. Ashton’s choreography of Prokofiev’s Cinderella. Madcap Coppélia in which a peasant boy lost his heart to a clockwork doll.

When Mara was small, ima would sit with her while she watched the dancers, her expression half-wistful and half-jaded. When the dancers had sketched their bows, ima would stand, shaking her head, and say, “Ballet is not a good life.”

At first, ima did not want to give Mara ballet lessons, but Mara insisted at the age of two, three, four, until ima finally gave in. During the afternoons while abba was in his workshop, Mara and ima would dance together in the studio until ima grew tired and sat with her back against the mirror, hands wrapped around her knees, watching Mara spin and spin.

After ima died, Mara had wanted to ask her father to sign her up for dance school. But she hated the melancholia that overtook him whenever they discussed ballet. Before getting sick, she’d danced on her own instead, accompanying the dancers on ima’s tapes. She didn’t dance every afternoon as she had when ima was alive. She was older; she had other things to do—books to read, study hours with the AI, lessons and play dates in attic space. She danced just enough to maintain her flexibility and retain what ima had taught her, and even sometimes managed to learn new things from watching the dancers on film.

Then last year, while dancing with the Mouse King to The Nutcracker, the pain she’d been feeling for months in her right knee suddenly intensified. She heard the snap of bone before she felt it. She collapsed suddenly to the floor, confused and in pain, her head ringing with the echoes of the household’s alarms. As the AI wailed for help, Mara found a single thought repeating in her head. Legs don’t shatter just because you’re dancing. Something is very wrong.

On the television screen, the filmed version of Mara’s mother entered, dancing a coy Giselle in blue tulle. Her gaze slanted shyly downward as she flirted with the dancers playing Albrecht and Hilarion. One by one, she plucked petals from a prop daisy. He loves me, he loves me not.

Mara heard footsteps starting down the hall. She rushed to speak before abba could make it into the room—“AI, switch off—”

Abba arrived before she could finish. He stood in the doorway with his shoulders hunched, his eyes averted from the image of his dead wife. “Breakfast is ready,” he said. He lingered for a moment before turning away.

After breakfast, abba went outside to scrape ice off of the truck.

They drove into town once a week for supplies. Until last year, they’d always gone on Sundays, after Shabbat. Now they went on Fridays before Mara’s appointments and then hurried to get home before sunset.

Outside, snowflakes whispered onto the hard-pack. Mara pulled her knit hat over her ears, but her cheeks still smarted from the cold. She rubbed her gloved hands together for warmth before attaching Abel’s leash. The old dog seemed to understand what her crutches were. Since she’d started using them, he’d broken his lifelong habit of yanking on the strap and learned to walk daintily instead, placing each paw with care.

Abba opened the passenger door so that Abel could clamor into the back of the cab. He fretted while Mara leaned her crutches on the side of the truck and pulled herself into the seat. He wanted to help, she knew, but he was stopping himself. He knew she hated being reminded of her helplessness.

He collected her crutches when she was done and slung them into the back with Abel before taking his place in the driver’s seat. Mara stared silently forward as he turned the truck around and started down the narrow driveway. The four-wheel drive jolted over uneven snow, shooting pain through Mara’s bad leg.

“Need to fix the suspension,” abba grumbled.

Because abba was a tinkerer, everything was always broken. Before Mara was born, he’d worked for the government. These days, he consulted on refining manufacturing processes. He felt that commercial products were shoddily designed and so he was constantly trying to improve their household electronics, leaving his dozens of half-finished home projects disassembled for months while all the time swearing to take on new ones.

The pavement smoothed out as they turned onto a county-maintained road. Piles of dirty snow lined its sides. Bony trees dotted the landscape, interspersed with pines still wearing red bows from Christmas.

Mara felt as though the world were caught in a frozen moment, preserved beneath the snow. Nothing would ever change. No ice would melt. No birds would return to the branches. There would be nothing but blizzards and long, dark nights and snow-covered pines.

Mara wasn’t sure she believed in G-d, but on her better days, she felt at peace with the idea of pausing, as if she were one of the dancers on ima’s DVDs, halted mid-leap.

Except she wouldn’t pause. She’d be replaced by that thing. That doll.

She glanced at her father. He stared fixedly at the road, grumbling under his breath in a blend of languages. He hadn’t bought new clothes since losing so much weight, and the fabric of his coat fell in voluminous folds across the seat.

He glanced sideways at Mara watching him. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Mara muttered, looking away.

Abel pushed his nose into her shoulder. She turned in her seat to scratch between his ears. His tail thumped, tick, tock, like a metronome.

They parked beside the grocery. The small building’s densely packed shelves were reassuringly the same year in and year out except for the special display mounted at the front of the store. This week it showcased red-wrapped sausages, marked with a cheerful, handwritten sign.

Gerry stood on a ladder in the center aisle, restocking cereals. He beamed as they walked in.

“Ten-thirty to the minute!” he called. “Good morning, my punctual Jewish friends!”

Gerry had been slipping down the slope called being hard of hearing for years now. He pitched his voice as if he were shouting across a football field.

“How is my little adult?” he asked Mara. “Are you forty today, or is it fifty?”

“Sixty-five,” Mara said. “Seventy tomorrow.”

“Such an old child,” Gerry said, shaking his head. “Are you sure you didn’t steal that body?”

Abba didn’t like those kinds of jokes. He used to worry that they would make her self-conscious; now he hated them for bringing up the subject of aging. Flatly, he replied, “Children in our family are like that. There is nothing wrong with her.”

Mara shared an eye roll with the grocer.

“Never said there was,” Gerry said. Changing the subject, he gestured at Mara’s crutches with a box of cornflakes. “You’re an athlete on those. I bet there’s nothing you can’t do with them.”

Mara forced a smile. “They’re no good for dancing.”

He shrugged. “I used to know a guy in a wheelchair. Out-danced everyone.”

“Not ballet, though.”

“True,” Gerry admitted, descending the ladder. “Come to the counter. I’ve got something for you.”

Gerry had hardly finished speaking before Abel forgot about being gentle with Mara’s crutches. He knew what Gerry’s gifts meant. The lead wrenched out of Mara’s hand. She chased after him, crutches clicking, but even with his aging joints, the dog reached the front counter before Mara was halfway across the store.

“Wicked dog,” Gerry said in a teasing tone as he caught Abel’s leash. He scratched the dog between the ears and then bent to grab a package from under the counter. “Sit,” he said. “Beg.” The old dog rushed to do both. Gerry unwrapped a sausage and tossed it. Abel snapped and swallowed.

Mara finished crossing the aisle. She leaned against the front counter. She tried to conceal her heavy breathing, but she knew that her face must be flushed. Abba waited at the edges of her peripheral vision, his arms stretched in Mara’s direction as if he expected her to collapse.

Gerry glanced between Mara and her father, assessing the situation. Settling on Mara, he tapped a stool behind the counter. “You look wiped. Take a load off. Your dad and I can handle ourselves.”

“Yes, Mara,” abba said quickly. “Perhaps you should sit.”

Mara glared. “Abba.”

“I’m sorry,” abba said, looking away. He added to Gerry, “She doesn’t like help.”

“No help being offered. I just want some free work. You up for manning the register?” Gerry tapped the stool again. “I put aside one of those strawberry things you like. It’s under the counter. Wrapped in pink paper.”

“Thanks,” Mara said, not wanting to hurt Gerry’s feelings by mentioning that she couldn’t eat before appointments. She went behind the counter and let Gerry hold her crutches while she pulled herself onto the stool. She hated how good it felt to sit.

Gerry nodded decisively. “Come on,” he said, leading abba toward the fresh fruit.

Abba and Gerry made unlikely friends. Gerry made no bones about being a charismatic evangelical. During the last election, he’d put up posters saying that Democratic voters were headed to hell. In return, abba had suggested that Republican voters might need a punch in the jaw, especially any Republican voters who happened to be standing in front of him. Gerry responded that he supported free speech as much as any other patriotic American, but speech like that could get the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out of his store. They shouted. Gerry told abba not to come back. Abba said he wouldn’t even buy dog food from fascists.

The next week, Gerry was waiting on the sidewalk with news about a kosher supplier, and Mara and abba went in as if nothing had ever happened.

Before getting sick, Mara had always followed the men through the aisles, joining in their arguments about pesticides and free-range chickens. Gerry liked to joke that he wished his children were as interested in the business as Mara was. Maybe I’ll leave the store to you instead of them, he’d say, jostling her shoulder. He had stopped saying that.

Mara slipped the wrapped pastry out from under the counter. She broke it into halves and put one in each pocket, hoping Gerry wouldn’t see the lumps when they left. She left the empty paper on the counter, dusted with the crumbs that had fallen when she broke the pastry.

An activity book lay next to where the pastry had been. It was for little kids, but Mara pulled it out anyway. Gerry’s children were too old to play with things like that now, but he still kept an array of diversions under the counter for when customers’ kids needed to be kept busy. It was better to do something than nothing. Armed with the felt-tip pen that was clipped to the cover, she began to flip through pages of half-colored drawings and connect-the-dots.

A few aisles over, near the butcher counter, she heard her father grumbling. She looked up and saw Gerry grab abba’s shoulder. As always, he was speaking too loudly. His voice boomed over the hum of the freezers. “I got in the best sausages on Wednesday,” he said. “They’re kosher. Try them. Make them for your, what do you call it, sadbath.”

By then, Gerry knew the word, but it was part of their banter.

“Shabbat,” Abba corrected.

Gerry’s tone grew more serious. “You’re losing too much weight. A man needs meat.”

Abba’s voice went flat. “I eat when I am hungry. I am not hungry so much lately.”

Gerry’s grip tightened on abba’s shoulder. His voice dropped. “Jakub, you need to take care of yourself.”

He looked back furtively at Mara. Flushing with shame, she dropped her gaze to the activity book. She clutched the pen tightly, pretending to draw circles in a word search.

“You have to think about the future,” said Gerry. His voice lowered even further. Though he was finally speaking at a normal volume, she still heard every word. “You aren’t the one who’s dying.”

Mara’s flush went crimson. She couldn’t tell if it was shame or anger—all she felt was cold, rigid shock. She couldn’t stop herself from sneaking a glance at abba. He, too, stood frozen. The word had turned him to ice. Neither of them ever said it. It was a game of avoidance they played together.

Abba pulled away from Gerry and started down the aisle. His face looked numb rather than angry. He stopped at the counter, looking at everything but Mara. He took Abel’s leash and gestured for Mara to get off of the stool. “We’ll be late for your appointment,” he said, even though it wasn’t even eleven o’clock. In a louder voice, he added, “Ring up our cart, would you, Gerry? We’ll pick up our bags on our way out of town.”

Mara didn’t like Doctor Pinsky. Abba liked him because he was Jewish even though he was American-born reform with a degree from Queens. He wore his hair close-cut but it looked like it would Jew ’fro if he grew it out.

He kept his nails manicured. His teeth shone perfectly white. He never looked directly at Mara when he spoke. Mara suspected he didn’t like children much. Maybe you needed to be that way if you were going to watch the sick ones get worse.

The nurses were all right. Grace and Nicole, both blond and a bit fat. They didn’t understand Mara since she didn’t fit their idea of what kids were supposed to be like. She didn’t talk about pop or interactives. When there were other child patients in the waiting room, she ignored them.

When the nurses tried to introduce her to the other children anyway, Mara said she preferred to talk to adults, which made them hmm and flutter. Don’t you have any friends, honey? Nicole had asked her once, and Mara answered that she had some, but they were all on attic space. A year ago, if Mara had been upset, she’d have gone into a-space to talk to her best friend, Collin, but more and more as she got sick, she’d hated seeing him react to her withering body, hated seeing the fright and pity in his eyes. The thought of going back into attic space made her nauseous.

Grace and Nicole gave Mara extra attention because they felt sorry for her. Modern cancer treatments had failed to help and now Mara was the only child patient in the clinic taking chemotherapy. It’s hard on little bodies, said Grace. Heck, it’s hard on big bodies, too.

Today it was Grace who came to meet Mara in the waiting room, pushing a wheelchair. Assuming it was for another patient, Mara started to gather her crutches, but Grace motioned for her to stay put. “Let me treat you like a princess.”

“I’m not much of a princess,” Mara answered, immediately realizing from the pitying look on Grace’s face that it was the wrong thing to say. To Grace, that would mean she didn’t feel like a princess because she was sick, rather than that she wasn’t interested in princesses.

“I can walk,” Mara protested, but Grace insisted on helping her into the wheelchair anyway. She hadn’t realized how tightly abba was holding her hand until she pulled it free.

Abba stood to follow them. Grace turned back. “Would you mind staying? Doctor Pinsky wants to talk to you.”

“I like to go with Mara,” abba said.

“We’ll take good care of her.” Grace patted Mara’s shoulder. “You don’t mind, do you, princess?”

Mara shrugged. Her father shifted uncertainly. “What does Doctor Pinsky want?”

“He’ll be out in a few minutes,” said Grace, deflecting. “I’m sorry, Mr. Morawski. You won’t have to wait long.”

Frowning, abba sat again, fingers worrying the collar of his shirt. Mara saw his conflicting optimism and fear, all inscribed plainly in his eyes, his face, the way he sat. She didn’t understand why he kept hoping. Even before they’d tried the targeted immersion therapy and the QTRC regression, she’d known that they wouldn’t work. She’d known from the moment when she saw the almost imperceptible frown cross the city diagnostician’s face when he asked about the pain she’d been experiencing in her knee for months before the break. Yes, she’d said, it had been worse at night, and his brow had darkened, just for an instant. Maybe she’d known even earlier than that, in the moment just after she fell in ima’s studio, when she realized with strange, cold clarity that something was very wrong.

Bad news didn’t come all at once. It came in successions. Cancer is present. Metastasis has occurred. The tumors are unresponsive. The patient’s vitals have taken a turn for the worse. We’re sorry to say, we’re sorry to say, we’re sorry to say.

Grace wheeled Mara toward the back, maintaining a stream of banal, cheerful chatter, remarks about the weather and questions about the holidays and jokes about boys. Mara deflected. She wasn’t ever going to have a boyfriend, not the way Grace was teasing her about. Adolescence was like spring, one more thing buried in endless snow.

Mara felt exhausted as they pulled into the driveway. She didn’t have the energy to push abba away when he came around the truck to help her down. Mara leaned heavily on her father’s arm as they crunched their way to the front door.

She vomited in the entryway. Abel came to investigate. She pushed his nose away while abba went to get the mop. The smell made her even more nauseated and so when abba returned, she left him to clean up. It made her feel guilty, but she was too tired to care.

She went to the bathroom to wash out her mouth. She tried not to catch her eye in the mirror, but she saw her reflection anyway. She felt a shock of alienation from the thin, sallow face. It couldn’t be hers.

She could hear abba in the hallway, grumbling at Abel in Yiddish. Wan, late afternoon light filtered through the windows, foreshadowing sunset. A few months ago, she and abba would have been rushing to cook and clean before Shabbat. Now no one cleaned and Mara left abba to cook alone as she went into ima’s studio.

She paused by the barre before sitting, already worried about how difficult it would be to get up again. “I want to watch Coppélia,” she said. The AI whirred.

Coppélia began with a young woman reading on a balcony—except she wasn’t really a young woman, she was actually an automaton constructed by the mad scientist, Dr. Coppélius. The dancer playing Coppélia pretended to read from a red leather book. Mara told the AI to fast-forward to ima’s entrance.

Mara’s mother was dancing the part of the peasant girl, Swanhilde. She looked nothing like the dancer playing Coppélia. Ima was strong, but also short and compact, where Coppélia was tall with visible muscle definition in her arms and legs.

Yet later in the ballet, none of the other characters would be able to tell them apart. Mara wanted to shake them into sense. Why couldn’t they tell the difference between a person and a doll?

Abba lit the candles and began the prayer, waving his hands through the smoke. They didn’t have an adult woman to read the prayers and abba wouldn’t let Mara do it while she was still a child. Soon, he used to say, after your bat mitzvah. Now he said nothing.

They didn’t celebrate Shabbat properly. They followed some traditions—tonight they’d leave the lights on, and tomorrow they’d eat cold food instead of cooking—but they did not attend services. If they needed to work then they worked. As a family, they had always been observant in some ways, and relaxed in others; they were not the kind who took well to following rules. Abba sometimes seemed to believe in Hashem and at other times not, though he believed in rituals and tradition. Still, before Mara had become ill, they’d taken more care with halakha.

As abba often reminded her, Judaism taught that survival was more important than dogma. Pikuach nefesh meant that a hospital could run electricity that powered a machine that kept a man alive. A family could work to keep a woman who had just given birth comfortable and healthy.

Perhaps other people wouldn’t recognize the exceptions that Mara and her father made from Shabbat as being matters of survival, but they were. They were using all they had just by living. Not much remained for G-d.

The long window over the kitchen counters let through the dimming light as violet and ultramarine seeped across the horizon. The tangerine sun lingered above the trees, preparing to descend into scratching, black branches. Mara’s attention drifted as he said Kiddush over the wine.

They washed their hands. Abba tore the challah. He gave a portion to Mara. She let it sit.

“The fish is made with ginger,” abba said. “Would you like some string beans?”

“My mouth hurts,” Mara said.

Abba paused, the serving plate still in his hands.

She knew that he wouldn’t eat unless she did. “I’ll have a little,” she added softly.

She let him set the food on her plate. She speared a single green bean and stared at it for a moment before biting. Everything tasted like metal after the drugs.

“I used turmeric,” he said.

“It’s good.”

Mara’s stomach roiled. She set the fork on her plate.

Her father ate a few bites of fish and then set his fork down, too. A maudlin expression crossed his face. “Family is Hashem’s best gift,” he said.

Mara nodded. There was little to say.

Abba picked up his wine glass. He twisted the stem as he stared into red. “Family is what the goyim tried to take from us with pogroms and ghettoes and the shoah. On Shabbat, we find our families, wherever we are.”

Abba paused again, sloshing wine gently from side to side.

“Perhaps I should have gone to Israel before you were born.”

Mara looked up with surprise. “You think Israel is a corrupt theocracy.”

“There are politics, like opposing a government, and then there is needing to be with your people.” He shrugged. “I thought about going. I had money then, but no roots. I could have gone wherever I wanted. But I thought, I will go to America instead. There are more Jews in America than Israel. I did not want to live in the shadow of the shoah. I wanted to make a family in a place where we could rebuild everything they stole. Der mensch trakht un Gatt lahkt.”

He had been speaking rapidly, his accent deepening with every word. Now he stopped.

His voice was hoarse when it returned.

“Your mother . . . you . . . I would not trade it, but . . . ” His gaze became diffuse as if the red of the wine were a telescope showing him another world. “It’s all so fragile. Your mother is taken and you . . . tsuris, tsuris . . . and then there is nothing.”

It was dark when they left the table. Abba piled dishes by the sink so that they could be washed after Shabbat and then retired to his bedroom. Abel came to Mara, tail thumping, begging for scraps. She was too tired to make him beg or shake hands. She rescued her plate from the pile of dishes and laid it on the floor for him to lick clean.

She started toward her bed and then changed her mind. She headed downstairs instead, Abel following after. She paused with her hand on the knob of the red-painted door before entering abba’s workshop.

Mara hadn’t seen abba go downstairs since their argument that morning but he must have managed to do it without her noticing. The doll sat primly on her stool, dignity restored, her head tilted down as if she were reading a book that Mara couldn’t see.

Mara wove between worktables until she reached the doll’s side. She lifted its hand and pressed their palms together as abba had done. It was strange to see the shape of her fingers so perfectly copied, down to the fine lines across her knuckles.

She pulled the thing forward. It lolled. Abel ducked its flailing right hand and ran a few steps away, watching warily.

Mara took hold of the thing’s head. She pressed the tip of her nose against the tip of its nose, trying to match their faces as she had their palms. With their faces so close together, it looked like a Cyclops, staring back at her with one enormous, blank eye.

“I hate you,” Mara said, lips pressed against its mute mouth.

It was true, but not the same way that it had been that morning. She had been furious then. Betrayed. Now the blaze of anger had burned down and she saw what lay in the ashes that remained.

It was jealousy. That this doll would be the one to take abba’s hand at Shabbat five years from then, ten years, twenty. That it would take and give the comfort she could not. That it would balm the wounds that she had no choice but to inflict.

Would Mara have taken a clockwork doll if it had restored ima to her for these past years?

She imagined lying down for the scans. She imagined a machine studying her brain, replicating her dreams neuron by neuron, rendering her as mathematical patterns. She’d read enough biology and psychology to know that, whatever else she was, she was also an epiphenomenon that arose from chemicals and meat and electricity.

It was sideways immortality. She would be gone, and she would remain. There and not there. A quantum mechanical soul.

Love could hurt, she knew. Love was what made you hurt when your ima died. Love was what made it hurt when abba came to you gentle and solicitous, every kindness a reminder of how much pain you’d leave behind.

She would do this painful thing because she loved him, as he had made this doll because he loved her. She thought, with a sudden clenching of her stomach, that it was a good thing most people never lived to see what people planned to make of them when they were gone.

What Gerry had said was as true as it was cutting. Abba was not the one who would die.

Abba slept among twisted blankets, clutching his pillow as if afraid to let it go.

Mara watched from the doorway. “Abba.”

He grumbled in his sleep as he shifted position.

“Abba,” she repeated. “Please wake up, abba.”

She waited while he put on his robe. Then, she led him down.

She made her way swiftly through the workshop, passing the newly painted marionette and the lonely mechanical hand. She halted near the doll, avoiding its empty gaze.

“I’m ready now,” she said.

Abba’s face shifted from confusion to wariness. With guarded hope, he asked, “Are you certain?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

“Please, Mara. You do not have to.”

“I know,” she answered. She pressed herself against his chest, as if she were a much smaller child looking for comfort. She felt the tension in his body seep into relief as he wept with silent gratitude. She was filled with tears, too, from a dozen emotions blended into one. They were tears of relief, and regret, and pain, and love, and mourning, and more.

He wrapped his arms around her. She closed her eyes and savored the comfort of his woody scent, his warmth, the stubble scratching her arm. She could feel how thin he’d become, but he was still strong enough to hold her so tightly that his embrace was simultaneously joyful and almost too much to bear.

ACT II: JAKUB

Tour en l’air

(Turn in the Air)

Jakub was careful to make the scans as unobtrusive as possible. If he could have, he’d have recorded a dozen sessions, twenty-five, fifty, more. He’d have examined every obscure angle; he’d have recorded a hundred redundancies.

Mara was so fragile, though; not just physically, but mentally. He did not want to tax her. He found a way to consolidate what he needed into six nighttime sessions, monitoring her with portable equipment that he could bring into her bedroom which broadcast its data to the larger machinery in the basement.

When the scans were complete, Jakub spent his nights in the workshop, laboring over the new child while Mara slept. It had been a long time since he’d worked with technology like this, streamlined for its potential as a weapon. He had to gentle it, soothe it, coax it into being as careful about preserving memories of rainy mornings as it was about retaining reflexes and fighting skills.

He spent long hours poring over images of Mara’s brain. He navigated three-dimensional renderings with the AI’s help, puzzling over the strangeness of becoming so intimate with his daughter’s mind in such an unexpected way. After he had finished converting the images into a neural map, he looked at Mara’s mind with yet new astonishment. The visual representation showed associational clusters as if they were stars: elliptical galaxies of thought.

It was a truism that there were many ways to describe a river—from the action of its molecules to the map of its progress from tributaries to ocean. A mind was such a thing as well. On one end there was thought, personality, individual . . . and on the other . . . It was impossible to recognize Mara in the points of light, but he was in the midst of her most basic elements, and there was as much awe in that as there was in puzzling out the origin of the universe. He was the first person ever to see another human being in this way. He knew Mara now as no one else had ever known anyone.

His daughter, his beloved, his sheineh maideleh. There were so many others that he’d failed to protect. But Mara would always be safe; he would hold her forever.

Once Jakub had created the foundational schematics for manufacturing analogues to Mara’s brain structures, the remainder of the process was automated. Jakub needed only to oversee it, occasionally inputting his approval to the machine.

Jakub found it unbearable to leave the machinery unsupervised, but nevertheless, he could not spend all of his time in the basement. During the mornings when Mara was awake, he paced the house, grumbling at the dog who followed him up and down the hallways as if expecting him to throw a stick. What if the process stalled? What if a catastrophic failure destroyed the images of Mara’s mind now when her health was even more fragile and there might be no way to replace them?

He forced himself to disguise his obsession while Mara was awake. It was important to maintain the illusion that their life was the same as it had been before. He knew that Mara remained uneasy with the automaton. Its very presence said so many things that they had been trying to keep silent.

Mara’s days were growing even harder. He’d thought the end of chemotherapy would give her some relief, but cancer pain worsened every day. Constant suffering and exhaustion made her alternately sullen and sharp. She snapped at him when he brought her meals, when he tried to help her across the house, when she woke to find him lingering in the doorway while she slept. Part of it was the simple result of pain displacing patience, but it was more, too. Once, when he had touched her shoulder, she’d flinched; then, upon seeing him withdraw, her expression had turned from annoyance to guilt. She’d said, softly, “You won’t always be able to do that.” A pause, a swallow, and then even more quietly, “It reminds me.”

That was what love and comfort had become now. Promises that couldn’t be kept.

Most nights, she did not sleep at all, only lay awake, staring out of her window at the snow.

Jakub searched for activities that might console her. He asked her if she’d like him to read to her. He offered to buy her immersive games. He suggested that she log into a spare room with other sick children where they could discuss their troubles. She told him that she wanted to be alone.

She had always been an unusual child, precocious and content to be her own companion. Meryem had said it was natural for a daughter of theirs, who had been raised among adults, and was descended from people who were also talented and solitary. Jakub and Meryem had been similar as children, remote from others their own age as they pursued their obsessions. Now Jakub wished she had not inherited these traits so completely, that she was more easily able to seek solace.

When Mara didn’t think he was watching, she gathered her crutches and went into Meryem’s studio to watch ballets. She did not like it when he came too close, and so he watched from the hallway. He could see her profile reflected in the mirrors on the opposite wall. She cried as she watched, soundless tears beading her cheeks.

One morning when she put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jakub ventured into the studio. For so long, he had stayed away, but that had not made things better. He had to try what he could.

He found Mara sitting on the floor, her crutches leaning against the ballet barre. Abel lay a few feet away with his head on his paws. Without speaking, Jakub sat beside them.

Mara wiped her cheeks, streaking her tears. She looked resentfully at Jakub, but he ignored her, hoping he could reach the part of her that still wanted his company even if she had buried it.

They sat stoically for the remainder of act one, holding themselves with care so that they did not accidentally shift closer to one another. Mara pretended to ignore him, though her darting glances told another story. Jakub let her maintain the pretense, trying to allow her some personal space within the studio since he had already intruded so far. He hoped she would be like a scared rabbit, slowly adjusting to his presence and coming to him when she saw that he was safe.

Jakub had expected to spend the time watching Mara and not the video, but he was surprised to find himself drawn into the dancing. The pain of seeing Meryem leap and spin had become almost a dull note, unnoticeable in the concert of his other sorrows. Meryem made a luminous Titania, a ginger wig cascading in curls down her back, her limbs wrapped in flowers, leaves, and gossamer. He’d forgotten the way she moved onstage, as careful and precise as a doe, each agile maneuver employing precisely as much strength as she needed and no more.

As Act II began, Mara asked the AI to stop. Exhaustion, she said. Jakub tried to help her back to her room, but she protested, and he let her go.

She was in her own world now, closing down. She had no room left for him.

What can I do for you, Marale? he wanted to ask. I will do anything. You will not let me hold you so I must find another way. I will change the laws of life and death. I will give you as much forever as I can, sheineh maideleh. See? I am doing it now.

He knew that she hated it when he stood outside her door, watching, but when he heard her breath find the steady rhythm of sleep, he went to the threshold anyway. While she slept, Mara looked peaceful for a while, her chest gently rising and falling underneath her snow-colored quilt.

He lingered a long time. Eventually, he left her and returned downstairs to check the machines.

The new child was ready to be born.

For years, Jakub had dreamed of the numbers. They flickered in and out of focus as if displayed on old film. Sometimes they looked ashen and faded. At other times, they were darker than any real black. Always, they were written on palettes of human flesh.

Sometimes the dreams included fragmentary memories. Jakub would be back in the rooms his grandparents had rented when he was a child, watching bubbe prepare to clean the kitchen, pulling her left arm free from one long cotton sleeve, her tattoo a shock on the inside of her forearm. The skin there had gone papery with age, the ink bleached and distorted, but time and sun had not made the mark less portentous. She scoured cookware with steel wool and caustic chemicals that made her hands red and raw when they emerged from the bubbling water. No matter how often Jakub watched, he never stopped expecting her to abandon the ancient pots and turn that furious, unrelenting scrubbing onto herself.

Zayde’s tattoo remained more mysterious. It had not been inflicted in Auschwitz and so it hid in the more discreet location they’d used on the trains, needled onto the underside of his upper arm. Occasionally on hot days when Jakub was small, zayde would roll up his sleeves while he worked outside in the sun. If Jakub or one of the other boys found him, zayde would shout at them to get back inside and then finish the work in his long sleeves, dripping with sweat.

Jakub’s grandparents never spoke of the camps. Both had been young in those years, but even though they were not much older when they were released, the few pictures of them from that time showed figures that were already brittle and dessicated in both physique and expression. Survivors took many paths away from the devastation, but bubbe and zayde were among those who always afterward walked with their heads down.

Being mutually bitter and taciturn, they resisted marriage until long after their contemporaries had sought comfort in each other’s arms. They raised their children with asperity, and sent them into the world as adults with small gifts of money and few displays of emotion.

One of those children was Jakub’s mother, who immigrated to the United States where she married. Some years later, she died in childbirth, bearing what would have been Jakub’s fifth brother had the child not been stillborn. Jakub’s father, grieving, could not take care of his four living sons. Instead, he wrote to his father-in-law in Poland and requested that he come to the United States and take them home with him.

Even then, when he arrived on foreign shores to fetch boys he’d never met and take them back with him to a land they’d never known; even then when the moment should have been grief and gathering; even then zayde’s face was hard-lined with resignation. Or so Jakub’s elder brothers had told him, for he was the youngest of the surviving children, having learned to speak a few words by then but not yet able to stand on his own.

When the boys were children, it was a mystery to them how such harsh people could have spent long enough together to marry, let alone have children. Surely, they would have been happier with others who were kinder, less astringent, who could bring comfort into a marriage.

One afternoon, when Jakub was four years old, and too naïve to yet understand that some things that were discussed in private should not be shared with everyone, he was sitting with bubbe while she sewed shirts for the boys (too expensive to buy, and shouldn’t she know how to sew, having done it all her life?). He asked, “If you don’t like zayde, why did you marry him?”

She stopped suddenly. Her hands were still on the machine, her mouth open, her gaze fastened on the seam. For a moment, the breath did not rise in her chest. The needle stuttered to a stop as her foot eased its pressure on the pedal.

She did not deny it or ask What do you mean? Neither did she answer any of the other questions that might have been enfolded in that one, like Why don’t you like him? or Why did you marry at all?

Instead, she heard Jakub’s true question: Why zayde and not someone else?

“How could it be another?” she asked. “We’re the same.”

And then she began sewing again, making no further mention of it, which was what zayde would have done, too, if Jakub had left bubbe at her sewing and instead taken his question to zayde as he replaced the wiring in their old, old walls.

As important as it was for the two of them that they shared a history, it also meant that they were like knives to each other, constantly reopening each other’s old wounds and salting them with tears and anger. Their frequent, bitter arguments could continue for days upon days.

The days of arguing were better than those when bitter silence descended, and each member of the family was left in their own, isolated coldness.

It was not that there were no virtues to how the boys were raised. Their bodies were kept robust on good food, and their minds strengthened with the exercise of solving problems both practical and intellectual. Zayde concocted new projects for them weekly. One week they’d learn to build cabinets, and the next they’d read old books of philosophy, debating free will versus determinism. Jakub took Leibniz’s part against zayde’s Spinoza. They studied the Torah as an academic text, though zayde was an atheist of the bitter stripe after his time in the camps.

When Jakub was nine, bubbe decided that it was time to cultivate their spirits as well as their minds and bodies. She revealed that she had been having dreams about G-d for decades, ever since the day she left the camp. The events of those hours had haunted her dreams and as she watched them replay, she felt the scene overlaid with a shining sense of awe and renewal, which over the years, she had come to believe was the presence of G-d. Knowing zayde’s feelings about G-d, bubbe had kept her silence in the name of peace for decades, but that year, some indefinable thing had shifted her conscience and she could do so no longer.

As she’d predicted, zayde was furious. “I am supposed to worship a G-d that would make this world?” he demanded. “A G-d like that is no G-d. A G-d like that is evil.”

But despite the hours of shouting, slammed doors, and smashed crockery, bubbe remained resolute. She became a frum woman, dressing carefully, observing prayers and rituals. On Fridays, the kitchen became the locus of urgent energy as bubbe rushed to prepare for Shabbat, directing Jakub and his brothers to help with the chores. All of them worked tensely, preparing for the moment when zayde would return home and throw the simmering cholent out of the window, or—if they were lucky—turn heel and walk back out, going who-knew-where until he came home on Sunday.

After a particularly vicious argument, zayde proclaimed that while he apparently could not stop his wife from doing as she pleased, he would absolutely no longer permit his grandsons to attend shul. It was a final decision; otherwise, one of them would have to leave and never come back. After that, bubbe slipped out alone each week, into the chilly morning.

From zayde and bubbe, Jakub learned that love was both balm and nettle. They taught him from an early age that nothing could hurt so much as family.

Somehow, Jakub had expected the new child to be clumsy and vacant as if she were an infant, but the moment she initialized, her blank look vanished. Some parts of her face tensed and others relaxed. She blinked. She looked just like Mara.

She prickled under Jakub’s scrutiny. “What are you staring at? Is something wrong?”

Jakub’s mouth worked silently as he sought the words. “I thought you would need more time to adjust.”

The child smiled Mara’s cynical, lopsided smile, which had been absent for months. “I think you’re going to need more time to adjust than I do.”

She pulled herself to her feet. It wasn’t just her face that had taken on Mara’s habits of expression. Without pause, she moved into one of the stretches that Meryem had taught her, elongating her spine. When she relaxed, her posture was exactly like Mara’s would have been, a preadolescent slouch ameliorated by a hint of dancer’s grace.

“Can we go upstairs?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Jakub said. “There are tests to perform.”

Tests which she passed. Every single one. She knew Mara’s favorite colors and the names of the children she had studied with in attic space. She knew the color and weight of the apples that would grow on their trees next fall and perfectly recited the recipe for baking them with cinnamon. In the gruff tone that Mara used when she was guarding against pain, she related the story of Meryem’s death—how Meryem had woken with complaints of feeling dizzy, how she had slipped in the bath later that morning, how her head had cracked against the porcelain and spilled red into the bathwater.

She ran like Mara and caught a ball like Mara and bent to touch her toes like Mara. She was precisely as fleet and as nimble and as flexible as Mara. She performed neither worse nor better. She was Mara’s twin in every way that Jakub could measure.

“You will need to stay here for a few more days,” he told her, bringing down blankets and pillows so that he could make her a bed in the workshop. “There are still more tests. You will be safer if you remain close to the machines.”

The new child’s face creased with doubt. He was lying to spare her feelings, but she was no more deceived than Mara would have been. She said, “My room is upstairs.”

For so many months, Jakub and Mara had taken refuge in mutual silence when the subject turned uncomfortable. He did not like to speak so bluntly. But if she would force him—”No,” he said gently. “That is Mara’s room.”

“Can’t I at least see it?”

A wheedling overtone thinned her voice. Her body language occupied a strange lacuna between aggression and vulnerability. She faced him full-on, one foot advancing, with her hands clenched tightly at her sides. Yet at the same time, she could not quite meet his eyes, and her head was tilted slightly downward, protecting her neck.

Jakub had seen that strange combination before. It was not so unusual a posture for teenagers to wear when they were trying to assert their agency through rebellion and yet simultaneously still hoping for their parents’ approval.

Mara had never reached that stage. Before she became ill, she had been calm, abiding. Jakub began to worry that he’d erred in his calculations, that the metrics he’d used had been inadequate to measure the essence of a girl. Could she have aged so much, simply being slipped into an artificial skin?

“Mara is sleeping now.”

“But I am Mara!” The new child’s voice broke on her exclamation.

Her lips parted uncertainly. Her fingers trembled. Her glance flashed upward for a moment and he saw such pain in it. No, she was still his Mara. Not defiant, only afraid that he would decide that he had not wanted a mechanical daughter after all, that he would reject her like a broken radio and never love her again.

Gently, he laid his hand on her shoulder. Softly, he said, “You are Mara, but you need a new name, too. Let us call you Ruth.”

He had not known until he spoke that he was going to choose that name, but it was a good one. In the Torah, Ruth had given Mara hesed. His Mara needed loving kindness, too.

The new child’s gaze flickered upward as if she could see through the ceiling and into Mara’s room. “Mara is the name ima gave me,” she protested.

Jakub answered, “It would be confusing otherwise.”

He hoped that this time the new child would understand what he meant without his having to speak outright. The other Mara had such a short time. It would be cruel to make her days harder than they must be.

On the day when Jakub gave the automaton her name, he found himself recalling the story of Ruth. It had been a long time since he had given the Torah any serious study, but though he had forgotten its minutiae, he remembered its rhythm. His thoughts assumed the cadences of half-forgotten rabbis.

It began when a famine descended on Judah.

A man, Elimelech, decided that he was not going to let his wife and sons starve to death, and so he packed his household and brought them to Moab. It was good that he had decided to do so, because once they reached Moab, he died, and left his wife and sons alone.

His wife was named Naomi and her name meant pleasant. The times were not pleasant.

Naomi’s sons married women from Moab, one named Orpah and the other named Ruth. Despite their father’s untimely death, the boys spent ten happy years with their new wives. But the men of that family had very poor luck. Both sons died.

There was nothing left for Naomi in Moab and so she packed up her house and prepared to return to Judah. She told her daughters-in-law, “Go home to your mothers. You were always kind to my sons and you’ve always been kind to me. May Hashem be kind to you in return.”

She kissed them good-bye, but the girls wept.

They said, “Can’t we return to Judah with you?”

“Go back to your mothers,” Naomi repeated. “I have no more sons for you to marry. What can I give if you stay with me?”

The girls continued to weep, but at last sensible Orpah kissed her mother-in-law and left for home.

Ruth, who was less sensible; Ruth, who was more loving; Ruth, who was more kind; Ruth, she would not go.

“Don’t make me leave you,” Ruth said. “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people and your G-d my G-d.”

When Naomi saw that Ruth was committed to staying with her, she abandoned her arguing and let her come.

They traveled together to Bethlehem. When they arrived, they found that the whole city had gathered to see them. Everyone was curious about the two women traveling from Moab. One woman asked, “Naomi! Is that you?”

Naomi shook her head. “Don’t call me Naomi. There is no pleasantness in my life. Call me Mara, which means bitterness, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.”

Through the bitterness, Ruth stayed. While Naomi became Mara, Ruth stayed. Ruth gave her kindness, and Ruth stayed.

Jakub met Meryem while he was in Cleveland for a robotics conference. He’d attended dozens, but somehow this one made him feel particularly self-conscious in his cheap suit and tie among all the wealthy goyim.

By then he was living in the United States, but although he’d been born there, he rarely felt at home among its people. Between talks, he escaped from the hotel to go walking. That afternoon, he found his way to a path that wound through a park, making its way through dark-branched trees that waved their remaining leaves like flags of ginger, orange, and gold.

Meryem sat on an ironwork bench beside a man-made lake, its water silvered with dusk. She wore a black felt coat that made her look pallid even though her cheeks were pink with cold. A wind rose as Jakub approached, rippling through Meryem’s hair. Crows took off from the trees, disappearing into black marks on the horizon.

Neither of them was ever able to remember how they began to converse. Their courtship seemed to rise naturally from the lake and the crows and the fallen leaves, as if it were another inevitable element of nature. It was bashert.

Meryem was younger than Jakub, but even so, already ballet had begun taking its toll on her body. Ballet was created by trading pain for beauty, she used to say. Eventually, beauty vanished and left only the pain.

Like Jakub, Meryem was an immigrant. Her grandparents had been born in Baghdad where they lived through the farhud instead of the shoah. They stayed in Iraq despite the pogroms until the founding of Israel made it too dangerous to remain. They abandoned their family home and fled to the U.S.S.R.

When Meryem was small, the Soviet government identified her talent for dance and took her into training. Ballet became her new family. It was her blood and bone, her sacred and her profane.

Her older brother sometimes sent letters, but with the accretion of time and distance, Meryem came to think of her family as if they were not so much people as they were the words spelled out in Yusuf’s spidery handwriting.

Communism fell, and Meryem’s family was given the opportunity to reclaim her, but even a few years away is so much of a child’s lifetime. She begged them not to force her to return. They no longer felt like her home. More, ballet had become the gravitational center of her life, and while she still resented it—how it had taken her unwillingly, how it bruised her feet and sometimes made them bleed—she also could not bear to leave its orbit. When Yusuf’s letters stopped coming some time later, she hardly noticed.

She danced well. She was a lyrical ballerina, performing her roles with tender, affecting beauty that could make audiences weep or smile. She rapidly moved from corps to soloist to principal. The troupe traveled overseas to perform Stravinsky’s Firebird, and when they reached the United States, Meryem decided to emigrate, which she accomplished with a combination of bribes and behind-the-scenes dealings.

Jakub and Meryem recognized themselves in each other’s stories. Like his grandparents, they were drawn together by their similarities. Unlike them, they built a refuge together instead of a battlefield.

After Meryem died, Jakub began dreaming that that the numbers were inscribed into the skins of people who’d never been near the camps. His skin. His daughter’s. His wife’s. They were all marked, as Cain was marked, as the Christians believed the devil would mark his followers at the end of time. Marked for diaspora, to blow away from each other and disappear.

“Is the doll awake?” Mara asked one morning.

Jakub looked up from his breakfast to see her leaning against the doorway that led into the kitchen. She wore a large T-shirt from Yellowstone that came to her knees, covering a pair of blue jeans that had not been baggy when he’d bought them for her. Her skin was wan and her eyes shadowed and sunken. Traces of inflammation from the drugs lingered, painfully red, on her face and hands. The orange knit cap pulled over her ears was incongruously bright.

Jakub could not remember the last time she’d worn something other than pajamas.

“She is down in the workshop,” Jakub said.

“She’s awake, though?”

“She is awake.”

“Bring her up.”

Jakub set his spoon beside his leftover bowl of chlodnik. Mara’s mouth was turned down at the corners, hard and resolute. She lifted her chin at a defiant angle.

“She has a bed in the workshop,” Jakub said. “There are still tests I must run. It’s best she stay close to the machines.”

Mara shook her head. It was clear from her face that she was no more taken in by his lie than the new child had been. “It’s not fair to keep someone stuck down there.”

Jakub began to protest that the workshop was not such a bad place, but then he caught the flintiness in Mara’s eyes and realized that she was not asking out of worry. She had dressed as best she could and come to confront him because she wanted her first encounter with the new child to be on her terms. There was much he could not give her, but he could give her that.

“I will bring her for dinner,” he said. “Tomorrow, for Shabbat.”

Mara nodded. She began the arduous process of departing the kitchen, but then stopped and turned back. “Abba,” she said hesitantly. “If ima hated the ballet, why did you build her a studio?”

“She asked for one,” Jakub said.

Mara waited.

At last, he continued, “Ballet was part of her. She could not simply stop.”

Mara nodded once more. This time, she departed.

Jakub finished his chlodnik and spent the rest of the day cooking. He meted out ingredients for familiar dishes. A pinch, a dash, a dab. Chopping, grating, boiling, sampling. Salt and sweet, bitter and savory.

As he went downstairs to fetch Ruth, he found himself considering how strange it must be for her to remember these rooms and yet never to have entered them. Jakub and Meryem had drawn the plans for the house together. She’d told him that she was content to leave a world of beauty that was made by pain, in exchange for a plain world made by joy.

He’d said he could give her that.

They painted the outside walls yellow to remind them of the sun during the winter, and painted blue inside to remind them of the sky. By the time they had finished, Mara was waiting inside Meryem’s womb. The three of them had lived in the house for seven years before Meryem died.

These past few weeks had been precious. Precious because he had, in some ways, finally begun to recover the daughter that he had lost on the day her leg shattered—Ruth, once again curious and strong and insightful, like the Mara he had always known. But precious, too, because these were his last days with the daughter he’d made with Meryem.

Precious days, but hardly bearable, even as he also could not bear that they would pass. Precious, but more salt and bitter than savory and sweet.

The next night, when Jakub entered the workshop, he found Ruth on the stool where she’d sat so long when she was empty. Her shoulders slumped; her head hung down. He began to worry that something was wrong, but then he saw that she was only reading the book of poetry that she held in her lap.

“Would you like to come upstairs for dinner?” Jakub asked.

Setting the poems aside, Ruth rose to join him.

Long before Jakub met Meryem—back in those days when he still traveled the country on commissions from the American government—Jakub had become friends with a rabbi from Minneapolis. The two still exchanged letters through the postal mail, rarefied and expensive as it was.

After Jakub sent the news from Doctor Pinsky, the rabbi wrote back, “First your wife and now your daughter . . . es vert mir finster in di oygen. You must not let yourself be devoured by agmes-nefesh. Even in the camps, people kept hope. Yashir koyech, my friend. You must keep hope, too.”

Jakub had not written to the rabbi about the new child. Even if it had not been vital for him to keep the work secret, he would not have written about it. He could not be sure what the rabbi would say. Would he call the new child a golem instead of a girl? Would he declare the work unseemly or unwise?

But truly, Jakub was only following the rabbi’s advice. The new child was his strength and hope. She would prevent him from being devoured by sorrow.

When Jakub and Ruth arrived in the kitchen for Shabbat, Mara had not yet come.

They stood alone together in the empty room. Jakub had mopped the floors and scrubbed the counters and set the table with good dishes. The table was laid with challah, apricot chicken with farfel, and almond and raisin salad. Cholent simmered in a crock pot on the counter, waiting for Shabbat lunch.

Ruth started toward Mara’s chair on the left. Jakub caught her arm, more roughly than he’d meant to. He pulled back, contrite. “No,” he said softly. “Not there.” He gestured to the chair on the right. Resentment crossed the new child’s face, but she went to sit.

It was only as Jakub watched Ruth lower herself into the right-hand chair that he realized his mistake. “No! Wait. Not in Meryem’s chair. Take mine. I’ll switch with you—”

Mara’s crutches clicked down the hallway. It was too late.

She paused in the doorway. She wore the blond wig Jakub had bought for her after the targeted immersion therapy failed. Last year’s green Pesach dress hung off of her shoulders. The cap sleeves neared her elbows.

Jakub moved to help with her crutches. She stayed stoic while he helped her sit, but he could see how much it cost her to accept assistance while she was trying to maintain her dignity in front of the new child. It would be worse because the new child possessed her memories and knew precisely how she felt.

Jakub leaned the crutches against the wall. Ruth looked away, embarrassed.

Mara gave her a corrosive stare. “Don’t pity me.”

Ruth looked back. “What do you want me to do?”

“Turn yourself off,” said Mara. “You’re muktzeh.”

Jakub wasn’t sure he’d ever before heard Mara use the Hebrew word for objects forbidden on the Sabbath. Now, she enunciated it with crisp cruelty.

Ruth remained calm. “One may work on the Sabbath if it saves a life.”

Mara scoffed. “If you call yours a life.”

Jakub wrung his hands. “Please, Mara,” he said. “You asked her to come.”

Mara held her tongue for a lingering moment. Eventually, she nodded formally toward Ruth. “I apologize.”

Ruth returned the nod. She sat quietly, hands folded in her lap. She didn’t take nutrition from food, but Jakub had given her a hollow stomach that she could empty after meals so she would be able to eat socially. He waited to see if she would return Mara’s insults, but she was the old Mara, the one who wasn’t speared with pain and fear, the one who let bullies wind themselves up if that was what they wanted to do.

Jakub looked between the girls. “Good,” he said. “We should have peace for the Sabbath.”

He went to the head of the table. It was late for the blessing, the sun skimming the horizon behind bare, black trees. He lit the candles and waved his hands over the flames to welcome Shabbat. He covered his eyes as he recited the blessing. “Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam . . . ”

Every time he said the words that should have been Meryem’s, he remembered the way she had looked when she said them. Sometimes she peeked out from behind her fingers so that she could watch Mara. They were small, her hands, delicate like bird wings. His were large and blunt.

The girls stared at each other as Jakub said kaddish. After they washed their hands and tore the challah, Jakub served the chicken and the salad. Both children ate almost nothing and said even less.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had three for Shabbat,” Jakub said. “Perhaps we can have a good vikuekh. Mara, I saw you reading my Simic? Ruth has been reading poetry, too. Haven’t you, Ruth?”

Ruth shifted the napkin in her lap. “Yehuda Amichai,” she said. “Even a Fist Was once an Open Palm with Fingers.”

“I love the first poem in that book,” Jakub said. “I was reading it when—”

Mara’s voice broke in, so quietly that he almost didn’t hear. “Ruth?”

Jakub looked to Ruth. The new child stared silently down at her hands. Jakub cleared his throat, but she did not look up.

Jakub answered for her. “Yes?”

Mara’s expression was slack, somewhere between stunned and lifeless. “You named her Ruth.”

“She is here for you. As Ruth was there for Mara.”

Mara began to cry. It was a tiny, pathetic sound. She pushed away her plate and tossed her napkin onto the table. “How could you?”

“Ruth gives hesed to Mara,” Jakub said. “When everyone else left, Ruth stayed by her side. She expected nothing from her loving, from her kindness.”

“Du kannst nicht auf meinem rucken pishen unt mir sagen class es regen ist,” Mara said bitterly.

Jakub had never heard Mara say that before either. The crass proverb sounded wrong in her mouth. “Please, I am telling you the truth,” he said. “I wanted her name to be part of you. To come from your story. The story of Mara.”

“Is that what I am to you?” Mara asked. “Bitterness?”

“No, no. Please, no. We never thought you were bitterness. Mara was the name Meryem chose. Like Maruska, the Russian friend she left behind.” Jakub paused. “Please. I did not mean to hurt you. I thought the story would help you see. I wanted you to understand. The new child will not harm you. She’ll show you hesed.”

Mara flailed for her crutches.

Jakub stood to help. Mara was so weak that she accepted his assistance. Tears flowed down her face. She left the room as quickly as she could, refusing to look at either Jakub or the new child.

Jakub looked between her retreating form and Ruth’s silent one. The new child’s expression was almost as unsure as Jakub’s.

“Did you know?” Jakub asked. “Did you know how she’d feel?”

Ruth turned her head as if turning away from the question. “Talk to her,” she said quietly. “I’ll go back down to the basement.”

Mara sat on her bed, facing the snow. Jakub stood at the threshold. She spoke without turning. “Hesed is a hard thing,” she said. “Hard to take when you can’t give it back.”

Jakub crossed the room, past the chair he’d made her when she was little, with Meryem’s shawl hung over the back; past the hanging marionette dressed as Giselle; past the cube Mara used for her lessons in attic space. He sat beside her on her white quilt and looked at her silhouetted form against the white snow.

She leaned back toward him. Her body was brittle and delicate against his chest. He remembered sitting on that bed with Mara and Meryem, reading stories, playing with toys. Tsuris, tsuris. Life was all so fragile. He was not graceful enough to keep it from breaking.

Mara wept. He held his bas-yekhide in his large, blunt hands.

ACT III: RUTH

Échappé

(Escape)

At first, Ruth couldn’t figure out why she didn’t want to switch herself off. Mara had reconciled herself to Ruth’s existence, but in her gut, she still wanted Ruth to be gone. And Ruth was Mara, so she should have felt the same.

But no, her experiences were diverging. Mara wanted the false daughter to vanish. Mara thought Ruth was the false daughter, but Ruth knew she wasn’t false at all. She was Mara. Or had been.

Coming into existence was not so strange. She felt no peculiar doubling, no sensation that her hands weren’t hers, no impression that she had been pulled out of time and was supposed to be sleeping upstairs with her face turned toward the window.

She felt more secure in the new body than she had in Mara’s. This body was healthy, even round in places. Her balance was steady; her fingernails were pink and intact.

After abba left her the first night, Ruth found a pane of glass that he’d set aside for one of his projects. She stared at her blurred reflection. The glass showed soft, smooth cheeks. She ran her fingers over them and they confirmed that her skin was downy now instead of sunken. Clear eyes stared back at her.

Over the past few months, Mara had grown used to experiencing a new alienation every time she looked in the mirror. She’d seen a parade of strangers’ faces, each dimmer and hollower than the last.

Her face was her own again.

She spent her first days doing tests. Abba watched her jump and stretch and run on a treadmill. For hours upon hours, he recorded her answers to his questions.

It was tedious for her, but abba was fascinated by her every word and movement. Sometimes he watched as a father. Sometimes he watched as a scientist. At first Ruth chafed under his experimental gaze, but then she remembered that he had treated Mara like that, too. He’d liked to set up simple experiments to compare her progress to child-development manuals. She remembered ima complaining that he’d been even worse when Mara was an infant. Ruth supposed this was the same. She’d been born again.

While he observed her, she observed him. Abba forgot that some experiments could look back.

The abba she saw was a different man than the one she remembered sitting with Mara. He’d become brooding with Mara as she grew sicker. His grief had become a deep anger with G-d. He slammed doors and cabinets, and grimaced with bitter fury when he thought she wasn’t looking. He wanted to break the world.

He still came down into the basement with that fury on his face, but as he talked to Ruth, he began to calm. The muscles in his forehead relaxed. He smiled now and then. He reached out to touch her hand, gently, as if she were a soap bubble that might break if he pressed too hard.

Then he went upstairs, back to that other Mara.

“Don’t go yet,” Ruth would beg. “We’re almost done. It won’t take much longer.”

He’d linger.

She knew he thought she was just bored and wanted attention. But that wasn’t why she asked. She hated the storm that darkened his eyes when he went up to see the dying girl.

After a few minutes, he always said the same thing, resolute and loyal to his still-living child. “I must go, nu?”

He sent Abel down in his place. The dog thumped down and waited for her to greet him at the foot of the stairs. He whuffed hello, breath humid and smelly.

Ruth had been convinced—when she was Mara—that a dog would never show affection for a robot. Maybe Abel only liked Ruth because his sense of smell, like the rest of him, was in decline. Whatever the reason, she was Mara enough for him.

Ruth ran the treadmill while Abel watched, tail wagging. She thought about chasing him across the snowy yard, about breaking sticks off of the bare-branched trees to throw for him. She could do anything. She could run; she could dance; she could swim; she could ride. She could almost forgive abba for treating her like a prototype instead of a daughter, but she couldn’t forgive him for keeping her penned. The real Mara was stuck in the house, but Ruth didn’t have to be. It wasn’t fair to have spent so long static, waiting to die, and then suddenly be free—and still remain as trapped as she’d ever been.

After the disastrous Shabbat, she went back down to the basement and sat on one of abba’s workbenches. Abel came down after her. He leaned against her knees, warm and heavy. She patted his head.

She hadn’t known how Mara was going to react.

She should have known. She would have known if she’d thought about it. But she hadn’t considered the story of Mara and Ruth. All she’d been thinking about was that Ruth wasn’t her name.

Their experiences had branched off. They were like twins who’d shared the womb only to be delivered into a world where each new event was a small alienation, until their individual experiences separated them like a chasm.

One heard a name and wanted her own back. One heard a name and saw herself as bitterness.

One was living. One was dying.

She was still Mara enough to feel the loneliness of it.

The dog’s tongue left a trail of slobber across the back of her hand. He pushed his head against her. He was warm and solid, and she felt tears threatening, and wasn’t sure why. It might have been grief for Mara. Perhaps it was just the unreasonable relief that someone still cared about her. Even though it was miserly to crave attention when Mara was dying, she still felt the gnaw of wondering whether abba would still love her when Mara was gone, or whether she’d become just a machine to him, one more painful reminder.

She jumped off of the table and went to sit in the dark, sheltered place beneath it. There was security in small places—in closets, under beds, beneath the desk in her room. Abel joined her, pushing his side against hers. She curled around him and switched her brain to sleep.

After Shabbat, there was no point in separating Ruth and Mara anymore. Abba told Ruth she could go wherever she wanted. He asked where she wanted to sleep. “We can put a mattress in the parlor,” he said. When she didn’t react, he added, “Or the studio…?”

She knew he didn’t want her in the studio. Mara was mostly too tired to leave her room now, but abba would want to believe that she was still sneaking into the studio to watch ima’s videos.

Ruth wanted freedom, but it didn’t matter where she slept.

“I’ll stay in the basement,” she said.

When she’d had no choice but to stay in the basement, she’d felt like a compressed coil that might spring uncontrollably up the stairs at any moment. Now that she was free to move around, it didn’t seem so urgent. She could take her time a little, choose those moments when going upstairs wouldn’t make things worse, such as when abba and Mara were both asleep, or when abba was sitting with Mara in her room.

Once she’d started exploring, she realized it was better that she was on her own anyway. Moving through the house was dreamlike, a strange blend of familiarity and alienation. These were rooms she knew like her skin, and yet she, as Ruth, had never entered them. The handprint impressed into the clay tablet on the wall wasn’t hers; it was Mara’s. She could remember the texture of the clay as she pushed in her palm, but it hadn’t been her palm. She had never sat at the foot of the plush, red chair in the parlor while ima brushed her hair. The scuff marks on the hardwood in the hallway were from someone else’s shoes.

As she wandered from room to room, she realized that on some unconscious level, when she’d been Mara, she’d believed that moving into a robotic body would clear the haze of memories that hung in the house. She’d imagined a robot would be a mechanical, sterile thing. In reality, ima still haunted the kitchen where she’d cooked, and the studio where she’d danced, and the bathroom where she’d died.

Change wasn’t exorcism.

Ruth remained restless. She wanted more than the house. For the first time in months, she found herself wanting to visit attic space, even though her flock was even worse about handling cancer than adults, who were bad enough. The pity in Collin’s eyes, especially, had made her want to puke so much that she hadn’t even let herself think about him. Mara had closed the door on her best friend early in the process of closing the doors on her entire life.

She knew abba would be skeptical, though, so she wanted to bring it up in a way that seemed casual. She waited for him to come down to the workshop for her daily exam, and tried to broach the subject as if it were an afterthought.

“I think I should go back to the attic,” she ventured. “I’m falling behind. My flock is moving on without me.”

Abba looked up from the screen, frowning. He worried his hands in a way that had become troublingly familiar. “They know Mara is sick.”

“I’ll pretend to be sick,” Ruth said. “I can fake it.”

She’d meant to sound detached, as if her interest in returning to school was purely pragmatic, but she couldn’t keep the anticipation out of her tone.

“I should go back now before it’s been too long,” she said. “I can pretend I’m starting to feel better. We don’t want my recovery to look too sudden.”

“It is not a good idea,” abba said. “It would only add another complication. If you did not pretend correctly? If people noticed? You are still new-made. Another few weeks and you will know better how to control your body.”

“I’m bored,” Ruth said. Making another appeal to his scholarly side, she added, “I miss studying.”

“You can study. You’ve been enjoying the poetry, yes? There is so much for you to read.”

“It’s not the same.” Ruth knew she was on the verge of whining, but she couldn’t make her voice behave.

Abba paused, trepidation playing over his features as he considered his response. “Ruth, I have thought on this . . . I do not think it is good for you to go back to attic space. They will know you. They might see that something is wrong. We will find you another program for home learning.”

Ruth stared. “You want me to leave attic space?” Almost everyone she knew, apart from abba and a few people in town, was from the attic. After a moment’s thought, the implications were suddenly leaden in her mind. “You don’t just want me to stop going for school, do you? You want me to stop seeing them at all.”

Abba’s mouth pursed around words he didn’t want to say.

“Everyone?” asked Ruth. “Collin? Everyone?”

Abba wrung his hands. “I am sorry, Mara. I only want to protect you.”

“Ruth!” Ruth said.

“Ruth,” abba murmured. “Please. I am sorry, Ruthele.”

Ruth swallowed hard, trying to push down sudden desperation. She hadn’t wanted the name. She didn’t want the name. But she didn’t want to be confused for the Mara upstairs either. She wanted him to be there with her, talking to her.

“You can’t keep me stuck here just because she is!” she said, meaning the words to bite. “She’s the one who’s dying. Not me.”

Abba flinched. “You are so angry,” he said quietly. “I thought, now that you were well—You did not used to be so angry.”

“You mean Mara didn’t used to be so angry,” Ruth said. A horrible thought struck her and she felt cold that she hadn’t thought of it before. “How am I going to grow up? Am I going to be stuck like this? Eleven, like she is, forever?”

“No, Ruth, I will build you new bodies,” said abba. “Bodies are easy. It is the mind that is difficult.”

“You just want me to be like her,” Ruth said.

Abba fumbled for words. “I want you to be yourself.”

“Then let me go do things! You can’t hide me here forever.”

“Please, Ruth. A little patience.”

Patience!

Ruth swung off of the stool. The connectors in her wrist and neck tore loose and she threw them to the floor. She ran for the stairs, crashing into one of the diagnostic machines and knocking it over before making it to the bottom step.

Abba said nothing. Behind her, she heard the small noise of effort that he made as he lowered himself to the floor to retrieve the equipment.

It was strange to feel such bright-hot anger again. Like abba, she’d thought that the transfer had restored her even temper. But apparently the anger she’d learned while she was Mara couldn’t just be forgotten.

She spent an hour pacing the parlor, occasionally grabbing books off of a shelf, flipping through them as she walked, and then putting them down in random locations. The brightness of the anger faded, although the sense of injustice remained.

Later, abba came up to see her. He stood with mute pleading, not wanting to reopen the argument but obviously unable to bear continuing to fight.

Even though Ruth hadn’t given in yet, even though she was still burning from the unfairness, she couldn’t look into his sad eyes without feeling thickness in her throat.

He gestured helplessly. “I just want to keep you safe, Ruthele.”

They sat together on the couch without speaking. They were both entrenched in their positions. It seemed to Ruth that they were both trying to figure out how to make things right without giving in, how to keep fighting without wounding.

Abel paced between them, shoving his head into Ruth’s lap, and then into abba’s, back and forth. Ruth patted his head and he lingered with her a moment, gazing up with rheumy but devoted eyes.

Arguing with abba wasn’t going to work. He hadn’t liked her taking risks before she’d gotten sick, but afterward, keeping her safe had become obsession, which was why Ruth was even alive. He was a scientist, though; he liked evidence. She’d just have to show him it was safe.

Ruth didn’t like to lie, but she’d do it. In a tone of grudging acceptance, she said, “You’re right. It’s too risky for me to go back.”

“We will find you new friends,” abba said. “We will be together. That’s what is important.”

Ruth bided her time for a few days. Abba might have been watching her more closely if he hadn’t been distracted with Mara. Instead, when he wasn’t at Mara’s bedside or examining Ruth, he drifted mechanically through the house, registering little.

Ruth had learned a lot about engineering from watching her father. Attic space wasn’t complicated technology. The program came on its own cube which meant it was entirely isolated from the household AI and its notification protocols. It also came with standard parental access points that had been designed to favor ease of use over security—which meant there were lots of back-end entryways.

Abba didn’t believe in restricting access to knowledge so he’d made it even easier by deactivating the nanny settings on Mara’s box as soon as she was old enough to navigate attic space on her own.

Ruth waited until nighttime when Mara was drifting in and out of her fractured, painful sleep, and abba had finally succumbed to exhaustion. Abba had left a light on in the kitchen, but it didn’t reach the hallway to Mara’s room, which fell in stark shadow. Ruth felt her way to Mara’s threshold and put her ear to the door. She could hear the steady, sleeping rhythm of Mara’s breath inside.

She cracked the door. Moonlight spilled from the window over the bed, allowing her to see inside. It was the first time she’d seen the room in her new body. It looked the same as it had. Mara was too sick to fuss over books or possessions, and so the objects sat in their places, ordered but dusty. Apart from the lump that Mara’s body made beneath the quilt, the room looked as if it could have been abandoned for days.

The attic space box sat on a low shelf near the door. It fit in the palm of Ruth’s hand. The fading image on its exterior showed the outline of a house with people inside, rendered in a style that was supposed to look like a child’s drawing. It was the version they put out for five-year-olds. Abba had never replaced it. A waste of money, he said, when he could upgrade it himself.

Ruth looked up at the sound of blankets shifting. One of Mara’s hands slipped free from the quilt. Her fingers dangled over the side of the bed, the knuckles exaggerated on thin bones. Inflamed cuticles surrounded her ragged nails.

Ruth felt a sting of revulsion and chastised herself. Those hands had been hers. She had no right to be repulsed.

The feeling faded to an ache. She wanted to kneel by the bed and take Mara’s hand into her own. She wanted to give Mara the shelter and empathy that abba had built her to give. But she knew how Mara felt about her. Taking Mara’s hand would not be hesed. The only loving kindness she could offer now was to leave.

As Ruth sat in ima’s studio, carefully disassembling the box’s hardware so that she could jury-rig it to interact with the television, it occurred to her that abba would have loved helping her with this project. He loved scavenging old technology. He liked to prove that cleverness could make tools of anything.

The complicated VR equipment that made it possible to immerse in attic space was far too bulky for Ruth to steal from Mara’s room without being caught. She thought she could recreate a sketchy, winnowed down version of the experience using low-technology replacements from the television and other scavenged equipment. Touch, smell, and taste weren’t going to happen, but an old stereo microphone allowed her to transmit on the voice channel. She found a way to instruct the box to send short bursts of visuals to the television, although the limited scope and speed would make it like walking down a hallway illuminated by a strobe light.

She sat cross-legged on the studio floor and logged in. It was the middle of the night, but usually at least someone from the flock was around. She was glad to see it was Collin this time, tweaking an experiment with crystal growth. Before she’d gotten sick, Ruth probably would have been there with him. They liked going in at night when there weren’t many other people around.

She saw a still of Collin’s hand over a delicate formation, and then another of him looking up, startled. “Mara?” he asked. “Is that you?”

His voice cracked when he spoke, sliding from low to high. It hadn’t been doing that before.

“Hi, Collin,” she said.

“Your avatar looks weird.” She could imagine Collin squinting to investigate her image, but the television continued to show his initial look of surprise.

She was using a video skin capture from the last time Mara had logged in, months ago. Without a motion reader, it was probably just standing there, breathing and blinking occasionally, with no expression on its face.

“I’m on a weird connection,” Ruth said.

“Is it because you’re sick?” Collin’s expression of concern flashed onscreen. “Can I see what you really like? It’s okay. I’ve seen videos. I won’t be grossed out or anything. I missed you. I thought—we weren’t sure you were coming back. We were working on a video to say good-bye.”

Ruth shifted uncomfortably. She’d wanted to go the attic so she could get on with living, not to be bogged down in dying. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

The next visual showed a flash of Colin’s hand, blurred with motion as he raised it to his face. “We did some stuff with non-Newtonian fluids,” he said tentatively. “You’d have liked it. We got all gross.”

“Did you throw them around?” she asked.

“Goo fight,” Collin agreed. He hesitated. “Are you coming back? Are you better?”

“Well—” Ruth began.

“Everyone will want to know you’re here. Let me ping them.”

“No. I just want to talk to you.”

A new picture: Collin moving closer to her avatar, his face now crowding the narrow rectangle of her vision.

“I looked up osteosarcoma. They said you had lung nodules. Mara, are you really better? Are you really coming back?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But everyone will want to know.”

Suddenly, Ruth wanted to be anywhere but attic space. Abba was right. She couldn’t go back. Not because someone might find out but because everyone was going to want to know, what about Mara? They were going to want to know about Mara all the time. They were going to want to drag Ruth back into that sick bed, with her world narrowing toward death, when all she wanted was to move on.

And it was even worse now than it would have been half an hour ago, before she’d gone into Mara’s room and seen her raw, tender hand, and thought about what it would be like to grasp it.

“I have to go,” Ruth said.

“At least let me ping Violet,” Collin said.

“I’ll be back,” Ruth answered. “I’ll see you later.”

On the television: Collin’s skeptical face, brows drawn, the shine in his eyes that showed he thought she was lying.

“I promise,” she said, hesitating only a moment before she tore the attic space box out of her jury-rigged web of wires.

Tears were filling her eyes and she couldn’t help the sob. She threw the box. It skittered across the wooden floor until it smacked into the mirror. The thing was so old and knocked about that any hard collision might kill it, but what did that matter now? She wasn’t going back.

She heard a sound from the doorway and looked up. She saw abba, standing behind the cracked door.

Ruth’s anger flashed to a new target. “Why are you spying on me?”

“I came to check on Mara,” abba said.

He didn’t have to finish for his meaning to be clear. He’d heard someone in the studio and hoped it could still be his Marale.

He made a small gesture toward the attic space box. “It did not go well,” he said quietly, statement rather than question.

Ruth turned her head away. He’d been right, about everything he’d said, all the explicit things she’d heard, and all the implicit things she hadn’t wanted to.

She pulled her knees toward her chest. “I can’t go back,” she said.

Abba stroked her hair. “I know.”

The loss of attic space hurt less than she’d thought it would. Mara had sealed off those tender spaces, and those farewells had a final ring. She’d said good-bye to Collin a long time ago.

What bothered her more was the lesson it forced; her life was never going to be the same, and there was no way to deny it. Mara would die and be gone, and Ruth had to learn to be Ruth, whoever Ruth was. That was what had scared Mara about Ruth in the first place.

The restlessness that had driven her into attic space still itched her. She started taking walks in the snow with Abel. Abba didn’t try to stop her.

She stopped reading Jewish poetry and started picking up books on music theory. She practiced sight reading and toe-tapped the beats, imagining choreographies.

Wednesdays, when abba planned the menu for Shabbat, Ruth sat with him as he wrote out the list he would take to Gerry’s on Thursday. As he imagined dishes, he talked about how Mara would like the honey he planned to infuse in the carrots, or the raisins and figs he would cook with the rice. He wondered what they should talk about—poetry, physics, international politics—changing his mind as new topics occurred to him.

Ruth wondered how he kept hoping. As Mara, she’d always known her boundaries before abba realized them. As Ruth, she knew, as clearly as Mara must, that Mara would not eat with them.

Perhaps it was cruel not to tell him, but to say it felt even crueler.

On a Thursday while abba was taking the truck to town, Ruth was looking through ima’s collection of sheet music in the parlor when she heard the click of crutches down the hall. She turned to find Mara was behind her, breathing heavily.

“Oh,” said Ruth. She tried to hide the surprise in her voice but failed.

“You didn’t think I could get up on my own.”

Mara’s voice was thin.

“I . . . ” Ruth began before catching the angry look of resolution on Mara’s face. “No. I didn’t.”

“Of course not,” Mara said bitterly. She began another sentence, but was interrupted by a ragged exhalation as she started to collapse against the wall. Ruth rushed to support her. Mara accepted her assistance without acknowledging it, as if it were beneath notice.

“Are you going to throw up?” Ruth asked quietly.

“I’m off the chemo.”

Mara’s weight fell heavily on Ruth’s shoulder. She shifted her balance, determined not to let Mara slip.

“Let me take you back to bed,” Ruth said.

Mara answered, “I wanted to see you again.”

“I’ll take you. We can talk in there.”

Ruth took Mara’s silence as assent. Abandoning the crutches, she supported Mara’s weight as they headed back into the bedroom. In daylight, the room looked too bright, its creams and whites unsullied.

Mara’s heaving eased as Ruth helped her into the bed, but her lungs were still working hard. Ruth waited until her breathing came evenly.

Ruth knelt by the bed, the way abba always had, and then wondered if that was a mistake. Mara might see Ruth as trying to establish power over her. She ducked her gaze for a moment, the way Abel might if he were ashamed, hoping Mara would see she didn’t mean to challenge her.

“What did you want to say to me?” Ruth asked. “It’s okay if you want to yell.”

“Be glad,” Mara said. “That you didn’t have to go this far.”

Mara’s gaze slid down Ruth’s face. It slowly took in her smooth skin and pink cheeks.

Ruth opened her mouth to respond, but Mara continued.

“It’s a black hole. It takes everything in. You can see yourself falling. The universe doesn’t look like it used to. Everything’s blacker. So much blacker. And you know when you’ve hit the moment when you can’t escape. You’ll never do anything but fall.”

Ruth extended her hand toward Mara’s, the way she’d wanted to the other night, but stopped before touching her. She fumbled for something to say.

Flatly, Mara said, “I am glad at least someone will get away.”

With great effort, she turned toward the window.

“Go away now.”

She shouldn’t have, but Ruth stood at the door that night when abba went in to check on Mara. She watched him kneel by the bed and take her hand. Mara barely moved in response, still staring out the window, but her fingers tensed around his, clutching him. Ruth remembered the way abba’s hand had felt when she was sleepless and in pain, a solid anchor in a fading world.

She thought of what abba had said to her when she was still Mara, and made silent promises to the other girl. I will keep you and hold you. I will protect you. I will always have your hand in mine.

In the morning, when Ruth came back upstairs, she peeked through the open door to see abba still there beside Mara, lying down instead of kneeling, his head pillowed on the side of her mattress.

She walked back down the hallway and to the head of the stairs. Drumming on her knees, she called for Abel. He lumbered toward her, the thump of his tail reassuringly familiar. She ruffled his fur and led him into the parlor where she slipped on his leash.

Wind chill took the outside temperature substantially below freezing, but she hesitated before putting on her coat. She ran her hand across the “skin” of her arm. It was robotic skin, not human skin. She’d looked at some of the schematics that abba had left around downstairs and started to wonder about how different she really was from a human. He’d programmed her to feel vulnerable to cold, but was she really?

She put the coat back on its hook and led Abel out the door. Immediately, she started shivering, but she ignored the bite. She wanted to know what she could do.

She trudged across the yard to the big, bony oak. She snapped off a branch, made Abel sit while she unhooked his leash, and threw the branch as far as she could. Abel’s dash left dents in the snow. He came back to her, breath a warm relief on her hand, the branch slippery with slobber.

She threw it again and wondered what she could achieve if abba hadn’t programmed her body to think it was Mara’s. He’d given her all of Mara’s limits. She could run as fast as Mara, but not faster. Calculate as accurately as Mara, but no moreso.

Someday, she and abba would have to talk about that.

She tossed the stick again, and Abel ran, and again, and again, until he was too tired to continue. He watched the branch fly away as he leaned against Mara’s leg for support.

She gave his head a deep scratch. He shivered and he bit at the air near her hand. She realized her cold fingers were hurting him. For her, the cold had ceased to be painful, though she was still shivering now and then.

“Sorry, boy, sorry,” she said. She reattached his leash, and watched how, despite the temperature, her fingers moved without any stiffness at all.

She headed back to the house, Abel making pleased whuffing noises to indicate that he approved of their direction. She stopped on the porch to stamp the snow off of her feet. Abel shook himself, likewise, and Ruth quickly dusted off what he’d missed.

She opened the door and Abel bounded in first, Ruth laughing and trying to keep her footing as he yanked on the leash. He was old and much weaker than he had been, but an excited burst of doggy energy could still make her rock. She stumbled in after him, the house dim after her cold hour outside.

Abba was in the parlor, standing by the window from which he’d have been able to see them play. He must have heard them come in, but he didn’t look toward her until she tentatively called his name.

He turned and looked her over, surveying her bare arms and hands, but he gave no reaction. She could see from his face that it was over.

He wanted to bury her alone. She didn’t argue.

He would plant Mara in the yard, perhaps under the bony tree, but more likely somewhere else in the lonely acreage, unmarked. She didn’t know how he planned to dig in the frozen ground, but he was a man of many contraptions. Mara would always be out there, lost in the snow.

When he came back, he clutched her hand as he had clutched Mara’s. It was her turn to be what abba had been for Mara, the anchor that kept him away from the lip of the black hole, the one steady thing in a dissolving world.

They packed the house without discussing it. Ruth understood what was happening as soon as she saw abba filling the first box with books. Probably she’d known for some time, on the fringe of her consciousness, that they would have to do this. As they wrapped dishes in tissue paper, and sorted through old papers, they shared silent grief at leaving the yellow house that abba had built with Meryem, and that both Mara and Ruth had lived in all their lives.

Abba had enough money that he didn’t need to sell the property. The house would remain owned and abandoned in the coming years.

It was terrible to go, but it also felt like a necessary marker, a border bisecting her life. It was one more way in which she was becoming Ruth.

They stayed in town for one last Shabbat. The process of packing the house had altered their sense of time, making the hours seem foreshortened and stretched at turns.

Thursday passed without their noticing, leaving them to buy their groceries on Friday. Abba wanted to drive into town on his own, but Ruth didn’t want him to be alone yet.

Reluctantly, she agreed to stay in the truck when they got there. Though abba had begun to tell people that she was recovering, it would be best if no one got a chance to look at her up close. They might realize something was wrong. It would be easier wherever they moved next; strangers wouldn’t always be comparing her to a ghost.

Abba was barely out of the truck before Gerry caught sight of them through the window and came barreling out of the door. Abba tried to get in his way. Rapidly, he stumbled out the excuse that he and Ruth had agreed on, that it was good for her to get out of the house, but she was still too tired to see anyone.

“A minute won’t hurt,” said Gerry. He pushed past abba. With a huge grin, he knocked on Ruth’s window.

Hesitantly, she rolled it down. Gerry crossed his arms on the sill, leaning his head into the vehicle. “Look at you!” he exclaimed. “Your daddy said you were getting better, but just look at you!”

Ruth couldn’t help but grin. Abel’s tail began to thump as he pushed himself into the front seat to get a better look at his favorite snack provider.

“I have to say, after you didn’t come the last few weeks . . . ” Gerry wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m just glad to see you, Mara, I really am.”

At the sound of the name, Ruth looked with involuntary shock at abba, who gave a sad little smile that Gerry couldn’t see. He took a step forward. “Please, Gerry. She needs to rest.”

Gerry looked back at him, opened his mouth to argue, and then looked back at Ruth and nodded. “Okay then. But next week, I expect some free cashier work!” He leaned in to kiss her cheek. He smelled of beef and rosemary. “You get yourself back here, Mara. And you keep kicking that cancer in the rear end.”

With a glance back at the truck to check that Mara was okay, abba followed Gerry into the store. Twenty minutes later, he returned with two bags of groceries, which he put in the bed of the truck. As he started the engine, he said, “Gerry is a good man. I will miss him.” He paused. “But it is better to have you, Mara.”

Ruth looked at him with icy surprise, breath caught in her throat.

Her name was her own again. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

The sky was bronzing when they arrived home.

On the stove, cholent simmered, filling the house with its scent. Abba went to check on it before the sun set, and Ruth followed him into the kitchen, preparing to pull out the dishes and the silverware and the table cloth.

He waved her away. “Next time. This week, let me.”

Ruth went into ima’s studio. She’d hadn’t gone inside since the disaster it attic space, and her gaze lingered on the attic box, still lying dead on the floor.

“I’d like to access a DVD of ima’s performances,” she told the AI. “Coppelia, please.”

It whirred.

The audience’s rumblings began and she instructed the AI to fast-forward until Coppelia was onstage. She held her eyes closed and tipped her head down until it was the moment to snap into life, to let her body flow, fluid and graceful, mimicking the dancer on the screen.

She’d thought it would be cathartic to dance the part of the doll, and in a way it was, but once the moment was over, she surprised herself by selecting another disc instead of continuing. She tried to think of a comedy that she wanted to dance, and surprised herself further by realizing that she wanted to dance a tragedy instead. Mara had needed the comedies, but Ruth needed to feel the ache of grace and sorrow; she needed to feel the pull of the black hole even as she defied its gravity and danced, en pointe, on its edge.

When the light turned violet, abba came to the door, and she followed him into the kitchen. Abba lit the candles, and she waited for him to begin the prayers, but instead he stood aside.

It took her a moment to understand what he wanted.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Please, Marale,” he answered.

Slowly, she moved into the space where he should have been standing. The candles burned on the table beneath her. She waved her hands through the heat and thickness of the smoke, and then lifted them to cover her eyes.

She said, “Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu, l’had’lik neir shel Shabbat.”

She breathed deeply, inhaling the scents of honey and figs and smoke.

“Amein.”

She opened her eyes again. Behind her, she heard abba’s breathing, and somewhere in the dark of the house, Abel’s snoring as he napped in preparation for after-dinner begging. The candles filled her vision as if she’d never seen them before. Bright white and gold flames trembled, shining against the black of the outside sky, so fragile they could be extinguished by a breath.

She blew them out, and Sabbath began.

Originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2014.

Okanoggan Falls

Carolyn Ives Gilman

The town of Okanoggan Falls lay in the folded hills of southwestern Wisconsin—dairy country, marbled with deciduous groves and pastureland that looked soft as a sable’s fur. It was an old sawmill town, hidden down in the steep river valley, shaded by elderly trees. Downtown was a double row of brick and ironwork storefronts running parallel to the river. Somehow, the town had steered between the Scylla and Charybdis of the franchise and the boutique. If you wanted to buy a hamburger on Main Street, you had to go to Earl’s Cafe, and for seented soap there was just Meyer’s Drugstore. In the park where the Civil War soldier stood, in front of the old Town Hall infested with pigeons, Mr. Woodward still defiantly raised the United States flag, as if the world on cable news were illusion, and the nation were still reality.

American small towns had changed since the days when Sinclair Lewis savaged them as backwaters of conformist complacency. All of that had moved to the suburbs. The people left in the rural towns had a high kook component. There were more welders-turned-sculptors per capita than elsewhere, more self-employed doll-makers, more wildly painted cars, more people with pronounced opinions, and more tolerance for all the above.

Like most of the Midwest, Okanoggan Falls had been relatively unaffected by the conquest and occupation. Few there had even seen one of the invading Wattesoons, except on television. At first, there had been some stirrings of grassroots defiance, born of wounded national pride; but when the Wattesoons had actually lowered taxes and reduced regulation, the volume of complaints had gone down. People still didn’t love the occupiers, but as long as the Wattesoons minded their own business and left the populace alone, they were tolerated.

All of that changed one Saturday morning when Margie Silengo, who lived in a mobile home on Highway 14, came racing into town with her shockless Chevy bouncing like a rocking horse, telling everyone she met that a Wattesoon army convoy had gone rolling past her house and turned into the old mill grounds north of town as if they meant to stay. Almost simultaneously, the mayor’s home phone rang, and Tom Abernathy found himself standing barefoot in his kitchen, for the first time in his life talking to a Wattesoon captain, who in precise, formal English informed him that Okanoggan Falls was slated for demolition.

Tom’s wife Susan, who hadn’t quite gotten the hang of this “occupation” thing, stopped making peanut butter sandwiches for the boys to say, “They can’t say that! Who do they think they are?”

Tom was a lanky, easygoing fellow, all knobby joints and bony jaw. Mayor wasn’t his full-time job; he ran one of the more successful businesses in town, a wholesale construction-goods supplier. He had become mayor the way most otherwise sensible people end up in charge: out of self-defense. Fed up having to deal with the calcified fossil who had run the town since the 1980s, Tom had stood for office on the same impulse he occasionally swore—and woke to find himself elected in a landslide, 374 to 123.

Now he rubbed the back of his head, as he did whenever perplexed, and said, “I think the Wattesoons can do pretty much anything they want.”

“Then we’ve got to make them stop wanting to mess with us,” Susan said.

That, in a nutshell, was what made Tom and Susan’s marriage work. In seventeen years, whenever he had said something couldn’t be done, she had taken it as a challenge to do it.

But he had never expected her to take on alien invaders.

Town council meetings weren’t formal, and usually a few people straggled in late. This day, everyone was assembled at Town Hall by five P.M., when the Wattesoon officer had said he would address them. By now they knew it was not just Okanoggan Falls; all four towns along a fifty-mile stretch of Highway 14 had their own occupying forces camped outside town, and their own captains addressing them at precisely five o’clock. Like most Wattesoon military actions, it had been flawlessly coordinated.

The captain arrived with little fanfare. Two sand-colored army transports sped down Main Street and pulled up in front of Town Hall. The two occupants of one got out, while three soldiers in the other stood guard to keep the curious at arm’s length. Their weapons remained in their slings. They seemed to be trying to keep the mood low-key.

The two who entered Town Hall looked exactly like Wattesoons on television—squat lumps of rubbly khaki-colored skin, like blobs of clay mixed with gravel. They wore the usual beige army uniforms that hermetically encased them, like shrink-wrap, from neck to heel, but neither officer had on the face mask or gloves the invaders usually employed to deal with humans. An aroma like baking rocks entered the room with them—not unpleasant, just not a smell ordinarily associated with living creatures.

In studied, formal English the larger Wattesoon introduced himself as Captain Groton, and his companion as Ensign Agush. No one offered to shake hands, knowing the famous Wattesoon horror at touching slimy human flesh.

The council sat silent behind the row of desks they used for hearings, while the captain stood facing them where people normally gave testimony, but there was no question about where the power lay. The townspeople had expected gruff, peremptory orders, and so Captain Groton’s reasonable tone came as a pleasant surprise, but there was nothing reassuring about his message.

The Wattesoons wished to strip-mine a fifty-mile swath of the hilly, wooded Okanoggan Valley. “Our operations will render the land uninhabitable,” Captain Groton said. “The army is here to assist in your removal. We will need you to coordinate the arrangements so this move can be achieved expeditiously and peacefully.” There was the ever-so-slight hint of a threat in that last word.

When he finished there was a short silence, as the council absorbed the imminent destruction of everything they had lived for and loved. The image of Okanoggan Valley transformed into a mine pit hovered before every eye: no maple trees, no lilacs, no dogs, no streetlights. Rob Massey, the scrappy newspaper editor, was first to find his voice. “What do you want to mine?” he said sharply. “There are no minerals here.”

“Silica,” the captain answered promptly. “There is a particularly pure bed of it underneath your limestone.”

He meant the white, friable sandstone—useless for building, occasionally used for glass. What they wanted it for was incomprehensible, like so much about them. “Will we be compensated for our property?” Paula Sanders asked, as if any compensation would suffice.

“No,” the captain answered neutrally. “The land is ours.”

Which was infuriating, but unarguable.

“But it’s our home!” Tom blurted out. “We’ve lived here, some of us four, five generations. We’ve built this community. It’s our life. You can’t just walk in and level it.”

The raw anguish in his voice made even Captain Groton, lump of rubble that he was, pause. “But we can,” he answered without malice. “It is not within your power to stop it. All you can do is reconcile yourselves to the inevitable.”

“How much time do we have?” Paula bit off her words as if they tasted bad.

“We realize you will need time to achieve acceptance, so we are prepared to give you two months.”

The room practically exploded with protests and arguments.

At last the captain held up the blunt appendage that served him as a hand. “Very well,” he said. “I am authorized to give you an extension. You may have three months.”

Later, they learned that every captain up and down the valley had given the same extension. It had obviously been planned in advance.

The room smoldered with outrage as the captain turned to leave, his job done. But before he could exit, Susan Abernathy stepped into the doorway, along with the smell of brewing coffee from the hall outside.

“Captain Groton,” she said, “would you like to join us for coffee? It’s a tradition after meetings.”

“Thank you, madam,” he said, “but I must return to base.”

“Susan,” she introduced herself, and, contrary to all etiquette, held out her hand.

The Wattesoon recoiled visibly. But in the next second he seemed to seize control of himself and, by sheer force of will, extended his arm. Susan clasped it warmly, looking down into his pebbly eyes. “Since we are going to be neighbors, at least for the next few months, we might as well be civil,” she said.

“That is very foresighted of you, madam,” he answered.

“Call me Susan,” she said. “Well, since you can’t stay tonight, can I invite you to dinner tomorrow?”

The captain hesitated, and everyone expected another evasion, but at last he said, “That would be very acceptable. Susan.”

“Great. I’ll call you with the details.” As the captain left, followed closely by his ensign, she turned to the council. “Can I bring you some coffee?”

“Ish. What did it feel like?” said her son Nick.

Susan had become something of a celebrity in the eleven-year-old set for having touched an alien.

“Dry,” she said, staring at the laptop on the dining room table. “A little lumpy. Kind of like a lizard.”

In the next room, Tom was on the phone. “Warren, you’re talking crazy,” he said. “We still might be able to get some concessions. We’re working on it. But if you start shooting at them, we’re doomed. I don’t want to hear any more about toad hunts, okay?”

“Have you washed your hand?” Nick wanted to know.

Susan let go of the mouse to reach out and wipe her hand on Nick’s arm. “Eew, gross!” he said. “Now I’ve got toad germs.”

“Don’t call them that,” she said sharply. “It’s not polite. You’re going to have to be very polite tonight.”

“I don’t have to touch him, do I?”

“No, I’m sure touching a grody little boy is the last thing he wants.”

In the next room, Tom had dialed a different number. “Listen, Walt, I think I’m going to need a patrol car in front of my house tonight. If this toad gets shot coming up my walk, my house is going to be a smoking crater tomorrow.”

“Is that true?” Nick asked, wide-eyed.

“No,” Susan lied. “He’s exaggerating.”

“Can I go to Jake’s tonight?”

“No, I need you here,” Susan said, hiding the pang of anxiety it gave her.

“What are we having for dinner?”

“I’m trying to find out what they eat, if you’d just leave me alone.”

“I’m not eating bugs.”

“Neither am I,” Susan said. “Now go away.”

Tom came in and sank into a chair with a sigh. “The whole town is up in arms,” he said. “Literally. Paula wanted to picket our house tonight. I told her to trust you, that you’ve got a plan. Of course, I don’t know what it is.”

“I think my plan is to feed him pizza,” Susan said.

“Pizza?”

“Why not? I can’t find that they have any dietary restrictions, and everyone loves pizza.”

Tom laid his head back and stared glumly at the ceiling. “Sure. Why not? If it kills him, you’ll be a hero. For about half an hour, then you’ll be a martyr.”

“Pizza never killed anyone,” Susan said, and got up to start straightening up the house.

The Abernathys lived in a big old 1918 three-story with a wraparound porch and a witch’s-hat tower, set in a big yard. The living room had sliding wood doors, stained-glass fanlights, and a wood-framed fireplace. It could have been fancy but instead it had a frayed, lived-in look—heaps of books, puppy-chewed Oriental carpet, an upright piano piled with model airplanes. The comfy, well-dented furniture showed the marks of constant comings and goings, school projects, and meetings. There was rarely a night when the Abernathys didn’t have guests, but dinner was never formal. Formality was alien to Susan’s nature.

She had been an RN, but had quit, fed up with the bureaucracy rather than the patients. She had the sturdy physique of a German farm girl, and the competent independence to go with it. Light brown hair, cropped just above her shoulders, framed her round, cheerful face. Only rarely was she seen in anything more fancy than a jean skirt and a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. When they had elected Tom, everyone had known they weren’t getting a major’s wife who would challenge anybody’s fashion sense.

That night, Captain Groton arrived precisely on time, in a car with tinted windows, driven by someone who stayed invisible, waiting. Tom met the guest on the doorstep, looking up and down the street a little nervously. When they came into the living room, Susan emerged from the kitchen with a bouquet of wineglasses in one hand and a bottle in the other.

“Wine, Captain?” she said.

He hesitated. “If that is customary. I regret I am not familiar with your dietary rituals. I only know they are complex.”

“It’s fermented fruit juice, mildly intoxicating,” she said, pouring a little bit in his glass. “People drink it to relax.”

He took the glass gingerly. Susan saw that he had stumpy nubbin fingers. As a nurse, she had had to train herself to feel compassion even for the least appealing patients, and now she was forced to call on that skill to disregard his appearance.

“Cheers,” she said, lifting her glass.

There was a snap as the stem on Captain Groton’s glass broke in two. The wine slopped onto his hand as he tried to catch the pieces. “Pardon me,” he mumbled. “Your vessel is brittle.”

“Never mind the glass,” Susan said, taking it and handing the pieces to Tom. “Did you cut yourself?”

“No, of course—” He stopped in mid-denial, staring at his hand. A thin line of blood bisected the palm.

“Here, I’ll take care of that,” she said. Taking him by the arm, she led him to the bathroom. It was not until she had dabbed the blood off with a tissue that she realized he was not recoiling at her touch as he had before. Inwardly, she smiled at small victories. But when she brought out a bottle of spray disinfectant, he did recoil, demanding suspiciously, “What is it?”

“Disinfectant,” she said. “To prevent infection. It’s alcohol-based.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought it might be water.”

She spritzed his hand lightly, then applied a bandage. He was looking curiously around. “What is this place?”

“It’s a bathroom,” she said. “We use it to—well, clean ourselves, and groom, and so forth. This is the toilet.” She raised the lid, and he drew back, obviously repulsed. She had to laugh. “It’s really very clean. I swear.”

“It has water in it,” he said with disgust.

“But the water’s not dirty, not now.”

“Water is always dirty,” he said. “It teems with bacteria. It transmits a thousand diseases, yet you humans touch it without any caution. You allow your children to play in it. You drink it, even. I suppose you have gotten used to it, living on this world where it soils everything. It even falls from the sky. It is impossible to get away from it. You have no choice but to soak in it.”

Struck by the startling image of water as filth, Susan said, “Occupying our world must be very unpleasant for you. What is your planet like?”

“It is very dry,” he said. “Miles and miles of hot, clean sand, like your Sahara. But your population does not live in the habitable spots, so we cannot either.”

“You must drink water sometimes. Your metabolisms are not that different from ours, or you would not be able to eat our food.”

“The trace amounts in foods are enough for us. We do not excrete it like you do.”

“So that’s why you don’t have bathrooms,” she said.

He paused, clearly puzzled. Then it dawned on him what she had left out of her explanation. “You use this room for excretory functions?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s supposed to be private.”

“But you excrete fluids in public all the time,” he said. “From your noses, your mouths, your skin. How can you keep it private?”

For a moment the vision of humans as oozing bags of bacteria left her unable to answer. Then she said, “That’s why we come here, to clean it all off.”

He looked around. “But there is no facility for cleaning.”

“Sure there is.” She turned on the shower. “See?”

He reacted with horror, so she quickly shut it off. She explained, “You see, we think of water as clean. We bathe in it. How do you bathe?”

“Sand,” he said. “Tubs of dry, heated sand. It is heavenly.”

“It must be.” She could picture it: soft, white sand. Like what lay under the Okanoggan limestone. She looked at him in dawning realization. “Is that why you want—?”

“I cannot say anything about that,” he said. “Please do not ask me.”

Which was all the answer she needed.

When they came back out, Tom and the boys were in the kitchen, so that was where they went.

“Sorry, we got caught up in a really interesting conversation,” Susan said breezily, with an I’ll-tell-you-later look at Tom. “Captain Groton, these are our sons, Ben and Nick.” The boys stood up and nodded awkwardly, obviously coached not to shake hands.

“They are both yours?” the Wattesoon asked.

“Yes,” Tom said. “Do you have any kids, captain?”

“Yes. A daughter.”

“How old is she?” Susan said, pouring some more wine for him in a mug.

Captain Groton paused so long she wondered if she had said something offensive, but finally he shook his head. “I cannot figure it out. The time dilation makes it too difficult. It would mean little to you anyway; our years are so different.”

“So she’s back home on your planet?”

“Yes.”

“Your wife, too?”

“She is dead.”

“I’m so sorry. It must have been hard for you to leave your daughter behind.”

“It was necessary. I was posted here. I followed my duty.”

It had occurred to Susan that perhaps cow-excretion pie was not the thing to offer her guest, so she began rummaging in the cupboard, and soon assembled a buffet of dry foods: roast soybeans, crackers, apple chips, pine nuts, and a sweet potato for moisture. As Tom tried valiantly to engage the captain in a conversation about fishing, she started assembling the pizza for her family. The dog was barking at the back door, so she asked Ben to feed him. Nick started playing with his Gameboy. There was a pleasantly normal confusion all around.

“What sorts of food do you eat at home?” Susan asked her guest when she had a chance.

Groton shrugged. “We are less preoccupied with food than you are. Anything will do. We are omnivores.”

Ben muttered, “Better watch out for our dogs.”

“Ben!” Susan rebuked him.

Captain Groton turned marbly eyes on him. “We have no interest in your food animals.”

The whole family stared in horror. “Our dogs aren’t food!” Ben blurted.

“Then why do you keep them?” the captain asked reasonably.

Tom said, “For companionship.”

Ben said, “For fun.”

Susan said, “Because they remind us that we’re human. Without other species around, we’d forget.”

“Ah. I see,” the Wattesoon said. “We feel the same.”

In the awkward silence that followed, the humans all wondered who were the Wattesoons’ pets.

They were saved by the timer. The pizza came out of the oven, and soon all was cheerful confusion again.

The Internet had told Susan that Wattesoons were frugal eaters, but Captain Groton seemed ravenous. He ate some of everything she put on the table, including two slices of pizza.

To spare their guest the troubling sight of counters, tabletop, and utensils being smeared with water, Susan asked him out to see the backyard so the others could clean up. The screen door banged shut behind them and the dog came trotting up, eager to smell the stranger, till Susan shooed him into the kitchen. She then led the Wattesoon out into the humid, crickety twilight.

It was a Midwestern evening. The yard backed up onto the river bluff, a weathered limestone cliff overgrown with sumac and grapevine. Susan strolled out past the scattered detritus of Frisbees and lawn darts toward the quiet of the lower yard, where nature had started to encroach. There was an old swing hung from a gnarled oak tree, and she sat down in it, making the ropes creak. In the shady quiet, she swung idly to and fro, thinking of other evenings.

She had never realized how desperately she loved this place until she was forced to think of losing it. Looking toward the dark bushes by the cliff, she saw the silent flare of fireflies. “Are you able to find this beautiful?” she said, not trying to hide the longing in her voice.

After a few moments of silence, she looked over to find the captain gazing into the dark, lost in thought. “I am sorry,” he said, recollecting himself. “What did you ask?”

Instead of answering, she said, “I think we each get imprinted on a certain kind of landscape when we’re young. We can enjoy other spots, but only one seems like we’re made from it, down to our bones. This is mine.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Can you understand how it is for us, then? We talk a lot about our investments and our livelihoods, but that’s just to hide the pain. We love this place. We’re bonded to it.”

He didn’t answer at once, so she stopped the swing to look at him.

“I understand,” he said.

“Do you?” she said hopefully.

“It changes nothing. I am sorry.”

Disappointed, she stared at his lumpy face. Now that she was a little more accustomed to him, he did not seem quite so rubbly and squat. He gave an impatient gesture. “Why are your people so fond of being discontent? You relish resisting, protesting, always pushing against the inevitable. It is an immature response, and makes your lives much harder.”

“But, Captain, there are some things that ought to be protested.”

“What things?”

“Folly. Malice. Injustice.”

He cut her off in a pained tone. “These things are part of the nature of the world. There is nothing we can do to prevent them.”

“You would not even try?” she sard.

“Life is not just. Fairness is a fool’s concept. To fight brings only disillusion.”

“Well, we are different. We humans can put up with a thousand evils so long as we think they are fair. We are striving all the time to bring about justice, in ourselves and our society. Yours too, if you would just let us.”

“So your truculence is all an effort to improve us?” the Wattesoon said.

Surprised, Susan laughed. “Why, Captain Groton, no one told me your people had a sense of irony.”

He seemed taken aback by her reaction, as if he regretted having provoked it.

“I was not laughing at you,” she explained hastily. “At least, not in any way you would not wish.”

“You cannot know what I would wish,” he said stiffly.

She said, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” For the time being, here out of all official contexts, he seemed just as difficult and contradictory as any human male. Speculatively, she said, “Your answer just now, about justice. You sounded bitter, as if you spoke from some experience. What was it?”

He stared at her with that unreadable, granitic face. For a few moments she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “It is in the past. There is no point in talking about it. Today is today. I accept that.”

They remained silent for a while, listening to the sounds of life all around. At last Susan said, “Well, the great injustice of our lives is still in the future.”

The thought of it flooded into her. All of this gentle valley would be gone soon, turned into an open wound in the landscape. Tears came to her, half anger and half loss, and she got up to go back inside. When she reached the back porch, she paused to compose herself, wiping the tears from her face. Captain Groton, who had followed her, said in a startled voice, “You are secreting moisture.”

“Yes,” she said. “We do that from time to time, in moments of intense emotion.”

“I wish—” he started, then stopped.

“Yes? What do you wish?”

“Never mind,” he said, and looked away.

That night, lying in bed, she told Tom all she had learned.

“Sand,” he said in disbelief. “The bastards are moving us out so they can have bathtub sand.”

He was not feeling charitable toward the Wattesoons. After their dinner guest had left in his tinted limousine, Tom had gotten a call from the mayor of Walker, the closest Wal-Mart metropolis. The captain in charge of their evacuation was an unbending disciplinarian who had presented the residents with a set of non-negotiable deadlines. The news from Red Bluff was even less encouraging. The captain assigned there was a transparent racist who seemed to think evacuation was too good for the native population. Force seemed to be his preferred alternative.

“Larry wants us to mount a unified resistance,” Tom said. “A kind of ‘Hell no, we won’t go’ thing. Just stay put, refuse to prepare. It seems pretty risky to me.”

Susan lay reflecting. At last she said, “They would think it was an immature response.”

“What, like children disobeying?” he said, irritated.

“I didn’t say I agreed. I said that was what they would think.”

“So what should we do?”

“I don’t know. Behave in a way they associate with adults. Somehow resist without seeming to resist.”

Tom turned his head on the pillow to look at her. “How come you learn all these things? He won’t give me anything but the official line.”

“You’re his counterpart, Tom. He has to be formal with you. I don’t count.”

“Or maybe you count more. Maybe he’s sweet on you.”

“Oh, please!”

“Who would have thought I’d lose my wife to a potato?” Tom mused.

She quelled the urge to hit him with a pillow. “You know, he’s something of a philosopher.”

“Socrates the spud,” he said.

“More like Marcus Aurelius. I don’t think he really wants to be here. There is something in his past, some tragedy he won’t talk about. But it might make him sympathetic to us. We might win him over.”

Tom rose on one elbow to look at her earnestly. “My God, he really did open up to you.”

“I’m just putting two and two together. The problem is, I’m not sure what winning him over would get us. He’s just following orders.”

“Jeez, even one friend among the Wattesoons is progress. I say go for it.”

“Is that an order, Mr. Mayor?”

“My Mata Hari,” he said, with the goofy, lopsided grin she loved.

She rolled closer to put her head on his shoulder. All problems seemed more bearable when he was around.

In the next few weeks, no one saw much of Captain Groton. Information, instructions, and orders still emanated from his office, but the captain himself was unavailable—indisposed, the official line went. When she heard this, Susan called the Wattesoon headquarters, concerned that he had had a reaction to the odd menu she had fed him. To her surprise, the captain took her call.

“Do not concern yourself, Susan,” he said. “There is nothing you can do.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re so in love with stoical acceptance that you could have toxic shock before you’d admit there was anything wrong.”

“There is nothing wrong.”

“I’m a nurse, Captain Groton. If you are sick, you have become my job.”

There was an enigmatic pause on the line. “It is nothing you would recognize,” he said at last. “A Wattesoon complaint.”

Concerned now that he had admitted it, she said, “Is it serious?”

“It is not mortal, if that is what you mean.”

“Can I see you?”

“Your concern is gratifying, but I have no need of assistance.”

And she had to be content with that.

In the end, Tom saw him before she did. It was at a meeting the captain couldn’t avoid, a progress report on preparations for the evacuation. “It must be some sort of arthritis,” Tom answered Susan’s questions vaguely. “He’s hobbling around with a cane. A bit testy, too.”

Not trusting a man to observe what needed to be noticed, Susan called Alice Brody, who had also been at the meeting. She was more than willing to elaborate. “He does seem to be in discomfort,” Alice said. “But that’s not the strange part.”

Aha, Susan thought.

“He’s taller, Susan. By inches. And proportioned differently. Not quite so tubby, if you know what I mean. It looks like he’s lost a lot of weight, but I think it’s just redistributed. His skin is different, too—smoother, a more natural color.”

“What do you think is going on?”

“Damned if I know.”

That was when Susan got the idea to invite Captain Groton to the Fourth of July celebration. Observing the holiday at all had been controversial, under the circumstances—but the city council had reasoned that a day of frivolity would raise everyone’s spirits. The Wattesoons regarded it as a quaint summer festival and completely missed the nationalist connotations, so their only objection was to the potential for disorder from the crowds. When the town agreed to ban alcohol, the occupiers relented.

Okanoggan Falls’s Fourth of July always climaxed with the parade, a homegrown affair for which people prepared at least three hours in advance. There was always a chainsaw drill team, a convertible for the Butter Princess, a Dixieland jazz band on a flatbed truck, and decorated backhoes and front-end loaders in lieu of floats. Deprecating self-mockery was a finely honed sport in Wisconsin.

Tom was going to be obliged to ride in a Model T with a stovepipe hat on, so Susan phoned the Wattesoon commander and asked him to accompany her.

“It will be a real demonstration of old-time Americana,” she said.

He hesitated. “I do not wish to be provocative. Your townsfolk might not welcome my presence.”

“If you were riding in a float, maybe. But mingling with the crowds, enjoying a brat and a lemonade? Some people might even appreciate it. If they don’t, I’ll handle them.”

At last he consented, and they arranged to meet. “Don’t wear a uniform,” was her last instruction.

She had no idea what a dilemma she had caused him till he showed up in front of Meyer’s Drugstore in a ragbag assortment of ill-fitting clothes that looked salvaged from a thrift shop. However, the truly extraordinary thing was that he was able to wear them at all—for when she had last seen him, fitting into human clothes would have been out of the question. Now, when she greeted him, she realized they were the same height, and he actually had a chin.

“You look wonderful,” she blurted out.

“You are exaggerating,” he said in a slightly pained tone.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Better, thank you.”

“But your clothes. Oh dear.”

“Are they inappropriate?” he asked anxiously.

She looked around at all the American summer slobbery—men in baggy T-shirts and sandals, women bursting out of their tank tops. “No,” she said. “You’ll fit right in. It’s just that, for a man in your position . . . ” She grabbed him by the hand and dragged him into the drugstore, making for the magazine rack. She found an issue of GQ and thrust it into his hands. “Study that,” she said. “It will show you what the elite class of men wear.” Perusing several other magazines, she found some examples of a more khakified, Cape Cod look. “This is more informal, but still tasteful. Good for occasions like this, without losing face.”

He was studying the pictures with a grave and studious manner. “Thank you, Susan. This is helpful.” With a pang, she wished Tom would take any of her sartorial advice so to heart.

They were heading for the counter to buy the magazines when he stopped, riveted by the sight of the shelves. “What are these products for?”

“Grooming, personal care,” Susan said. “These are for cleaning teeth. We do it twice a day, to prevent our breath smelling bad and our teeth going yellow. These are for shaving off unwanted hair. Men shave their faces every day, or it grows in.”

“You mean all men have facial hair?” Captain Groton said, a little horrified.

“Yes. The ones who don’t want beards just shave it off.”

“What about these?” he said, gesturing to the deodorants.

“We spread it under our arms every day, to prevent unpleasant odors.”

Faintly he said, “You live at war with your bodies.”

She laughed. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it?” She looked down the aisle at the shampoos, mouthwashes, acne creams, corn removers, soaps, and other products attesting to the ways in which even humans found their own bodies objectionable.

Beth Meyer was manning the counter, so Susan introduced her to Captain Groton. Unable to hide her hostility, Beth nevertheless said, “I hope you learn something about us.”

“Your shop has already been very instructive, Mrs. Meyer,” the captain said courteously. “I never realized the ingenuity people devote to body care. I hope I may return some day.”

“As long as we’re open we won’t turn away a customer,” Beth said.

Outside, things were gearing up for the parade, and it was clear that people were spontaneously going to use it to express their frustration. Some of the spectators were carrying protest signs, and along the sidewalk one local entrepreneur had set up a Spike the Spud concession stand offering people a chance to do sadistic things to baked potatoes for a few dollars. The most popular activity seemed to be blowing up the potatoes with firecrackers, as attested by the exploded potato guts covering the back of the plywood booth. A reporter from an out-of-town TV station was interviewing the proprietor about his thriving business. The word “Wattesoon” never passed anyone’s lips, but no one missed the point.

Including Captain Groton. Susan saw him studying the scene, so she said quietly, “It’s tasteless, but better they should work it out this way than in earnest.”

“That is one interpretation,” he said a little tensely. She reminded herself that it wasn’t her symbolic viscera plastering the booth walls.

His radio chose that moment to come to life. Susan hadn’t even realized he was carrying it, hidden under his untucked shirt. He said, “Excuse me,” and spoke into it in his own language. Susan could not tell what was being said, but the captain’s voice was calm and professional. When he finished, she said, “Do you have soldiers ready to move in?”

He studied her a moment, as if weighing whether to lie, then said, “It would have been foolish of us not to take precautions.”

It occurred to her then that he was their advance reconnaissance man, taking advantage of her friendship to assess the need for force against her neighbors. At first she felt a prickle of outrage; it quickly morphed into relief that he had not sent someone more easily provoked.

“Hey, Captain!” The man at the Spike the Spud stand had noticed them, and, emboldened by the TV camera, had decided to create a photogenic scene. “Care to launch a spud missile?” The people standing around laughed nervously, transfixed to see the Wattesoon’s reaction. Susan was drawing breath to extricate him when he put a restraining hand on her arm.

“I fear you would think me homicidal,” he said in an easygoing tone.

Everyone saw then that he understood the message of sublimated violence, but chose to take it as a joke and not a provocation.

“No homicide involved, just potatoes,” said the boothkeeper. He was a tubby, unshaven man in a sloppy white T-shirt. His joking tone had a slightly aggressive edge. “Come on, I’ll give you a shot for free.”

Captain Groton hesitated as everyone watched intently to see what he would do. At last he gave in. “Very well,” he said, stepping up to the booth, “but I insist on paying. No preferential treatment.”

The boothkeeper, an amateur comedian, made a show of selecting a long, thin potato that looked remarkably like his customer. He then offered a choice of weapons: sledgehammer, ax, firecracker, or other instruments of torture. “Why, the firecracker of course,” the captain said. “It is traditional today, is it not?”

“American as beer.” One segment of the crowd resented that the Wattesoons had interfered with their patriotic right to inebriation.

The boothkeeper handed him the potato and firecracker. “Here, shove it in. Right up its ass.” When the captain complied, the man set the potato in the back of the booth and said, “Say when.”

When the captain gave the word, the man lit the fuse. They waited breathlessly; then the potato exploded, splattering the boothkeeper in the face. The onlookers hooted with laughter. Captain Groton extracted himself with an amiable wave, as if he had planned the outcome all along.

“You were a remarkably good sport about that,” Susan said to him as they walked away.

“I could have obliterated the tuber with my weapon,” he said, “but I thought it would violate the spirit of the occasion.”

“You’re packing a weapon?” Susan stared. Wattesoon weapons were notoriously horrific. He could have blown away the booth and everyone around it.

He looked at her without a shade of humor. “I have to be able to defend myself.”

The parade was about to commence, and Susan was feeling that she was escorting an appallingly dangerous person, so she said, “Let’s find a place to stand, away from the crowd.”

“Over here,” Captain Groton said. He had already scoped out the terrain and located the best spot for surveillance: the raised stoop of an old apartment building, where he could stand with his back to the brick. He climbed the steps a bit stiffly, moving as if unused to knees that bent.

Okanoggan Falls had outdone itself. It was a particularly cheeky parade, full of double-entendre floats like the one carrying a group called the No Go Banjoes playing “Don’t Fence Me In,” or the “I Don’t Wanna Mooove” banner carried by the high school cheerleading squad in their black-and-white Holstein costumes. The captain’s radio kept interrupting, and he spoke in a restrained, commanding voice to whoever was on the other end.

In the end, it all passed without intervention from any soldiers other than the one at Susan’s side. When the crowd began to disperse, she found that she had been clenching her fists in tension, and was glad no one else was aware of the risk they had been running.

“What happens now?” Captain Groton said. He meant it militarily, she knew; all pretense of his purpose being social was gone.

“Everyone will break up now,” she said. “Some will go to the school ballfield for the fund-raiser picnic, but most won’t gather again till the fireworks tonight. That will be about nine-thirty or ten o’clock.”

He nodded. “I will go back to base, then.”

She was battling mixed feelings, but at last said, “Captain—thank you, I think.”

He studied her seriously. “I am just doing my duty.”

That night on the television news, the celebration in Okanoggan Falls was contrasted with the one in Red Bluff, where a lockdown curfew was in place, fireworks were banned, and Wattesoon tanks patrolled the empty streets.

A week later, when Susan phoned Captain Groton, Ensign Agush took the call. “He cannot speak to you,” he said indifferently. “He is dying.”

“What?” Susan said, thinking she had heard wrong.

“He has contracted one of your human diseases.”

“Has anyone called a doctor?”

“No. He will be dead soon. There is no point.”

Half an hour later, Susan was at the Wattesoon headquarters with her nurse’s kit in hand. When the ensign realized he was facing a woman with the determination of a stormtrooper, he did not put up a fight, but showed her to the captain’s quarters. He still seemed unconcerned about his commanding officer’s imminent demise.

Captain Groton slumped in a chair in his spartan but private sitting room. The transformation in his appearance was even more remarkable; he was now tall and slender, even for a human, and his facial features had a distinctly human cast. He might have passed for an ordinary man in dim light.

An exceedingly miserable ordinary man. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face un-shaved (she noted the facial hair with surprise), and his voice was a hoarse croak when he said, “Susan! I was just thinking I should thank you for your kindness before . . . ” He was interrupted by a sneeze.

Still preoccupied with his appearance, she said, “You are turning human, aren’t you?”

“Your microbes evidently think so.” He coughed phlegm. “I have contracted an exceedingly repulsive disease.”

She drew up a chair next to him. “What are your symptoms?”

He shook his head, obviously thinking the subject was not a fit one. “Don’t be concerned. I am resigned to die.”

“I’m asking as a professional.”

Reluctantly, he said, “This body appears to be dissolving. It is leaking fluids from every orifice. There, I told you it was repulsive.”

“Your throat is sore? Your nose is congested? Coughing and sneezing?”

“Yes, yes.”

“My dear captain, what you have is called a cold.”

“No!” he protested. “I am quite warm.”

“That’s probably because you have a fever.” She felt his forehead. “Yes. Well, fortunately, I’ve brought something for that.” She brought out a bottle of aspirin, some antihistamine, decongestant, and cough suppressant. She added a bottle of Vitamin C for good measure.

“You are not alarmed?” he asked hesitantly.

“Not very. In us, the disease normally cures itself in a week or so. Since your immune system has never encountered it before, I’m not sure about you. You have to level with me, Captain. Have you become human in ways besides appearance?”

Vaguely, he said, “How long has it been?”

“How long has what been?”

“Since I first saw you.”

She thought back. “About six weeks.”

“The transformation is far advanced, then. In three weeks I will be indistinguishable from one of you.”

“Internally as well?”

“You would need a laboratory to tell the difference.”

“Then it should be safe to treat you as if you were human. I’ll be careful, though.” She looked around the room for a glass of water. “Where’s your ba—” It was a Wattesoon apartment; of course there was no bathroom. By now, she knew they excreted only hard, odorless pellets. “Where can I get a glass of water?”

“What for?” He looked mildly repulsed.

“For you to drink with these pills.”

“Drink?”

“You mean to tell me you’ve had no fluids?”

“We don’t require them . . . .”

“Oh, dear Lord. You’re probably dehydrated as well. You’re going to have to change some habits, Captain. Sit right there. I need to run to the grocery store.”

At the grocery she stocked up on fruit juices, bottled water, tissues, and, after a moment’s hesitation, toilet paper—though not relishing having to explain that one to him. She also bought soap, a washcloth, mouthwash, shaving gel, a packet of plastic razors, a pail, and a washbasin. Like it or not, he was going to have to learn.

She had dealt with patients in every state of mental derangement, but never had she had to teach one how to be human. When she had gotten him to down the pills and a bottle of orange juice, she explained the purpose of her purchases to him in plain, practical language. She showed him how to blow his nose, and explained how a human bladder and bowel worked, and the necessity of washing with soap and water. When she finished he looked, if anything, more despairing than before.

“It is not common knowledge to us that you are hiding these bodily deficiencies,” he said. “I fear I made a grave error in judgment.”

“You’re a soldier,” she said. “Stop dramatizing, and cope with it.”

For a moment he stared, astonished at her commanding tone. Then she could see him marshaling his courage as if to face dismemberment and death. “You are justified to rebuke me,” he said. “I chose this. I must not complain.”

Soon the antihistamine was making him drowsy, so she coaxed him to return to bed. “You’re best off if you just sleep,” she told him. “Take more of the pills every four hours, and drink another bottle every time you wake. If you feel pressure and need to eliminate liquid, use the pail. Don’t hold it in, it’s very bad for you. Call me in the morning.”

“You’re leaving?” he said anxiously.

She had intended to, but at his disconsolate expression she relented. It made her realize that she could actually read expressions on his face now. She drew up a chair and sat. “I must say, your comrades here don’t seem very sympathetic.”

He was silent a few moments, staring bleakly at the ceiling. At last he said, “They are ashamed.”

“Of what? You?”

“Of what I am becoming.”

“A human? They’re bigots, then.”

“Yes. You have to understand, Susan, the army doesn’t always attract the highest caliber of men.”

She realized then that the drug, or the reprieve from death, had broken down his usual reticence. It put her in an odd position, to have the occupying commander relying on her in his current unguarded condition. Extracting military or political secrets would clearly violate medical ethics. But was personal and cultural information allowed? She made a snap decision: nothing that would hurt him. Cautiously, she said, “I didn’t know that you Wattesoons had this . . . talent . . . ability . . . to change your appearance.”

“It only works with a closely related species,” he said drowsily. “We weren’t sure you were similar enough. It appears you are.”

“How do you do it?”

He paused a long time, then said, “I will tell you some day. The trait has been useful to us, in adapting to other planets. Planets more unlike our own than this one is.”

“Is that why you changed? To be better adapted?”

“No. I felt it was the best way to carry out my orders.”

She waited for him to explain that; when he didn’t, she said, “What orders?”

“To oversee the evacuation on time and with minimal disturbance. I thought that looking like a human would be an advantage in winning the cooperation of the local populace. I wanted you to think of me as human. I did not know of the drawbacks then.”

“Well, I don’t think you would have fooled us anyway,” Susan said a little skeptically. “Can you change your mind now?”

“No. The chameleon process is part of our reproductive biology. We cannot change our minds about that, either.”

The mention of reproduction brought up something she had often wondered about. “Why are there no Wattesoon women here?” she asked.

The subject seemed to evoke some sort of intense emotion for him. In a tight voice, he said, “Our women almost invariably die giving birth. The only ones who survive, as a rule, are childless, and they are rare. If it were not for the frequency of multiple births, we would have difficulty maintaining our population. We see the ease with which you human women give birth, and envy it.”

“It wasn’t always this way,” Susan said. “We used to die much more frequently, as well. But that wasn’t acceptable to us. We improved our medicine until we solved the problem.”

Softly, he said, “It is not acceptable to us, either.”

A realization struck her. “Is that what happened to your wife?”

“Yes.”

She studied his face. “I think you must have loved her.”

“I did. Too much.”

“You can’t blame yourself for her death.”

“Who should I blame?”

“The doctors. The researchers who don’t find a cure. The society that doesn’t put a high enough priority on finding a solution.”

He gave a little laugh. “That is a very human response.”

“Well, we have solved our problem.”

He considered that answer so long she thought he had fallen asleep. But just as she was rising to check, he said, “I think it is better to go through life as a passerby, detached from both the good and the bad. Especially from the good, because it always goes away.”

Gently, Susan said, “Not always.”

He looked at her with clouded eyes. “Always.”

And then he really did fall asleep.

That evening, after the boys had gone up to their rooms, Susan told Tom everything over wine. Some of her medical details made him wince.

“Ouch. The poor bastard. Sounds worse than puberty, all crammed into nine weeks.”

“Tom, you could really help him out,” Susan said. “There are thing you could tell him, man to man, that I can’t—”

“Oh no, I couldn’t,” Tom said. “No way.”

She protested, “But there are things about male anatomy—you expect me to warn him about all that?”

“Better you than me,” Tom said.

“Coward,” she said.

“Damn right. Listen, men just don’t talk about these things. How am I supposed to bring it up? More to the point, why? He got himself into this. It was a military strategy. He even admitted it to you: he wanted to manipulate us to cooperate in our own conquest. I don’t know why you’re acting as if you’re responsible for him.”

Tom was right. She studied the wine in her glass, wondering at her own reaction. She had been empathizing as if Captain Groton were her patient, not her enemy. He had deliberately manipulated her feelings, and it had worked.

Well, she thought, two could play at that game.

It was not to be a summer of days at the beach, or fishing trips, or baseball camp. Everyone was busy packing, sorting, and getting ready to move. Susan marshaled Nick and Ben into the attic and basement to do the easy part, the packing and stacking, but the hardest part of moving was all hers: making the decisions. What to take, what to leave. It was all a referendum on her life, sorting the parts worth saving from the rest. No object was just itself: it was all memories, encapsulated in grimy old toys, birthday cards, garden bulbs, and comforters. All the tiny, pointillist moments that together formed the picture of her life. Somehow, she had to separate her self from the place that had created her, to become a rootless thing.

The summer was punctuated with sad ceremonies like the one when they started disinterring the bodies from the town cemetery, the day when the crane removed the Civil War soldier from the park, and the last church service before they took out the stained-glass windows. After the dead had left, the town paradoxically seemed even more full of ghosts.

The protests did not die down. Red Bluff was in a state of open rebellion; a hidden sniper had picked off three Wattesoon soldiers, and the army was starting house-to-house searches to disarm the populace. In Walker, angry meetings were televised, in which residents shouted and wept.

In Okanoggan Falls, they negotiated. The Wattesoons were now paying to move three of the most significant historic buildings, and the school district would be kept intact after relocation. Captain Groton had even agreed to move the deadline two weeks into September so the farmers could harvest the crops—a concession the captains in Red Bluff and Walker were eventually forced to match, grudgingly.

The captain became a familiar face around town—no longer in a limousine, but driving a rented SUV to supervise contractors, meet with civic groups, or simply to stop for lunch at Earl’s Cafe and chat with the waitress. Outwardly, there was no longer a hint of anything Wattesoon about him, unless it was his awkwardness when asked to tie a knot or catch a baseball. He had turned into a tall, distinguished older man with silver hair, whose manners were as impeccable as his dress. In social settings he was reserved, but occasionally something would catch his whimsy, and then he had a light, tolerant laugh. At the same time, a steely authority lay just under the surface.

The women of Okanoggan began to notice. They began to approach and engage him in conversation—urgently, awkwardly warm on their side, full of self-conscious laughter; and on his side, studiously attentive but maddeningly noncommittal. People began to talk about the fact that he went every week to dine at the Abernathy home, whether Tom was there or not. They noticed when Susan took him to the barber shop, and when they drove together to La Crosse to visit the mall. Her good humor began to irritate the other women in ways it never had before, and their eyes followed her when she passed by.

“She must of kissed that frog good, ‘cause he sure turned into a prince,” said Jewell Hogan at the beauty salon, and the remark was considered so witty it was repeated all over town.

For herself, Susan had found one more reason to love her life in Okanoggan Falls just before losing it. She was playing a game that gave her life an exotic twist, excitement it had lacked. It was her patriotic duty to lie awake each morning, thinking of ways to get closer to a thrillingly attractive, powerful man who clearly enjoyed her company and relied on her in some unusually intimate ways. In the last month before it all fell apart, her life had become nearly perfect.

Between arranging to move his business and the mayoral duties, Tom was often gone on the nights when Captain Groton came over for dinner. Susan was aware of the gossip—a blushing Nick had told her the boys were taunting him about his mother—but she was not about to let small-mindedness stop her. “Just wait till they see how it pays off,” she said to Nick.

It made her think she needed to start making it pay off.

By now, Captain Groton was perforce conversant with the ceremonial foods of the Midwest—string bean casserole, Jell-O salad, brats and beans—and the communal rituals at which they were consumed. So Susan had been entertaining herself by introducing him to more adventurous cuisine. His tastes were far less conservative than Tom’s, and he almost invariably praised her efforts. On one night when Tom was returning late, she ordered a pizza for the boys and prepared shrimp with wild rice, cilantro, artichokes, and sour cream, with just a hint of cayenne pepper and lemon. They ate in the dining room with more wine than usual.

The captain was telling her how the amateur scholar who ran the landfill, in one of the endless efforts to deter the Wattesoons from their plans, had tried to convince him that there was an important archaeological site with buried treasure underneath the town. He had even produced proof in the form of an old French map and a photo of a metallic object with a mysterious engraved design.

Susan laughed, a little giddy from the wine. “You didn’t fall for it, did you?”

Captain Groton looked at her quizzically. “No, I didn’t fall down.”

His English was so good she almost never encountered a phrase he didn’t know. “It’s an expression, to fall for something. It means he was pulling your leg.”

“Pulling my leg. And so I was supposed to fall down?”

“No, no,” she said. “It’s just an idiom. To fall for something is to be deceived. On the other hand, to fall for someone means to become fond of them, to fall in love.”

He considered this thoughtfully. “You use the same expression for being deceived and falling in love?”

It had never struck her before. “I guess we do. Maybe it means that you have to have illusions to fall in love. There is a lot of self-deception involved. But a lot of truth as well.”

She suddenly became aware how seriously he was watching her, as if the topic had been much on his mind. When their eyes met, she felt a moment of spontaneous chemical reaction; then he looked away. “And when you say ‘Okanoggan Falls,’ which do you mean, deception or love?” he asked.

“Oh, love, no question.”

“But if it meant deception, you would not tell me,” he said with a slight smile.

“I am not deceiving you, Captain,” she said softly. And, a little to her own surprise, she was telling the truth.

There was a moment of silence. Then Susan rose from the table, throwing her napkin down. “Let’s go to the backyard,” she said.

He followed her out into the hot summer night. It was late August; the surrounding yards were quiet except for the cicadas buzzing in the trees and the meditative sigh of air conditioners. When they reached the deeper grass under the trees, the captain came to a halt, breathing in the fragrant air.

“The thing I was not expecting about being human is the skin,” he said. “It is so sensitive, so awake.”

“So you like it now, being human?” she asked.

“There are compensations,” he said, watching her steadily.

Her intellect told her she ought to be changing the subject, pressing him on the topic of public concern, but her private concerns were flooding her mind, making it impossible to think. She was slightly drunk, or she never would have said it aloud. “Damn! It’s so unfair. Why does such a perfect man have to be an alien?”

A human man would have taken it as an invitation. Captain Groton hesitated, then with great restraint took her hands chastely in his. “Susan,” he said, “there is something I need to explain, or I would be deceiving you.” He drew a breath to steady himself as she watched, puzzled at his self-consciousness. He went on, “It is not an accident, this shape I have assumed. On my planet, when a woman chooses a man, he becomes what she most wishes him to be. It is the function of the chameleon trait. We would have died out long ago without it.” He gave a slight smile. “I suppose nature realized that men can never be what women really want until they are created by women.”

Susan was struggling to take it in. “Created by . . . ? But who created you?”

“You did,” he said.

“You mean—”

“That first day we met, when you touched me. It is why we avoid human contact. A touch by the right woman is enough to set off the reaction. After that, physiology takes over. Every time you touched me after that, it was biochemical feedback to perfect the process.”

All the misery and shock of an interspecies transformation, and she had done it to him? “Oh my God, you must hate me,” she said.

“No. Not at all.”

Of course not. Her perfect man would never hate her. It would defeat the purpose.

At that thought, she felt like a bird that had flown into a windowpane. “You mean you are everything I want in a man?” she said.

“Evidently.”

“I thought Tom was what I wanted,” she said faintly.

“You already have him,” Captain Groton said. “You don’t need another.”

She studied his face, custom-made for her, like a revelation of her own psyche. It was not a perfect face, not at all movie-star handsome, but worn with the traces of experience and sadness.

“What about your personality?” she asked. “Did I create that, too?”

He shook his head. “That is all mine.”

“But that’s the best part,” she said.

She couldn’t see his face in the dim light, but his voice sounded deeply touched. “Thank you.”

They were acting like teenagers. They were like teenagers, in the power of an unfamiliar hormonal rush, an evolutionary imperative. The instant she realized it, it shocked her. She had never intended to cheat on Tom, not for a nanosecond. And yet, it was as if she already had, in her heart. She had fantasized a lover into being without even realizing it. He was the living proof of her infidelity of mind.

Trying to be adult, she said, “This is very awkward, Captain. What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps—”

Just then, the back porch light came on, and they jumped apart guiltily, as if caught doing what they were both trying to avoid thinking about.

Tom was standing on the back porch, looking out at them. “You’re back!” Susan called brightly, hoping her voice didn’t sound as strained as she felt. She started up the lawn toward the house, leaving Captain Groton to follow. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” Tom said. “I stopped at the Burger King in Walker.”

“Oh, poor dear. I was just about to make coffee. Want some?”

“I am afraid I must be getting back to base,” Captain Groton said.

“Won’t you even stay for coffee?” Susan said.

“No, it is later than I realized.” With a rueful laugh he added, “Now I understand why humans are always late.”

She went with him to the front door, leaving Tom in the kitchen. The captain hesitated on the steps. “Thank you, Susan,” he said, and she knew it wasn’t for dinner.

Softly, she said, “Your women are lucky, Captain.”

Seriously, he said, “No, they’re not.”

“Their lives may be brief, but I’ll bet they’re happy.”

“I hope you are right.” He left, hurrying as if to escape his memories.

When Susan went back into the kitchen, Tom said with studied casualness, “Did you make any headway with him?”

“No,” she said. “He’s very dutiful.” She busied herself pouring coffee. When she handed him his cup, for the first time in their marriage she saw a trace of worry in his eyes. She set the cup down and put her arms around him. “Tom,” she said fiercely, “I love you so much.”

He said nothing, but held her desperately tight.

And yet, that night as she lay awake listening to Tom’s familiar breathing, questions crowded her mind.

There was a hole in her life she had not even known was there. Now that she knew it, she could not ignore the ache. She had settled into a life of compromises, a life of good-enough. And it was no longer good enough.

Yet there was no way for her to have more without hurting Tom. She didn’t love him any less for the revelation that he wasn’t perfect for her; he was human, after all. None of this was his fault.

She looked at the lump of covers that was her husband, and thought of all she owed him for years of loyalty and trust. Somehow, she needed to turn from possibility and desire, and pass on by. She had to reconcile herself to what she had. It was simply her duty.

The day of the move was planned down to the last detail, the way the Wattesoons did everything. Fleets of moving vans, hired from all over the region, would descend on Okanoggan Falls starting at six thirty A.M. After stopping at the Wattesoon base, they would roll into town at eight sharp and fan out to assigned locations. The schedule of times when each household would be moved had been published in the paper, posted in the stores, and hand-delivered to each doorstep. There was a Web site where everyone could find their own move time.

The protesters were organized as well. The word had gone out that everyone was to gather at seven A.M. in the park opposite Town Hall. From there, they would march down Main Street to the spot where the highway ran between the bluff and the river, and block the route the trucks would have to take into town.

When Susan and Tom pulled into the mayor’s reserved parking spot behind Town Hall at six forty-five, it was clear the rally had drawn a crowd. The local police were directing traffic and enforcing parking rules, but not otherwise interfering. Lines of people carrying homemade signs, thermos bottles, and lawn chairs snaked toward the park, as if it were a holiday. Some activists Susan didn’t recognize were trying to get a handheld PA system going.

When Tom and Susan reached the front steps of Town Hall, Walt Nodaway, the police chief, saw them and came up. “We’ve got some professionals from out of town,” he said. “Probably drove in from Madison.”

“You have enough guys?” Tom asked.

“As long as everyone stays peaceable.”

“The officers know not to interfere?”

“Oh, yeah.” They had talked it over at length the night before.

A reporter came up, someone from out of town. “Mayor Abernathy, are you here to support the protesters?” she asked.

Tom said, “Everyone has a right to express their opinions. I support their right whether I agree with them or not.”

“But do you agree with the people resisting the relocation?”

Susan had coached him not to say “No comment,” but she could tell he wanted to right now. “It’s hard on people. They want to defend their homes. I know how they feel.” Susan squeezed his hand to encourage him.

The city council members had begun to arrive, and they gathered on the steps around Tom, exchanging low-toned conversations and watching the crowd mill around. The protest was predictably late getting started; it was seven thirty before the loudspeaker shrieked to life and someone started to lead a chorus of “We Shall Not Be Moved.” People were starting to line up for the two-block march down to the highway when, from the opposite direction, a familiar black SUV came speeding around the police barricades and pulled up in front of Town Hall. A van that had been following it stopped on the edge of the park.

Captain Groton got out, followed by three Wattesoon guards who looked even more lumpish than usual beside their lean commander. All were in sand-colored uniforms. The captain cast an eye over the park, where people had just started to realize that the opposition had arrived, and then he turned to mount the steps. When he came up to Tom he said in a low, commanding voice, “A word with you, Mayor Abernathy. Inside.” He turned to the city council members. “You too.” Then he continued up the steps to the door. The others followed.

A few spectators were able to crowd inside before the Wattesoon guards closed the doors; Susan was one of them. She stood with the other onlookers at the back of the room as Captain Groton turned to the city officials.

They had never seen him really angry before, and it was an unsettling sight. There was a cold intensity about him, a control pulled tight and singing. “I am obliged to hold all of you responsible for the behavior of those people outside,” he said. “They must return to their homes immediately and not interfere with the operation in progress.” He turned to Tom. “I would prefer that the order come from you, Mayor.”

“I can’t give them that order,” Tom said. “For one, I don’t agree with it. For two, they’re not going to obey it, regardless of what I say. I’m not their commander, just their mayor. They elected me, they can unelect me.”

“You have a police force at your disposal.”

“Just Walt and three officers. They can’t act against the whole town. There must be four hundred people out there.”

“Well then, consider this,” Captain Groton said. “I do have a force at my disposal. Two hundred armed soldiers. Ten minutes ago, they started to surround the park outside. They are only waiting for my order to move in and start arresting noncompliants. We have a secure facility ready to receive prisoners. It is your decision, Mayor.”

Somehow, they had not expected such heavy-handed tactics. “There are children out there, and old people,” Tom protested. “You can’t have soldiers rough them up. They’re just expressing their views.”

“They have had three months to express their views. The time for that is over.”

“The time for that is never over,” Tom said.

Their eyes met for a moment, clashing then Captain Groton changed his tone. “I am at my wit’s end,” he said. “You have known from the beginning what we were here for. I have never lied to you, or concealed anything. I have done everything in my power to make you content. I have compromised till my superiors are questioning my judgment. And still you defy me.”

“It’s not you, Captain,” Tom said in a more conciliatory tone. “You’ve been very fair, and we’re grateful. But this is about something bigger. It’s about justice.”

“Justice!” Captain Groton gave a helpless gesture. “It is about fantasy, then. Something that never was, and never will be. Tell me this: Do you call the earthquake unjust, or march against the storm?”

“Earthquakes and storms aren’t responsible for their actions. They don’t have hearts, or consciences.”

“Well, if it would help reconcile you, assume that we don’t, either.”

With a level gaze, Tom said, “I know that’s not true.”

For a moment Captain Groton paused, as if Tom had scored a hit. But then his face hardened. “I have misled you, then,” he said. “We are implacable as a force of nature. Neutral and inevitable. Neither your wishes, nor mine, nor all those people’s out there can have the slightest influence on the outcome.”

Outside, the crowd had gathered around the steps, and now they were chanting, “The people, united, will never be defeated.” For a moment the sound of their voices was the only thing in the room.

In a low tone, Captain Groton said, “Show some leadership, Tom. Warn them to get out of here and save themselves. I can give you ten minutes to persuade them, then I have to give the order. I’m sorry, but it is my duty.”

Tom stared at him, angry at the betrayal, furious to be made into a collaborator. Captain Groton met his gaze levelly, unyielding. Then, for an instant, Tom glanced at Susan. It was very quick, almost involuntary, but everyone in the room saw it. And they knew this was about more than principle.

Tom drew himself up to his full height, his spine visibly stiffening. Ordinarily, he would have consulted with the council; but this time he just turned and walked to the door. As he passed by, Susan fell in at his side. The onlookers made way. Not a soul knew what Tom was going to do.

Outside, the Wattesoon guards keeping the crowd away from the door fell back when Tom came out onto the steps. He held up his hands and the chanting faltered to a stop. “Listen up, everyone,” he started, but his voice didn’t carry. He gestured at the woman with the portable loudspeaker, and she hurried up the steps to give him the microphone.

“Listen up, everyone,” he said again. The crowd had fallen utterly silent, for they saw how grim his face looked. “The Wattesoon soldiers have surrounded us, and in ten minutes they’re going to move in and start arresting people.”

There was a stir of protest and alarm through the crowd. “They’re bluffing,” someone called out.

“No they’re not,” Tom said. “I know this captain pretty well by now. He’s dead serious. Now, if you want to get arrested, roughed up, and put in a Wattesoon jail, fine. But everyone else, please go home. Take your kids and get out of here. I don’t want you to get hurt. You know they can do it.”

On the edges, some people were already starting to leave, but most of the crowd still stood, watching Tom in disappointment, as if they had expected something different from him. “Look, we did our best,” he said. “We talked them into a lot of things I never thought they’d give us. We pushed it as far as we could. But now we’ve reached the point where they’re not going to give any more. It’s our turn to give in now. There’s nothing more we can do. Please, just go home. That’s what I’m going to do.”

He handed the mike back to its owner and started down the steps. Susan took his hand and walked with him. There was a kind of exhalation of purpose, a deflation, around them as the crowd started breaking up. Though one of the protesters from Madison tried to get things going again, the momentum was gone. People didn’t talk much, or even look at each other, as they started to scatter.

Halfway across the park, Susan whispered to Tom, “The car’s the other way.”

“I know,” Tom said. “I’ll come back and get it later.” She figured out his thinking then: the symbolic sight of them walking away toward home was the important thing right now.

Don’t look back, she told herself. It would make her look hesitant, regretful. And yet, she wanted to. When they reached the edge of the park, she couldn’t help it, and glanced over her shoulder. The green space was almost empty, except for a little knot of diehards marching toward the highway to block the trucks. On the steps of Town Hall, Captain Groton was standing alone. But he wasn’t surveying the scene or the remaining protesters. He was looking after her. At the sight, Susan’s thoughts fled before a breathtaking rush of regret, and she nearly stumbled.

“What is it?” Tom said.

“Nothing,” she answered. “It’s okay.”

By evening of the second day, it was all over in Okanoggan Falls.

In Red Bluff, there had been an insurrection; the Wattesoon army was still fighting a pitched house-to-house battle with resisters. In Walker, the soldiers had herded unruly inhabitants into overcrowded pens, and there had finally been a riot; the casualty reports were still growing. Only in Okanoggan Falls had things gone smoothly and peacefully.

The moving van had just pulled away from the Abernathy home with Tom and Nick following in the pickup, and Susan was making one last trip through the house to spot left-behind items, when her cell phone rang. Assuming it was Tom, she didn’t look at the number before answering.

“Susan.”

She had not expected to hear his voice again. All the decisions had been made, the story was over. The Wattesoons had won. Okanoggan had fallen to its enemies.

“Can you spare five minutes to meet me?” he said.

She started to say no, but the tug of disappointment made her realize there was still a bond between them. “Not here,” she said.

“Where?”

“On Main Street.”

Ben was in the backyard, taking an emotional leave of the only home he had known. Susan leaned out the back door and called, “I have to run into town for a second. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

Downtown, the streetlights had come on automatically as evening approached, giving a melancholy air to the empty street. The storefronts were empty, with signs saying things like CLOSED FOR GOOD (OR BAD) tacked up in the windows. As Susan parked the car, the only other living things on Main Street were a crow scavenging for garbage, and Captain Groton, now sole commander of a ghost town.

At first they did not speak. Side by side, they walked down the familiar street. Inside Meyer’s Drugstore, the rack where Susan had bought him a magazine was empty. They came to the spot where they had watched the Fourth of July parade, and Captain Groton reached out to touch the warm brick.

“I will never forget the people,” he said. “Perhaps I was deceiving myself, but in the end I began to feel at ease among them. As if, given enough time, I might be happy here.”

“It didn’t stop you from destroying it,” Susan said.

“No. I am used to destroying things I love.”

If there had been self-pity in his voice she would have gotten angry, but it was simply a statement.

“Where will you go next?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I need to clear up some disputes related to this assignment.”

Behind them a car door slammed, and Captain Groton cast a tense look over his shoulder. Following his gaze, Susan saw that a Wattesoon in a black uniform had emerged from a parked military vehicle and stood beside it, arms crossed, staring at them.

“Your chauffeur is impatient.”

“He is not my chauffeur. He is my guard. I have been placed under arrest.”

Susan was thunderstruck. “What for?”

He gave a dismissive gesture. “My superiors were dissatisfied with my strategy for completing my assignment.”

Somehow, she guessed it was not the use of force he meant. “You mean . . . ” She gestured at his human body.

“Yes. They felt they needed to take a stand, and refer the matter to a court-martial.”

Susan realized that this was what he had wanted to tell her. “But you succeeded!” she said.

He gave an ironic smile. “You might argue that. But a larger principle is at stake. They feel we cannot risk becoming those we conquer. It has happened over and over in our history.”

“It happens to us, too, in our way,” Susan said. “I think your officers are fighting a universal law of conquest.”

“Nevertheless, they look ahead and imagine Wattesoon children playing in the schoolyards of towns like this, indistinguishable from the humans.”

Susan could picture it, too. “And would that be bad?”

“Not to me,” he said.

“Or to me.”

The guard had finally lost his patience and started toward them. Susan took the captain’s hand tight in hers. “I’m so sorry you will be punished for violating this taboo.”

“I knew I was risking it all along,” he said, gripping her hand hard. “But still . . . ” His voice held a remarkable mix of Wattesoon resolution and human indignation. “It is unjust.”

It was then she knew that, despite appearances, she had won.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2006.

Protection

Maureen F. McHugh

When the train gets to the camp I’m scared out of my mind, but I’m trying to act smooth, you know? I was supposed to go to Green River, an all women camp out in Wyoming, but there was some kind of jack-jockey mix-up and I end up going to Protection in Kansas. I’ve never heard of Protection—I’ve heard of Green River, of course. I guess in a way I’m kind of pissed, I was supposed to go to this famous, badass labor camp and instead they send me to this place nobody ever heard of. Like it’s some kind of contest, you know, and people are going to give a damn what camp I end up in. Still thinking outside, and I’m inside. But I don’t know that yet.

I think of myself as one ticklish bitch, let me tell you. I think I’m hard-circuited. I’m not doing anything the whole way out from Wichita to Protection except I’ve got a seat on the train by the window and I’m just sitting there. Nobody will climb on me, even though a lot of people are sitting in the aisle and stepping on each other. That’s because I managed to shove a pen down the side seam of one of the three pairs of pants I’m wearing and everybody knows if they come near me I’m like as not to shove it in them, so nobody bothers me.

But there’s nothing to see outside the train window except all this dead, brown grass. Kansas must be a hell of a place. The train trip is about five hours, because we don’t go very fast, and the whole time there’s nothing outside but dried grass and once in awhile we go over a place that used to be a road before the Corridor dried up, back when it used to rain out west and there were farms. People keep stepping on each other because they’ve got to go to the bathroom, but I figure I can wait pretty long because I know the moment I get up someone is going to have my seat.

We all look real wonderful. They let us keep our clothes, which kind of surprised me, I thought they’d make us wear gray coveralls or something, but all they did was shave the back of our heads and put these implants in. I don’t know what they’re for. Maybe they can always tell where we are—hell, maybe they can tell what we’re thinking. Anybody who’d had their metabolism stabilized was destabilized, too. I guess nobody worries about being overweight in a labor camp. The back of my head itches, and I’ve been wearing these clothes for two weeks. I’m wearing like three of everything, it looks really stupid and it’s hot. I worried about that, you know, you want to look smooth, but when they told us that we could only keep what we had on I thought it might take me awhile to get out. I mean, I’ll probably bust out before winter, you know? But just in case. And since I don’t know what the hell I’ll be doing when I get out, I think I better have extra clothes. It’s not like the officials don’t know I intend to be out, they probably assume everybody wants to get out, and when I do they’re not going to let me just buy an Amtrak ticket home, I could spend a lot of time getting back to Cleveland. I may have to walk part of the way, and that could take a hell of a long time, so I could be really glad I kept this stuff.

So we get to Protection. It’s nothing, not even fence, just this concrete platform as long as the train and a dirt road and dead grass. The train stops and we sit. I figure it’s got to be Protection, what else would be out here? Where else would a convict train go?

After we sit for awhile, maybe twenty minutes in the train with the blowers off, sweating, and far off I see this plume of brown smoke. Except it’s not smoke, it’s dust, and it’s coming off the road. Buses, bunches of them. A whole long elephant trail of dark green buses, humping up and down these kind of rolling hills. Until now I never knew what they meant by rolling hills, but they’re like ripples, all covered with dust-colored dead grass. They stop on the road, the first one is almost nose up against the platform. It’s a gas bus, with a big methane gas bag on top, half inflated, kind of sagging in a cage. I never saw one before, we don’t have them in Cleveland. Guards in army colored coveralls get off the buses, lots of heavy arsenal swinging around. Deal guns, which isn’t what I expected, I thought they’d have projectile weapons, but what do I know? Maybe disruptive guns are less messy, that’s why city cops use them. But out here in a labor camp, who cares if they bloody up the landscape?

They fiddle around for a moment, crack the door on our car and three of them charge in screaming at us not to move and swinging those deal guns. Hey, I’m not going anywhere, not until I find out what’s going on. “You’re going to go out on the platform, in two lines! You assholes understand me?” this woman is screaming at us. “I been working out here in this goddamn place for five years, maybe if I kill enough of you they’ll think I can’t be trusted and transfer me somewhere, so I’m looking for an excuse! Now move!”

So we start streaming off our train car, all up and down the platform the other train cars are doing the same. When I get to the door, a guard signals I should get in the left line so I do. There doesn’t seem to be any difference between the left and right line. So there we all are, all lined up, and it’s hot and I gotta go to the bathroom.

They make us stand there in the sun while they prowl up and down the platform. Yeah, I’m getting scared. I know what’s going on, I know what I’d do in a situation like this. If I had a bunch of scum to take care of, first thing I’d do is show them what a badass I was. So we stand and I wonder what they’re going to do to us.

Finally the woman who was head screamer stops in front of our two lines. I think of her as “Helga.” “You,” she points that deal gun at a guy in the right line. Tall, skinny-looking guy, the kind who didn’t get a seat. He doesn’t have any expression on his face at all, almost like he expected this. “GET UP HERE!” she screams. He shambles forward. He’s got his ankles shackled, they only do that for psychos and politics; they wouldn’t pull a psycho out of the line unless they were going to roast him, besides, he just doesn’t act psycho, so I figure he’s politics. They probably don’t mind roasting a politics, either.

“TURN AROUND,” she screams. He does what he’s told so he’s standing with his back to us. “You shitheads like his haircut? Well, let me tell you, the perimeter of the camp is wired.” All up and down the platform every car is getting the same thing screamed at them. I look back at the guy, his hair is kind of long so it covers part of the shaved place. “I’m going to show you what happens if you cross the perimeter.”

She puts her hand in his back and shoves him off the platform and he falls off, hands out, flat into the dust around the concrete. “WALK!” she screams at him. I’m leaving out a lot of what she called us, just because it was pretty much the same thing over and over. Anyway, he struggles to his feet and looks up at her.

“Why should I walk if you’re going to kill me anyway?” he says in this normal, reasonable way. You can tell he’s scared, but his voice is just as nice and adult.

I like people who give the world lip.

“WALK!” she screams at him and shoves her deal gun in his face, so he kind of stumbles back, then suddenly his whole body goes stiff. Like a board. All the muscles in his neck stand out and his hands make claws and he falls over like a frigging tree, straight. Then he goes all loose.

I look up and down the platform, except for one guy who they’re having to push, all up and down are these people lying in the brown grass. Two guards hop down and I catch my breath expecting them to keel over, too, but they just pick up the guy by his arms and legs and sling him on the bus.

“Cross it often enough and you’ll fry your frigging brains to scrambled eggs,” the woman says with satisfaction. “That is, if any of you assholes have brains.”

We don’t get on the bus until Helga has told us the rules, which takes forever. When we get on our bus nobody wants to sit next to Political but he’s sitting near the front so I do. Buses make me sick, the closer I am to the front the better off I am. He’s still out, head against the window, and I have to move him to sit down. He has nice clothes, real ragged but good stuff, Chinese or something. He’s wearing a sweater and pants and under the dust they’re both this kind of maroon color, with little flecks of gray in them. They’ve taken the shackles off and thrown them back on the train. He’s got real long fingers. Something about him I like, maybe it’s the way he turned around and talked to Helga. I could understand if he got mad or freaked, but he was just real reasonable.

Everybody is looking at me because I sat down next to Political, everybody knows he’s already marked for trouble. I figure if I don’t care it marks me as a real hard-circuit and then nobody will bother me.

Besides, something about him really attracts me, so I figure he’s mine.

He doesn’t really come to in the time it takes us to get to the camp, so I have to sling his arm over my shoulders and half-carry him out of the bus. I’m not that big a girl. He’s skinny, but 180, maybe 190 centimeters and weighs more than I do. He’s not completely out, and I keep talking to him. His eyes are barely open. “Come on,” I say, “steps, get your feet under you, you son of a bitch or they’ll take it out on my kidneys.” I just keep pressing on him, get him down the steps and into the barracks. The barracks are new, concrete block and the beds are just like metal bookshelves. I sling him into a bottom bunk and take a middle one. I watch everybody else mill around before settling in.

Scared, man I’m scared. I sure as hell didn’t want a mixed camp, in a woman’s camp it’s not like I’ll be out-massed by over half the inmates. On the bus it was about two guys to every woman. Men are bigger, the only hope I have is to get a reputation as crazy, or else to come up with something everybody needs. Worrying about Politics gives me something to do other than worry about myself. The only time I leave is to go to the bucket. I never pissed in a metal bucket before, it’s an experience, not to mention that it’s loud. They turn the lights out before I get back to my bunk, which is also exciting.

I don’t sleep that night. I want to be in a real bed. I want to brush my teeth. I know that’s a bad way to think, ‘cause when I did two years of juvenile reform, I learned, you don’t think about what you miss—and it isn’t really as good as you remember it anyway. Hell, most of the time I sleep on someone’s couch, or floor. But it’s different.

It’s still dark when the lights come back on. Helga told us we have half an hour in the morning, then roll call, then breakfast. I don’t know what the hell the half an hour is for, most everybody spends it sleeping. I hop down out of my bunk—Goddamn Marx and Lenin, every bone in my body aches from sleeping on a metal bookshelf—and check Politics. Most of the night he was just sprawled the way he landed, one leg half off, but now he’s curled up like he’s cold. He moved, I figure that’s a good sign.

“Hey,” I shake him gently. “Come on, wake up.” For the first time it occurs to me that maybe he’s brain-damaged. Helga made it sound as if you had to do it a couple of times, but how do I know? I don’t want him to be brain-damaged. I need him. “Come on,” I say, “look at me. Politics, look at me.”

He groans and opens his eyes.

“Come on,” I say, “sit up.”

He sits up and grabs his head with those long fingers. Spider fingers.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Paul,” he says. Well, at least he understands.

“I’m Janee,” I say, “and we’re going to stick together, okay Paul?” If he’s brain-damaged I’ll ditch him later.

He looks at me; his head is really killing him, but the way he looks at me, kind of judging, figuring, and I think, well, if he’s brain-damaged he must have been a genius before. “Janee,” he says, hoarse sounding. “Okay, Janee.”

I prowl up and down the barracks. Out in the yard is an old-fashioned water spigot. I don’t have anything to get water in, not even a juice bulb, but I open the door—it’s dark and clear, the stars are still bright except off to the east—and check. The perimeter is brightly lit but our door isn’t locked and I don’t see anyone walking a beat. I sneak out to the spigot.

It’s got weeds right around the base, then the rest of the ground is dry and cracked. It’s real hard to turn on, and the water comes out in a trickle. I soak the outermost shirt I’m wearing, rinse it out real good, then bring it back in. I crawl into Paul’s bunk and hand him the shirt.

“It’s wet,” he says, sounding surprised.

“There’s a spigot outside.”

He wipes his face and holds it against his forehead. “Thanks, Janee,” he says.

“I told you, we stick together.”

“You don’t want to stick with me,” he says. “I’m Political.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say. “I’ll let you know when it’s a problem.”

The guy in the bottom bunk across from Paul’s is watching us. I look right at him, then give him a long, slow, skitzy smile. He looks away first. Little victories.

The camp is hell. That’s all there is to it. And Protection isn’t as bad as Green River, or so they say. I can’t see how that could be true. All the time I’m hungry, and either too hot or too cold. My bones hurt from sleeping on a shelf. I figure out the reason why the lights go on half-an-hour early, so we can lie there hungry and dread the day. We get up every morning and wait half-an-hour to go out to roll call. Roll call takes twenty minutes if there’s no lecture, and then we get twenty minutes for breakfast. The first day we are all given a cup, a bowl, and a spoon. We march in lines to the mess, which is just a roof, no walls. For breakfast we get something that’s mostly water and a steamed roll. And coffee, if you can call it that. When they pour the soup stuff into my bowl I think it’s some kind of yeast soup, it’s just brown watery slop. It doesn’t have much taste. In the bottom are a couple of tablespoons of barley or something. The coffee is clear, like tea.

I look at it, ten years of this if I don’t figure out how to cross that perimeter. This is day one. I have 3,650 days, plus a couple of leap days.

Paul gets his and goes to a pole holding up the roof and squats down sliding against it. He hasn’t bothered to get coffee, I can’t understand it, I’m so dry I could drink a gallon and I got water in the morning at the spigot. He hands me his bowl.

“What,” I say.

“I can’t eat it,” he says.

“You got to,” I say.

“I’ll get sick,” he says. Then with this kind of sickly smile, “I like mine with milk and sugar anyway.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“Oatmeal,” he says.

Oatmeal? I sniff at it. It does smell sort of like oatmeal. I take his cup and pour some of the liquid into it. “You’ve got to have something in your stomach.”

“I’ll get sick,” he says.

“So you get sick. Maybe then you’ll feel better.”

“It’s not a hangover,” he says. But while I’m eating our breakfast, he drinks it. I stash the rolls in my bag, I could eat them but I figure he’s going to get hungry eventually.

That first day we go to the “factory” and learn how to stitch quilts on these old black sewing machines with “Singer” on them in gold letters. I guess because of the noise they make, although it doesn’t sound like singing to me. I sit next to Paul. We put the backs on, the blank, not-pretty parts. We’re supposed to finish three an hour. I don’t know jackshit about sewing, I mean, I didn’t sit around doing this a whole lot, you know? So I ruin the first one, big time, and the second one looks like hell, but the third one isn’t too bad. It’s not hard, just, ziiiip, up one side, ziiiip, across the top, ziiiip, ziiiip, side and bottom, a big square.

The first day Paul is so sick he’s lucky to be able to do one an hour. By the third day we’re doing six an hour, but that first day I can do two extra for Paul. The problem is getting them into his basket without getting caught. He doesn’t say anything about my doing them. His basket is always the first one they check.

I think I’m pretty fast at making quilts. It never hurts to be good at something. But that day and the next day, I don’t push, there’s no reason to work any harder than I have to.

By the third day Paul’s doing as well as anyone, long spider fingers aren’t shaking anymore.

We work until two-thirty, then we get a twenty-minute break, then we work until seven. By dinner I’m so empty I echo. We stand in the wind with our plates and cups. Dinner is two rolls each, pale beans with a bit of white pork fat and bitter coffee.

The second day, Paul says we should pick grass and use it in our bunks, but it’s hard to find much in the camp. That’s the problem with politicals, people like that are always thinking, but the stuff never works in the real world.

The third day they let us mix with the people who’ve been here for awhile.

I know we’re in trouble when Paul and I squat down by our pole. I happen to look around and most of the guards are gone, only a string left to protect the mess cooks, who are turning the stinking stuff they use to rinse the kettles onto the ground. “Hey,” I say.

Paul looks up.

The walking dead are headed toward us. All these skinny people in filthy clothes, maybe fifty of them. The first time, I don’t know catshit about the walking dead, I think everybody looks like that after they’ve been here awhile and I feel sick. I’m still planning to get out of here before winter, but the business of crossing the perimeter is a real problem, and besides, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m not going to just walk to St. Louis and hitch a ride on a transport.

“Keep eating,” I whisper to Paul, so we do. When they get to the edge of the mess I notice that the last of the guards and the cook detail are disappearing. I keep eating. The first dead gets to a guy who’s holding his half-empty bowl and without much ado, kicks him in the ribs, and two of them fall on top of the guy, steal his food.

They start moving through and jumping people. They don’t jump everybody, somebody looks big, they just go around them. Man, I’ve got to do something. Some of them have sticks and I think to myself, I got to find out where they get those sticks. The walking dead don’t make much noise. They’re either all nuts or they’re trying to scare people. It’s creepy, watching them come through. I got a feeling that Paul and I are people they’ll press.

I’ve got to do something. We’re going to lose our dinner no matter what we do. I could just put down my bowl and then maybe they wouldn’t touch us, but that’s a bad thing to do. You don’t give in, or you become a pushover. So I’ve got to make myself so much trouble that after this they don’t mess with me.

So I look right into the face of one skinny bastard walking towards me and I smile. Then I start screaming and running, right at him, just screaming as loud as I can, and battering at him with my bowl, beans spattering. It wasn’t exactly what he expected, he’s not ready for some lunatic and I get him down, one hand pressed against his throat and keep hitting him in the face with my bowl.

Then another one of them grabs my arms and tries to pull me off. They’re real skinny, these walking dead, and I’m all pumped up, so he’s having real trouble, even with the one I’m sitting on struggling like mad. Then Paul tries to grab the one pulling on me, and a guy named Carlos starts whacking on the one Paul is pulling on (which is good because Paul is a lousy fighter).

I guess that’s when the guards decide enough is enough and start moving in, swinging the butts of the deal guns. I end up with a split lip and a black eye and the next morning all of us in the fight have to stand for an extra hour and miss breakfast—plus, we’re not supposed to get behind on our quota of quilts even though we missed forty minutes. But I also get a stick one of the walking dead dropped. And I have a good idea people are pretty much going to leave me alone.

My Paul. My Paul. He has long spider fingers and his skin is so thin you can see the copper-green stain of his neural jacks on his wrists. He never asks what I did to end up in a reform through labor camp. “Don’t you want to know?” I ask, curled up against him in our bunk.

“No,” he says, “that’s outside, we’re inside.”

He was a history teacher, a middle school teacher, I think. He’s older than I am, I’m twenty-three and he’s almost thirty. He’s here for twenty years, I’m here for ten. He wouldn’t have a chance if it wasn’t for me, he doesn’t have the first idea how to protect himself and he’s a Political, that makes him a target because the guards don’t care what happens to a Political. Nobody messes with him now, because everybody knows that Janee is crazy. Sometimes if I’m careful I can hook an extra bun and split it with him. I wonder about his life outside. “Did you have a girlfriend?” I ask. “Where did you live? What kind of flat did you have?” He’s from Pennsylvania, I think. “Did you have any brothers and sisters?”

“That’s outside, Janee, it doesn’t matter here.”

He sounds like our political instruction meetings. Our old lives are outside, now, inside, we have a chance to put together new lives.

We have political instruction meetings a couple of times a week, the twelve rules are painted on the wall of the barracks.

#1. We are not strong enough ourselves, we must rely on a power greater than ourselves.

A power greater than ourselves is society, of course. The first time we go there’s this lecture, about how we are all maladjusted, and how we are denying that we are maladjusted. And the first thing we have to do is admit that we are. So we have to go all around the room and stand up and say our first name and what our problem is. Well, Catalano, one of the guards, is standing there, so everybody mostly just stands up and says their name and why they are there.

First couple of guys aren’t much, they stand up and say things like, “My name is Derrick and I am a thief.”

But then it gets to be a contest. Guys stand up and we kind of hold our breath to find out what sort of badass crime they’d committed. If a guy stands up and says he’s a thief or a pimp or that he’s in for assault everybody just sits there. But then this guy gets up, just a normal-looking guy, not very big, and he says, “My name is Vincent, not Vinny, Vincent. And I am a hijacker.”

Everything gets real quiet. Even though the guy is supposed to sit down he sort of smiles and says, “I hijacked a city bus and killed the driver.”

“That’s enough,” Natalie says. She’s a prisoner too, but she’s been here for years, and so she leads our political discussion group. She knows that Vincent is putting the whammy on us, and she makes a little note in this notebook she carries.

Some people stand up and say their crimes real fast and sit down. One woman, she’s in for prostitution, but she’s not a hard case, you can tell. Maybe some smalltown girl who puts out, who got somebody bothered. She stands up and she’s crying and she says in this real little voice, real fast, “MynameisNancyandI’maprostitute,” and sits down.

But Natalie makes her stand back up, and there she is crying, and makes her say it again, slower. Nobody can understand what she’s saying, she’s scared so bad and crying so hard. It’s just mean to make her stand up, a little piece of white meat like that, ‘cause the little girl knows, and she’s right, that these guys are going to be all over her once lights are out.

But I’m thinking about my reputation. I’m only in for larceny and assault, which isn’t going to sound like much. And I’ve got a reputation between me and big trouble.

Paul doesn’t have to stand up and say anything, politicals aren’t allowed to say anything in political instruction for the first two years, which is another weird rule. You’d think they’d need it worse than us.

So I’m thinking, while it gets closer and closer to my turn, and finally I’ve got to stand up. I stand up and stand there a moment, thinking if I really want to go through with this, and just before Natalie says something, because I can see she’s going to, I say, “My name is Janee, and my problem is that I’m stuck in this goddamn camp.” And I sit down.

A lot of guys laugh and a couple of them whistle and I don’t smile or anything. Catalano, the guard, reverses his deal gun and starts coming toward me, so I stand back up and say, “I’m in for larceny and assault.” Which makes it sound like there might be other stuff that they never got on me. And then I sit down and Natalie scribbles in her little book.

The next morning, Vincent and I have to stand at roll call for an extra forty minutes, which was what Natalie was scribbling down. But Paul hooks an extra roll at breakfast, and gives me his and the extra. I’m real proud of him, he’s learning a little, too.

At break he tells me that the political study is based on Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Give me a break,” I say. “Alcoholics Anonymous isn’t about politics.”

“No,” he says, “it’s about changing behavior. They use most of the old rules, maybe change them a little. Rule No. 1, about relying on a power greater than ourselves, that’s straight from AA. Except that traditionally the power greater than ourselves was God, not society.”

“I knew they meant society,” I say, he probably thinks I’m stupid, and I’m not, I know a lot more about staying alive than some goddamn history teacher.

But he isn’t paying any attention at all. “It backfired big time last night,” he says. “You and Vincent.” He grins at me. I thought he might not understand about what I did, he didn’t say anything when we crawled into our bunk the night before, but he does, he thinks it’s all right.

I gotta think about getting out. Paul keeps shaking his head every time I say something about it. “How are you going to get across the perimeter?” he asks.

“I got in,” I say.

“Are you going to wait until there’s a shipment of new prisoners and then just walk past them?” he says. Which is a point. I don’t know if the whole perimeter shuts off when prisoners come in or not.

“I can test it,” I say.

“Fry your brains?” he says.

“Nah,” I say, “shove one of the walking dead across.”

He laughs, but I’m serious. The walking dead don’t care about each other, they don’t care about anything. I can go snag me a walking dead and the others will just look at me.

So I’m waiting. The only problem is that it isn’t like they post an arrival schedule for new prisoners. The first time we get new prisoners, we’re inside sewing quilts. We come out for dinner, and there are new people, so we have to wait because we can’t mix with them. Standing there in the wind, shivering, while these stupid people, looking even stupider with the backs of their heads still new-shaved, are getting their dinner.

But it’s early October, I think, and we’re out for our break and somebody says, “Look.”

There are a couple of the big green buses, rolling up to the perimeter. I start up, look around, can I get to one of the walking dead before the perimeter gets back up? Walking dead don’t wander far from their factory work room. I can’t even imagine one of them working. Most of them are in group six, which is officially the group for incorrigibles. Group six is pretty far from us, we’re group thirty-six.

I don’t see how I can get to one and back, I look back at the perimeter, the first bus slows down and then speeds up and crosses. There are bunches of guards and deal guns at the road, but nothing between us and the perimeter. Maybe I should just try it? Helga made it sound like I’d have to get fried a couple of times before it would hurt me permanently.

But this guy in Group thirty-three makes his decision before me, takes out running for the perimeter, away from the buses and the guards. I look back at the guards, expecting them to start firing. Deal guns aren’t real accurate if you’re too far away, he might still make it.

But they don’t do anything. That tells me right there. I should have known, they’d be guarding if the whole perimeter went down. We all sit and watch the guy, he hits the perimeter, it’s just a bunch of white stakes with a string about ankle high, just to mark it. He leaps the wire and goes down. We can see him spasm in the grass, just beyond the wire.

The guards aren’t in any hurry. After awhile two of them finally walk from the road across the compound to the guy.

It’s time for us to be called back inside to sew more quilts, but the loudspeakers are still quiet, just that hum that means they’re on. I look up at Natalie, who is supposed to be calling us back inside and she’s looking at her feet.

This is a lesson I guess. I figure they’re going to roast the guy.

The guards walk across the perimeter like it wasn’t even there. It’s not for them. They grab the guy by the arms and drop him across the wire, and walk back, leaving him there.

“What are they—” I say. But I know.

“They’re leaving him to fry,” Paul says.

Right. “Can he feel anything?” I ask.

Paul doesn’t say anything for a moment. “No,” he says finally, “probably not.”

We sit out there for a long time, Natalie looking at her feet, some of us watching the guy. Every so often he jerks around for awhile and stops. Finally we go in to work until dinner, and when we come out to get our slop, the poor sucker is gone.

It’s not going to stop me, you know? There’s always a way. Once I get out of Protection, all I got to do is get to Saint Louis, then I can hitch with a transport and be in Cleveland in no time. In Cleveland I know some people who’ll hide me.

People get in, people can get out.

But it dawns on me that it’s getting on to winter and I’m not real sure about my chances of getting to Saint Louis in the winter. Besides, if I winter over in Protection, then the hair on the back of my head will grow out better and I won’t look so much like a goddamn escapee. My clothes’ll get worse, but maybe next spring I can steal the clothes off a newcomer. And during the winter I can watch and plan, so I can figure how to get out of here.

Anyway, if I’m going to be spending the winter here, I’ve got to start playing the game different. Got to work the system a little better, score some points with the guards and the upper orders, you know? When I was in juvenile detention they made a big thing about political instruction, so I try to pay attention.

Thing is, all that stuff about ideology and infrastructure and shit goes right over my head. And Natalie is always asking me things like, “Why are we here in Protection?”

“Cause we screwed up,” I say.

Natalie shakes her head and asks somebody else and they answer with one of those slogan kind of answers about society and bourgeois mal-a-dap-tation. And I look at Paul and roll my eyes. I can’t keep this stuff in my head. I mean, it’s all just words that don’t mean anything. I can’t understand why anyone would ever get in political trouble because none of it ever seems to mean anything. Maybe if I’d finished high school it would be easier.

I can’t figure out what’s so awful about capitalism in the first place. Back when America had capitalism we were rich and powerful. Now we’re not. So isn’t capitalism better?

One night I wait until lights out and I ask Paul.

He laughs. “It’s not that simple, Janee.”

“So why not,” I whisper.

“Because we lost our power while we were still capitalist. You’ve heard about the Second Depression.”

Sort of. “When New York City used to turn off the electricity at night?” I used to watch this show called “Stormtime,” it was real popular, with that cute guy, Sam Basarico. They were always turning the electricity off and people always had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night or die, and Sam Basarico was always waking up doctors and stuff.

“Yeah,” he says.

“So,” I say.

“So what?” he says.

“So what’s wrong with capitalism?”

He sighs. For a minute I wonder if maybe he’s a capitalist. But then he says, “It’s not a fair system.”

“That’s stupid,” I say. Things aren’t fair. Only little kids expect things to be fair.

“I’m tired,” Paul says. “Go to sleep.”

“No,” I say, and start kinda making up to him, scrunching up against him, playing with him. And when he’s starting to get all hot I say, “You want to go to sleep?”

“Jesus, Janee,” he whispers. So we hump a little in the dark. I should be worried about getting pregnant. I wonder what they do if someone gets pregnant? But I haven’t had a period since I got to the camp, which is strange. Maybe the implant.

“Okay,” I say, “now tell me about capitalism and what’s wrong with it.”

“Tomorrow.”

“No,” I say.

And the guy on the rack above us hisses, “You two shut up!”

So we’re quiet for awhile and then I say real close to Paul’s ear—he’s falling asleep and I’m tired, too, but you can’t give up on stuff like this—“Come on, tell me about capitalism.”

“If we talk politics, I’ll get in trouble and you’ll get in trouble,” he says.

“If I don’t figure out how to say the right stuff in political instruction I’m going to get in trouble anyway.”

He kind of laughs. I can feel him shake, even though he doesn’t make any noise. “Okay,” he whispers. “But tomorrow. Go to sleep.”

So he starts by asking me what I know about capitalism.

“People were rich and there was a lot of corruption and a lot of crime,” I say. “And now we have socialism and people are poor and there’s a lot of corruption and a lot of crime.”

He laughs. Anything I say about politics makes him laugh.

“You think I’m not that smart,” I say. “Just because I’m not book smart.”

“You’re not stupid, Janee, you just never had much chance.”

I don’t know how to answer that so I don’t say anything, I mean, is it an insult or what? So he tells me about capitalism, and people making money. And he tells me about people having to pay rent for the places they lived. That sounds pretty screwy. People had to pay for water, too. People could sell anything.

I make him tell me how capitalism caused global warming and he tells me all about how people wouldn’t give up things because if they stop buying capitalism doesn’t work, so the technology and the pollution made the earth heat up and now the whole corridor, Texas and Kansas and Oklahoma and Idaho and all those states that used to have farming don’t have enough rainfall. Protection used to be a farming community. Now it never rains.

Which explains a lot of what was wrong with capitalism. I get the idea that people knew all this bad stuff was going to happen, but they wouldn’t stop buying gasoline-driven cars and stuff, and the government wouldn’t stop them. So now people like me have to suffer for it.

Except none of that helps in political instruction.

“What class are you?” Natalie asks me.

“Proletariat,” I say. I know that one, I remember that from when I was still in high school.

Wrong again. None of us know what class we are. Natalie sighs. We’re “criminal element.” Right, I should have got that.

We have a stove in the barracks, and it’s getting real cold at night. I keep hoping that they’re going to start heating the place a bit. It’s been cold enough that one night water froze. And we may sew quilts all day but we never get to take any of them back to the barracks at night.

“Hey,” I say in political instruction, “one of the big differences between capitalism and socialism is that in capitalist times people had to pay for stuff like where they lived and water and heat and all that, right?”

“Yes,” Natalie says.

“So if we live in Socialism, how come we don’t have heat?”

Natalie scrunches her mouth together in a line, real flat. Paul looks down at his hands. I screwed up again, and I don’t even understand why I’m wrong.

Finally Natalie says, “Girl, I’m telling you, you’ve got an attitude. You should be thinking about working on that.”

All my life people have been telling me about my frigging at-ti-tude. Seems to me, a lot of times, my at-ti-tude has been all that’s been between me and the world making me part of the pavement. Seems to me, here in Protection, my at-ti-tude is about all I’ve got.

I’m cold all the time. Out here in Kansas, the wind blows all the time. It’s sunny, but the sky is real pale blue and real far away. Natalie says that long about January we’ll start getting dust storms.

When the lights come on in the morning, none of us bother to get up. I stay right up against Paul, trying to get a little warm. We got two blankets because they’re two of us, but they’re really not big enough to cover two people, even when I lie right up against him. Still, we get some overlap. So my legs and feet are cold, and his backside is cold, because those are places where there isn’t enough cover, but we’re okay.

We take our blankets to the factory, all wrapped up like Indians. If you do it right, part of the time you are sewing a quilt you can have it in your lap, but if they catch us doing that they chew us out. Nancy gets in trouble because when she’s finished sewing a quilt, instead of putting it in her basket, she keeps it on her lap.

We’ve been doing quilts a couple of months, it’s not real hard. We’re supposed to do twelve an hour, one every five minutes. You got to fold a little, pin a little, then zip, zip, zip, zip, four seams and you go on to the next one. When you run out of thread you have to signal Natalie and she brings you thread. If you don’t do twelve an hour, then you have to stand for detention. So I do fourteen or fifteen the first hour, just in case I have a problem, and then twelve an hour for the rest of the day. Our hands get so cold it’s hard to do them right. If you make a mistake, the bad quilt is called “waste.” I asked if we couldn’t keep a couple of the “wastes” to use ourselves but Natalie said that unscrupulous people would ruin quilts on purpose just so they could have them.

Well, yeah, I would.

Then one morning, Corbin, who with Natalie is one of our Group Leaders, says that we’re going to have a change. Corbin doesn’t have any teeth in front. At first I thought he was real old, but then I found out he’s only thirty-six, but he’s been in labor camps for fourteen years. I guess that and the fact that his mouth is all caved in from having no teeth is what makes him look old.

He says that there is rationing outside, like there usually is in the winter. It’s the first time anyone has mentioned outside in a long time. It seems so far away, outside. I guess there didn’t used to be rationing, before the Second Depression, but I guess if they could farm the corridor there would be a lot more food.

From now on, he says, if we make 120 quilts a day, we get regular rations, if we make more than 180 we get extra rations, and if we make less than 120, we get half rations.

I figure maybe I can make 180 quilts, I mean, I’ve never really tried hard before. I have to make eighteen quilts an hour. The first hour I make nineteen, raggedy-assed things but nineteen and they’re good enough to pass, not waste, you know. Man, I figure I got this thing licked, and I’m tasting extra rations. But the next hour I screw up two and I only end up with fifteen. And the third hour I get up to thirteen and the thirteenth one I screw the thread all to hell, tangled in the bobbin and all, and I got to be real careful or I’ll break the needle. If I break the needle they’ll dock me ten quilts because needles are expensive. I finish the day with 154. Chris, this big guy from Detroit who killed somebody with a top from a trash barrel, he makes 182. His fingers just blur. I’m always afraid that I’m going to end up sewing my own hand if I go that fast.

This other guy, Nesly, he only makes 114. He’s just a klutz, he goes real slow and he messes some up. At dinner, Chris gets two extra buns, and I’m disappointed, I thought he’d get more than that. But Nesly only gets half his beans.

We discuss it at our political meeting. First the title of the lesson, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Then Natalie has a discussion group and we talk about what it means.

Nesly says, kind of desperate, “It doesn’t seem fair, I work as hard as I can.”

Maybe he does, I don’t know. I don’t like Nesly, he’s one of those people who you look at and you know they’re a screw-up. He’s not very big, and he’s got no front, no pride. And he whines all the time.

Natalie says, “Think about it, Nesly. People like Chris work harder, they need more food. Society is like a machine. A person like Chris makes sure that more people have blankets. It’s for the good of society that if there is only so much food, people like Chris get it, because he’s more efficient.”

Some people nod. I can see it, in a way.

Mostly I don’t care, it’s warmer in the bunk, with Paul, and that’s where I want to be. I’m tired all the time, from being cold. It seems like I just go to sleep and the lights snap on.

I close my eyes again, not bothering to get up.

Paul says, “You still want to learn more for political instruction?”

“I dunno,” I say, and then from habit, because he’s doing something I want him to do, “Yeah, I guess.”

But he doesn’t talk about anything that makes sense, he starts by saying, “What’s feudalism?”

“Bad,” I say, thinking about how in half an hour I have to go stand out in the cold for roll call. When we have roll call in the morning, the stars are still out and it’s still dark.

“Why is it bad?”

Hell, I don’t know, I don’t even really know what feudalism is except it has to do with kings and queens.

So that morning he tells me about serfs, who were like slaves, because only a few people owned all the land, and everybody else had to work for them. And because if you didn’t work for someone you would starve, you’d do anything to work for someone. But they could pay you whatever they wanted.

I think I can understand that pretty well. “People like us,” I say, “we’re like serfs, because we’re trapped, and they don’t have to do anything but give us a little food.”

“Right,” he says, pleased with me. Well hallelujah, Janee finally said something right. “The only difference,” he says, “is that a feudal economy is based on land. Since people don’t have much money, mostly land, they can’t really buy and sell a lot. I mean, you can’t carry a hectare of land in your pocket, you know?”

I laugh, because I’m supposed to, but he sounds like a frigging teacher.

“Now a factory is expensive,” he says. “You know how animals and people evolve?”

“Like people started out from apes,” I say.

“Sort of,” he says. “Anyway, first are primitive societies, like the Indians. Then there are feudal societies, which are more organized. And then people get money together and they buy machines and build buildings and you have factories. But to start a factory you have to have a lot of money, you need capital. And that’s why people who run factories are called capitalists.”

Okay. So out on the field for roll call, while I’m freezing my buns off, I’m thinking about factory workers and serfs. And about labor camps. Paul thinks they’re different, because of land and money, but they really aren’t. It seems to me that if society is going to evolve, it should get better for everyone, not just the people at the top, right? I mean, Indians had it a lot better than I do.

“Where did you live in Pennsylvania?” I ask Paul.

He doesn’t answer.

“Did you live in a big city, like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh?”

He doesn’t pay any attention to me.

“Maybe in a little town, like Allentown?” Everybody has heard of Allentown, because it’s a famous battleground of class struggle. That and the little town in Kentucky where the miners went on strike. “Did you have a girlfriend?”

“That was outside,” he finally says.

“Do you want to know if I had a boyfriend?” I ask.

“I’m sure you did.”

“You don’t know,” I say. “You try to make it sound like you don’t care, but you don’t know anything about me. Maybe I ax-murdered my boyfriend,” I say.

It irritates me, he won’t tell me anything. He doesn’t want to hear anything about me, either. I mean I don’t think it’s a good idea to always be talking about it, but it’s stupid to pretend that we didn’t have any life at all out there. I figure he had a girlfriend, maybe a wife. Sometimes, people divorce people who go into labor camps. It’s an okay reason for divorce.

“What’s the big secret?” I say. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

“That’s a whole different person,” he says, “a whole different life.”

“Why don’t you ever talk about politics, I mean, you’re here because of politics.”

“I am talking about politics,” he says, sounding angry, “I’m teaching you, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, but you never teach me anything subversive,” I say. “We just talk about feudalism. Natalie doesn’t even care about feudalism, I still don’t know the right answers when she asks me questions.”

“It’s not something somebody can explain overnight,” he says.

“I don’t even think you’re right,” I say. “You say that feudalism was better than the Indians, and that capitalism was better than feudalism. But it’s not, it’s just the same for people like me, we always get shit on. Except maybe for the Indians. I’d be better off if I were an Indian.”

“That’s the point,” he says, exasperated. “Feudalism and capitalism exploit people like you and me.”

Exploit. That crops up all the time, exploitation of the workers. I feel like I’ve just gotten another piece of the puzzle.

“So how would you change things, Janee?” he says.

I think. “I’d make sure that . . . I mean, people still have to work, right? Or we wouldn’t have anything to eat. But I’d give more to the people like me, like I’d make sure that people had enough to eat and all that. I wouldn’t let some people have a lot and not have to work. And I wouldn’t make people do stupid things. You know, sewing quilts all the time is boring.”

“But how are you going to have factories if no one has enough money to build them?” Paul asks.

He’s got a point. I mean, if everybody is pretty much the same, nobody has a whole lot of money. I try to think who builds factories. I get it, all the sudden I get it. “The government. The government can build them.”

“Why the government?” he asks.

“Because they’ve got the money,” I say.

“But then the government just becomes like the capitalists, exploiting people.”

That’s what we’ve got but I don’t say it.

“Think about it, Janee,” he says.

Right. He knows the answer, but he wants me to guess, stupid son of a bitch playing stupid teacher games.

If it wasn’t for me, the poor sorry bastard would be in real deep shit. I know he thinks I’m stupid, I can tell by the way he talks to me. When he’s telling me about politics he talks slower, real careful, and he asks questions he already knows the answers to and there I am, trying to guess the right answer when he could just tell me and then I’d know. And why won’t he tell me anything about himself? Why doesn’t he want to know anything? ‘Cause I don’t really matter, that’s why. He doesn’t need to tell me anything because I’m just dumb old Janee.

“Listen,” I say, “what difference does it make? Why the hell can’t you just tell me where you lived? Huh? Why do you have to be so goddamn secret about it?”

“What difference does it make where I lived,” he says. He’s in a pissy mood. When he’s like this I’m not supposed to bother him, he kind of sits around and doesn’t say anything. What, he thinks he’s the only one whose life is screwed up?

“Fine,” I say. “You don’t want to talk to me? I don’t want to talk to you.” And I don’t talk to him. I just leave him right there and I just start ignoring him from then on, take my blanket, sleep in the goddamn bunk by the door even though it’s colder. I mean, I boot Nesly out, make him sleep in the middle bunk so I can have the bottom, I can’t let goddamn Nesly sleep better than I do, not even for Paul. And the bunk is the pits, there’s a draft in from the door and I’ve only got one blanket, so I have to sleep curled up in the corner trying to get all of me under the stupid green blanket.

Paul doesn’t say anything. He has that way, like he expects shit to happen, like he always expected I’d dump him. And the next morning nobody really bothers him. Nobody really bothers me, either, but then, people don’t bother me. So we just go through the day, not talking to each other. I even make Nesly sit at my Singer sewing machine, next to Paul. I see people watching, seeing how pissed I am. Seeing if Paul is out there by himself.

At dinner Paul gets in line, he’s in front of Marisa, who is okay, and Roy and Sal cut in front of Marisa, which gets her real nervous until they start bumping into Paul and she realizes she’s not the target. She looks back at me, I can see her head turn, but I’m making like I’m not really looking. Paul looks back, not knowing what’s going on, and says something, and Sal and Roy laugh. So he gets his beans and they get theirs, and I’m still like I’m not watching, and Sal and Roy are leaning on him. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can tell, they’re over there by the kettles and now since it’s cold there’s always like this steam blowing like smoke.

And Paul doesn’t know what to do, you can see his shoulders up around his ears and he’s all elbows and you can tell that Roy and Sal got him running, but he’s holding his beans and shaking his head, and Sal pulls on the plate, but Paul won’t let go, so it’s kind of a tug of war. Sal’s looking a little stupid, and Paul calls to one of the guards, which is a mistake, because it’s a guy we call Arkansas who doesn’t care what happens as long as he doesn’t have to do anything. He’s this short little guy with a big Adam’s apple and those stupid green guards’ uniforms fit him even worse than they fit the other guards. Paul always says Arkansas is an example of too much inbreeding.

Arkansas goes deaf and pretends he doesn’t know what’s going on and the next thing I know Sal flicks Paul’s plate of beans onto Paul’s face and shirt. And Sal and Roy are laughing, and I guess it’s not as good as getting Paul’s beans but it’s better than nothing, and Paul yells at Arkansas, “Did you see that! Are you going to let them do that!”

Arkansas sort of half reverses his deal gun, so that the metal stock is out there, like he’s going to club someone, and narrows his eyes and says, “Politics, you causing a disturbance?” in this real lazy way.

“I wasn’t doing anything—”

“I don’t like trouble,” Arkansas says.

And Paul must realize that it’s open season when you’re Political, ‘cause he doesn’t say anything after that.

And I’m pretending not to notice anything. Son of a bitch thinks I’m stupid, let him survive out there on his brains.

Things are really different without me being with Paul. I guess I kind of look around. Not that there’s a whole lot to see. Kansas looks like hard, pale ripples, and the sky is light blue, real far away. The barracks are all in lines and they’re low and long and even though they were painted green, now they’re just all washed out, a kind of darker Kansas color. The only colors are the guards’ uniforms, which are dark green, all stamped The U.S. People’s Army over the pockets.

I feel so small. It was okay when I was busy watching everybody in group thirty-six and worrying about Paul, but now I feel so small, and I have this awful thing in my stomach, all the time. Every time I look out past the guard wire that marks the perimeter, and there’s dry, empty Kansas, it’s like my stomach is trying to swallow me up. I know I’m going to get out of here in the spring, something will come up, it has to come up, I can’t stand it here, I’ll die, I’ll really die out here.

People do die. Nobody from group thirty-six, but sometimes from other groups, like group six, the zombies. They put the body in a green bag in the morning and we see the guards throw them in a truck while we’re standing in line for breakfast, and I realize they’ve been doing that since it started to get cold. I’ve been watching them but it’s like I didn’t really notice.

I start thinking about running out, just running, just trying it. Maybe the perimeter isn’t on all the time. We don’t go near it. Maybe they leave it off. And if they don’t, I’d never know, just zap and then the guards leave you there and Paul thought that you didn’t feel anything and he ought to know, since he’s been zapped.

Crazy thoughts, that scare me, but it’s so tempting. Like my mind doesn’t really believe anything could happen to me.

In political instruction Natalie gives us all lapboards and paper and little short stubby pencils. Even Paul gets a lapboard. That’s real different. Which makes me more nervous, I don’t like different. Different is bad. My first thought is that we’re going to have a test and I know there’s no way I can pass, and I start wondering what they’ll do to me if I flunk. Cut my rations? I’m trying, I’m trying as hard as I can. But that’s what Nesly always says. So I clench my pencil and wait to see what she says.

Natalie says, “We need to see how you are progressing in your self-struggle. Please write about yourself. You can write anything you wish, but we will check to see what you have omitted. Everybody understand?”

No, I don’t understand. I don’t write very good. I mean, I didn’t even finish high school. I don’t know what they want. But nobody else says anything, so I’m not going to say anything. So I look down at the piece of paper. I look up and around the room and I see the twelve rules of self-struggle on the wall. All that stuff about one day at a time, and denial and all that stuff. A couple of people are writing but a lot of people are like me, just sitting there.

Paul is looking at me, and when I look at him, he shakes his head. No.

I frown. “No” what? But if I kept looking at him Natalie will notice and we’ll both be in trouble.

So I look back at my paper. I try to write something.

My name is Janee Scott. I am a theif and I asalted a person. I am . . .

I don’t know how to spell maladjusted. So I change my sentence.

 . . . a criminol elamint.

That looks wrong, too. So I make the “i” and “e,” “elament” looks better. So now what am I supposed to do? Natalie said that we would be checked for stuff we left out. So maybe I should tell about my arrest? So I write down about the woman I beat up and about stealing her purse.

I used to steal from the grocery, too. In the winter it was easy. I got picked up a couple of times and I spent a couple of nights in jail. So I better tell about that, too. I can’t spell grocery so I write “store.”

Finally I write:

I am sory for my crimes, and for the bad things I did to sosiaty.

I haven’t written very much, not even half the page. Some people are still writing. Some people have written most of a page already. I wonder what else I’m supposed to write. Natalie said we’d get in trouble if we left things out, but I don’t know what kind of things.

What else could I say? Maybe I’m supposed to write about the things I did in camp? About the fight with the walking dead and about standing up in political instruction and saying that my problem was that I was in a labor camp?

Other people are asking Natalie questions, they kind of wait until she is looking around and then they half raise their hand and she comes over. So I wait and when she looks at me I put my hand up, feeling stupid. Natalie already knows I’m stupid, what difference does it make?

“Are we supposed to write about things we’ve done at camp?” I whisper.

“Whatever you want,” Natalie says.

Somebody else raises their hand and she goes to them.

I don’t know what to do. But she said that we’ll get in trouble for the stuff we leave out. So I try to think of how to say what I’ve done at Protection.

I have a bad atitude. I was in a fite with some pepoul from gr. 6 becase they tried to take my beans. Also, in our meeting, I say that my problim is I am at a laber camp, but my problim is that I am a theif and I asalted the person at the store and I stol food. When I stol food from the store, I hurt sosiaty.

I think the last sentence is pretty good, but when I think I’ve done something right in political instruction, I’m always wrong.

After the political instruction meeting, Sal starts ragging on Paul about his bunk, telling him he’s going to throw him out. Sal has a bottom bunk, so he’s really just leaning on Paul. I figure if Sal is going to take Paul’s bunk, I’ll take Sal’s, so I grab my blanket and throw it there while Sal is facing down Paul.

Paul is going to come here first, thinking that Sal’s bunk is empty. I’m going to tell him to try near the door. Actually, maybe I’ll let him stay, maybe I won’t, it depends. If he acts mealy-mouthed and just slinks down the door, he can freeze for all I care.

And he will, too, cause Paul’s so tall that his blanket isn’t long enough, and when he scrunches up it seems like his knees always stick out. And he’s thin, the way some tall guys are, even thinner now. We’re all even thinner now. He’s going to end up all bones and joints, like his long fingers, stuck down there with Nesly. And Nesly’ll latch on to him, and he won’t have the sense to tell Nesly to get out of his face.

He’ll feel sorry for Nesly. And he’ll be nice to him, ‘cause Paul’s like that. He’s decent. Even if it drives me nuts sometimes, like maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to know about me before I came here, like he’d prefer to think nice things about me or something. Or maybe that’s not it at all, it’s hard to know what he’s thinking. He’d have to be pretty stupid to think nice things about me. But I do know, if someone doesn’t take care of him, being decent will get him in deep.

And then all the sudden I’m thinking all these things at once, like what if Paul got like the zombies, what if he stopped caring, and I’m wondering if it could happen, although I can just see him, all raggedy-assed and blank-eyed, stick-like and smelling like piss, specially because he’s thin to begin with. And at the same time, I keep thinking of Kansas out there, all pale colored, and us so little, and wondering if I might not end up a zombie, ‘cause worrying about Paul, I never thought about people ending up zombies. I never thought about running for the perimeter. It’s like my cousin said about her kid, when you have a baby, you don’t have a chance to know how screwed up you are because you got to think about milk and diapers and all that shit, and the baby just keeps loving you.

So, not even meaning to, I pop out of Sal’s bunk and just grab my blanket and go to see what’s going on.

And what’s going on is this: Paul has my stick, the one I got from the living dead, which I keep stuck in the frame under our bunk, and he doesn’t really look like he’s sure what to do with it. But Sal isn’t sure how to get around him, because there isn’t a lot of room between the bunks, you know. And Eddy, who has the bottom bunk across from ours, and Marisa, who has the bunk above Eddy’s, are both swearing like mad, telling Sal to leave everything alone, ‘cause if Paul starts swinging that stick in that little space people might get their heads knocked.

So I just walk up and say, “Sal, get back to your own bunk.”

“Stay outta this,” Sal says.

Paul doesn’t say anything, so I just walk past Sal. The stupid dick elbows me and pushes me into the bunk, so I pop out again and grab the stick from Paul and stick it like a sword right into Sal’s stomach and then start smacking him with it, bap, bap, bap, not really hurting him, but real fast, so he can’t get a hold of it, and he puts up his hands trying to keep me off and keeps walking backward until he’s clear of the bunks and I say, “Listen, mess with me again and I’ll put it in your teeth.”

That’s the way you deal with trash.

So then I just walk back and sit down on the bunk and lean down and shove the stick back in the frame.

Paul stands there a moment and I look up at him and say, “What?”

He’s got a kind of funny little smile on his face, but he just says, in that real reasonable way of his, “Are you back or do you just want the bunk?”

“It’s warmer with someone else,” I say. “And I’ve already got you broke in.”

“Okay,” he says. And sits down.

Eddy says, “Shit,” and turns over with his back to us. Marisa is looking over the edge of her bunk. Marisa is with Kirk, I don’t know where he’s been all through this.

“Janee,” Paul says, real quiet.

I look up at him, wondering, wondering what he’s going to say, and feeling kind of funny, and maybe a little embarrassed, just because of the way he said my name.

“What did you write?” he says.

For a moment I don’t follow, because it isn’t what I expect at all. Then I figure out he means that stupid thing at political instruction, and without even thinking I kind of look over toward where the twelve rules are written on the wall, even though you can’t see them from the bunk.

I’m irritated. Here I just saved his balls and he’s going to play teacher games. “None of your business,” I say.

“Janee—” he says, and takes my shoulder and kind of pushes my hair away from my face, nice, something he’s never done before. Not like humping, but nice, like just for me, Janee. “It’s important, what did you write?”

I shrug. “Just about being a thief and about fighting with the guys from group six and then about the time I said that my big problem was being in a labor camp.”

He nods. “Good. When they give it back to you, just write the same thing, only in different words.”

“Why are they going to give it back to me?”

“It’s something they do,” he says. He’s real tense, real scared. I can’t figure out what the big deal is. I know he’s rattled from Sal, he doesn’t know that the Sals of this world are really just looking for someone to tell them what they can and can’t do.

“Hey,” I say. “Don’t worry about it. Come on, sit down here with me. It’s cold enough in this barn.” Saying that makes me smile. “My mother used to say that,” I tell him. “She’d say, ‘Close the door, it’s cold enough in this barn.’”

He smiles a little. “Mothers say that sort of thing. Mine used to say, ‘Close the door, you weren’t raised in a barn.’”

“Must be a Pennsylvania thing,” I say, even though I’ve heard it before, people in Cleveland say it.

“Yeah,” he says, “must be a Harrisburg thing.”

“You know,” I say, real quiet, “you can be a real pain in the ass, but sometimes, you’re all right.”

“Janee,” he says, “you’ve got to be real careful. I don’t know why you adopted me, but you don’t want me telling you things. You think you do, but I tell you about my life and then I’ll be talking about things, things I think and believe, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in a labor camp. You’ve got to just say back to them whatever they say to you, okay?”

He looks sad, he looks lonely. Well I’m lonely, too. All the time I’m lonely here. “Most of what they say is crap,” I say, and I can feel myself getting irritated at him, getting irritated at all of it, I’m cold all the time, and hungry, damn it.

“I didn’t say you had to believe it,” he whispers.

Finally, they start the little electric heaters in the factory where we sew quilts, mostly because it’s so cold that our fingers are stiff and our production is falling. It doesn’t make the place warm, but I can’t see my breath anymore.

I think about being warm all the time. I get these bruises on my legs, most of us do, from the cold. Chilblains. They hurt, real bad. Get up in the morning and it hurts to move my legs, and when I’m standing out there for roll call, the wind comes whipping over those little ripply Kansas hills and my legs hurt so much I have tears in my eyes. Then we cripple on over for breakfast and take it into the factory. Paul and I sit together against the wall, one blanket around our shoulders, the other across our legs, and eat.

I still haven’t gotten to 180 quilts. I get 177 once and Corbin calls time to quit. I’m so mad I almost cry. Really, I never understood that saying, but I can feel the hot tears. I want to hit something. Nesly’s doing real bad. He’s coughing all the time, and spitting. He’s on half rations, because his production is so low. I know when I’m losing my concentration because I can hear Nesly back there, coughing his lungs out.

I sew quilts. I can mostly sew without thinking, just zip, zip, zip, zip. I think about a lot of things. I think about what Paul said, about saying whatever they want me to say. And I think about what they want me to say. And I think about the question he asked me, when I said that it seemed to me that the Indians had it the best, that factory workers, and serfs and people like me, we all had it just about the same.

I keep trying to think about what would make it better. Everybody has to work, or people wouldn’t have anything. Even Indians had to hunt or something. Like quilts, there’s a lot in a quilt. There’s the cottony stuff in the middle, somebody has to make that, and then somebody has to put it in the middle of the quilt. Somebody like us has to make the plain part, that they put the stuffing in. And somewhere, somebody has to put together all the little pieces of cloth and make the top part. Sometimes I imagine the way my plain shells will look when the top goes on them. I don’t know if they’ll be the kind with the patches, or if they’ll be the ones with the stars, or the fans, or the pin wheels . . . There’s a lot of different patterns.

I’d like making quilts a lot better if I could do different things, like the top part, too. If I were going to make a new society, I’d have people do different things, not the same things all the time. So that somebody wouldn’t always get stuck doing the stuff that no one likes to do.

At break one day, I tell Paul about my idea.

“That’s a good idea,” he says. “But who would make the schedule?”

I shrug. “Maybe everybody could talk about it. Like consensus.” In political meetings we’ve been talking about consensus, having everybody come to agreement. It means that when you know you’re outvoted, you give in, because you know you’re not going to win. First you talk, and everybody kind of finds out what everybody else thinks, then when you vote, it’s not really a vote, you consent. And if one persons says no, then you have to talk about it until everybody agrees. But you shouldn’t say “no” unless you really have to. Everybody has to kind of trust everybody else, you have to decide, you may disagree, but do you disagree enough to stop everything?

“Quaker socialism,” Paul says. For a moment I think he’s laughing at me, but he’s not. Things strike him funny that aren’t funny to anyone else.

“What’s that mean?” I ask.

“Quakers were a religious group that practiced some socialist techniques,” he says.

“Religion is anti-socialist,” I say, which everybody knows is true. Opiate of the masses and all that.

“A lot of Christian groups experimented with communal living,” he says, “and some of the ways they found are very practical, like consensus. And socialism uses a lot of—” he stops.

“What,” I say.

He shakes his head. “So you would use consensus to establish your schedule. I think that’s a good idea. Have you figured out how to build your factories yet?”

He’s changing the subject, because it’s wrong to say that socialism is like religion. “No,” I say. “I’m still working on it.”

And then we have to go back to work. But the nice thing about going back to work after our two-thirty break is that it’s only four more hours until dinner. And I’m thinking about what Paul said, about socialism being like religion. Which is very, very weird, because everybody knows that religion is all superstition.

But I don’t say anything about religion to Paul. I just kind of store that away. And then I go back to thinking about my quilt factory.

Dinner is some sort of stew with floury dumplings, we don’t always have beans. There’s a bit of fatty meat in my bowl and I save it for last. Fat tastes so good to me. That sounds disgusting, but it does. I think I could eat straight fat. I’m hungry when I’m done, but I save my roll, because Paul and I always eat our bread right before we go to sleep. Some people save their cornbread from morning, they save it all day.

The next morning Corbin says that Nesly doesn’t have to work.

Nesly says he’ll work, it’s okay, even though he’s really sick and he’s not even making eighty quilts a day. He’s real thin, the bones in his chest are real sharp and his wrists look like sticks and his skin is real dry and scaly. His hair is coming out, too. Sometimes when I look over, he isn’t even sewing, he’s just got his head down on his table. Sometimes his eyes are closed, sometimes they’re open.

We all know why he wants to go to work, if he doesn’t go to work he’ll be on infirmary rations.

Corbin says he should stay and rest and it’s like Nesly just doesn’t care. Like the walking dead.

Nesly is going to die.

When we’re sewing, once in awhile I hear someone coughing—a lot of people cough—and then I think, “It’s not Nesly. Nesly is going to die.”

Nothing I can do.

In my society, Nesly wouldn’t go on half rations, not if everybody felt Nesly was really trying. I think about what group thirty-six could do. If everybody gave Nesly a spoonful of their food, that would be thirty-one spoonfuls. That would be a lot, added to his half-ration, then he wouldn’t starve. If everybody does it, that spreads it out, so nobody has to do a whole lot. Not that I think people really would, not for Nesly.

I don’t tell anybody, though. They’d think I’d gone soft in the head.

Natalie hands out lapboards again, and the little stubby pencils. I’ve still got the pen stuck in the seam of my pants, it’s been there since I stuck it in the seam of my pants when they told us we could only take what we were wearing. I never even think of it. Sometimes, Paul used to kind of play with it through my pants, but we don’t do anything anymore but sleep. I look over at Paul, and he looks scared. Which makes me real nervous.

Natalie just hands back all those pieces of paper that we wrote before, and I look mine over. It really looks stupid.

Natalie says, “All of you left things out, things that we know about, so please explain further. Please tell us more about yourself and your self-struggle.”

My self-struggle? I look up at the twelve rules. Look back down at my lapboard. It’s real lousy plastic, bumpy with scrapes and scratches so that when I write my pencil will catch in the indentations. What do they know about that I didn’t say? Juvenile reform?

I was in jewvinile reform becase I stol a player and some chips. I had a chanse to reform at Brigum House but I did not. Sosiaty had to pay mony to fed me and give me cloths and when I got out of Brigum House I did the same bad things.

I know I’m doing good, now. At Brigham House they were always talking about our debt to society. And here they talk about that too. In a way we’re like Nesly, we never make our quotas, so now society has to pay for us, like a spoonful from everybody.

Now I am here . . .

I want to say in Protection, but I’m not sure how to spell it,

 . . . and Sosiaty gives me food and has to buld a camp so I have to work hard and make alot of quiwlts so I can give back to sosiaty. When I go home, I have to be a productiv memeber of sosiaty. Soshalisum means everbody together in sosiaty.

I underline the part about everybody together. I understand what Natalie had been trying to teach us, socialism means that everybody shares. The way to build the factory was to share, if everybody gave a little bit, like if we all gave a teaspoon of food to Nesly, nobody would notice the little bit. But put all the little bits together, and then you have a lot, and you can build a factory. I had figured it out, all by myself. I want to tell somebody, I want to tell Natalie, or Paul.

Paul is just sitting, looking at his lapboard. Natalie is answering someone’s question. Natalie looks up at Paul, then walks over to him and says, “Aren’t you going to add anything?”

Paul shrugs. “I added something.”

Natalie walks up beside him, so she can read it. “I have failed to renew my commitment to the revolution each day,” she says, in a funny voice. “Is that all you can think to add, Paul?”

“That’s all,” he says.

Natalie flicks open her notebook. “What about Kevin Hanrahan?”

Paul says, like he doesn’t care, “What about him, Natalie?”

“Why don’t you write about him?”

He bends over his lapboard. We’re all watching. Natalie always ignores Paul, she never says anything to him. Politicals aren’t allowed to say anything in political meetings for the first two years.

She reads, “Natalie has asked me to write about Kevin Hanrahan. Kevin Hanrahan was a student of mine six years ago. After he left my class I had no further communication with him.”

She shakes her head. Natalie looks mean. I think of when we first had political meetings, when she made Nancy stand up and say she was a prostitute. I wonder what Natalie did to get sent to a labor camp. I mean, Natalie always just seemed like a person who you felt sorry for, a chump, I was never afraid of her before.

“Paul,” she says. “Wasn’t there a letter?”

He doesn’t say anything. Then he says, “I don’t remember a letter.”

“You’re holding out,” she says. “You realize, holding out on us will only hurt you, and hurt Kevin Hanrahan.”

“Maybe when Degraff—” the camp guard I always called Helga “—used me as a demonstration model on the perimeter there was brain damage, Natalie.” He says her name sarcastic, like he’s being polite, and he’s not.

“This isn’t a camp for Politicals,” Natalie says. “This camp is easy. You don’t want to end up somewhere like Rushville.”

“Why don’t you go help the kids with their compositions,” he says, but this time he doesn’t sound sarcastic at all, he just sounds like he doesn’t care.

But he does, because when we climb into our bunk, he’s shaking all over, all tense and scared. And I don’t know what to do, so I don’t do anything. And after awhile he goes to sleep.

A couple of days later they take Nesly to the infirmary. He can’t’ walk anymore, and he mutters all the time, talking, talking, but he doesn’t know what he’s saying and nobody can understand him.

“We could have done something,” I tell Paul.

He shakes his head. “There’s nothing you could do, Janee.”

“No,” I say, irritated, “not me. Us. All of us, group thirty-six.” So I explain to him about if everybody gave him a spoonful. “That’s socialism,” I say, “that’s how you build the factory.”

He nods. “So who owns the factory?”

Owns the factory? “The people who work in it, I guess.” I think a moment. “No, everybody, because everybody put a spoonful in. It’s everybody’s factory.”

He grins, “That’s right, that’s it, Janee. That’s socialism.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And the people who work there decide the way to do the job, and they use consensus to make the schedule, and everybody takes turns, I mean, except for the jobs that someone can’t do, like you know, if they have to fix a sewing machine, I can’t do that, but all the rest of the jobs, people all trade around, so nobody has to do the boring stuff all the time.”

“And there are no bosses,” he says.

“But it doesn’t work that way,” I say. At least, I never heard of it working that way, I mean, we’re supposed to be socialist, even in Cleveland, and Cleveland sure isn’t like that.

“No,” he says, “it doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs, looks at the floor. “I don’t know,” he says.

But I don’t believe him, he could answer me. He could tell me why it’s not working. It’s one of the things he won’t talk about, like that stuff about religion.

We’re sitting in the factory, eating our breakfast. Corbin comes in. “Corbin’s not a prisoner,” Paul says.

Which is stupid. “What, you think he’s a guard in disguise?” I say.

“No, Corbin was in on a ten-year sentence. Chick, over in group thirty-one, told me.”

That doesn’t make any sense. Why the hell would someone stay here after he’s served his time unless he’s soft upstairs? Corbin even told us that he’s served time in seven different work camps, some as far west as Colorado, out where there’s no water. Corbin is a little weird, in the summer he doesn’t wear shoes so he can save the people the cost of shoe leather. Corbin is a first-class chump.

Corbin makes us all go to our sewing machines and then he tells us that the camp director has asked us all to show some unity, to show some spirit. “Today is our chance to show the rest of the camp that group thirty-six is not slacking,” Corbin says. It’s some sort of production push. “If you normally make 120 quilts, try to make 160. If you make 160, try to make 200.”

Then the big news. “You’ll get extra beans at 2:30, because of your extra effort,” Corbin says. “But think, if you earn those extra beans, maybe this will happen more often.”

Hell, for extra beans, I’d make 500 quilts.

In the first hour I make nineteen, which is great, but my shoulders are killing me because I’m working the foot of the threader right at my fingers and pushing the cloth through as hard as I can and I’m afraid I’m going to get my fingers under the needle.

The second hour I make twenty, which is the most I ever made in an hour. I can feel myself sweating. I mean, it’s cold in that stupid factory but I’m sweating, I’m concentrating so hard. And the third hour I mess up two in a row, and I only make sixteen. I tell myself I can still make 180. Chris makes 180 all the time, and he’s just some stupid dickhead from Detroit. When we break at 2:30 I’ve made 114 quilts, which is a personal best. Paul has made 106, which is good for him. Corbin makes us count, then we go for beans.

Beans at 2:30, it’s wonderful. I can’t believe we get to eat again at 7:30. “We get beans at dinner, right?” I ask Corbin.

“Yeah,” he says, “you do.” But he’s talking to some other group leaders.

As soon as we eat the beans, Corbin hurries us back to our factory building. “Group fourteen is making an average of seventeen an hour,” he says. Then he makes us tell our figures out loud. Chris has made 127 quilts. Thirteen more than me. Two more an hour than me. But I’m okay, not the fastest, but not the slowest, either. I’m up in the top five. The slowest is Roy, who has only made 91.

Everybody gets real quiet when Roy tells how many he’s made, everybody is thinking that he’ll pull our group average down.

“We’ll stop for dinner, but then we’ll work late, so everybody has a chance to meet their quota.”

We go back to work. Usually the four hours between 2:30 and dinner just drag by, but today they go fast. At dinner Corbin has us figure again. I’ve made 185 quilts, the most I’ve ever made. A lot of people have made more than they ever made before.

Marisa says, “Maybe we should just take ten minutes for dinner and then come back, so we have more time until lights out at ten.”

Corbin nods, and says we have to decide. So we vote, and decide we will, although some people don’t want to. I think about consensus. But first of all, if we wait until we have consensus it will take too much time. Second of all, a lot of people in the group don’t understand about consensus, they’re selfish.

Anyway, we gobble our food—normally I never eat fast, normally I eat real slow, trying to make it last—and hurry back. Other groups are doing the same thing. It’s weird to be back in the factory with the clamp lamps on, and my table isn’t in good light, so I can’t see very well, so I have to go slower. I’m real tired. I’m so tired I can’t see good. I can’t focus.

I get tired more easily. And if I try to comb my hair with my fingers, some of it comes out. I can’t concentrate on sewing, I keep thinking about Cleveland, about riding the bus down 1-90 past Martin Luther King Boulevard, and how right before Dead Man’s Curve you can see the lake, and the rocks. Sometimes the lake’s real clear, and sometimes, if there’s been a storm or something, the water’s real brown.

So I start to cry a little, which is stupid. I hated the bus. I only took the bus when the rapid broke down—which it did fairly often. And then I had to stand because all the people who took the rapid were on the bus.

Finally we stop, and I’ve only made 39 quilts. That’s 224. I don’t even remember falling into the bunk.

The next morning some of us even get extra cornbread, because we went over 180 quilts, and after work we get extra beans, although my production is way down after the day before. I’m still tired from the push.

And we have political instruction. I figure I’m just going to do nothing during political instruction, maybe I’ll sit in the back and go to sleep.

But Natalie sees me in the back. “Janee,” she says, first thing, “what have you learned from all this?”

The questions are all trick questions and I always get them wrong anyway. “That we work better for rewards,” I say. Natalie gets this little smile she has when she’s going to roast somebody’s ideology, “and that shows we need to analyze our own motives better,” I say, quick, because that’s always good. I’m just beginning to figure out what we’re supposed to be analyzing for.

And all the sudden it’s like I know the right answer. Capitalism is selfish, our problem is that we are still selfish. What has to happen is that we have to be less selfish, otherwise socialism will never work. “If we were truly socialist,” I say, “we would work for the good of everybody, that’s society, but we still have old-fashioned, uh, capitalist ways of thinking and we work for rewards.”

Natalie looks surprised, then she looks at Paul—who is staring at his long spider fingers and doesn’t look at me even though you think he’d be happy that I finally gave them back an answer they wanted. She thinks he told me what to say.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” I say. “I think that socialism is a really good idea, you know, everybody sharing, and everybody being equal and everything, but what I want to know is, why isn’t it like that on the outside?”

Natalie frowns. I’ve made a mistake.

“What I mean is, socialism says that, say, if we had a real quilt factory, everybody would own it, right? And the people that made the quilts, they’d like, trade jobs, so that sometimes you have to do the boring stuff, but sometimes you get to do the more interesting stuff, like putting the piece work, the stars and stuff, on the top. And that everybody would vote, like we did last night about coming back from dinner to work on our quota. But outside, things don’t work like that, there are bosses and people don’t trade. In a way,” I say, “we’re more socialist than they are outside.”

Natalie looks really surprised. “Well, Janee,” she says, “the difference is that inside, we really analyze ourselves, and we really work together.”

“So maybe everybody ought to have to do what we do,” I say, “but that makes it sound like everybody ought to come to a labor camp, which isn’t what I mean. But if I hadn’t come here, I’d have never figured this out.”

Natalie writes awhile in her notebook and I figure I’m roasted. Then she looks up and says, “Janee, when you first came here you had a very negative, a very ego-centered attitude. I want you to know I’m astonished and impressed at the progress you’ve made.” And then she smiles at me.

Some people are nodding to themselves. Some are like Paul, staring at their hands. Roy is looking at me, naked hate on his face.

In bed, after lights out, Paul says to me, “Why did you say that?”

“Because I figured it out, from what you told me.”

I think he’ll at least say something nice, but he just sighs.

“I figured it out, myself,” I say.

“I know you did,” he says.

“You told me to tell them what they wanted,” I say. Even though I didn’t just say it because it’s what they want me to say.

He doesn’t answer me. Sometimes I don’t understand him at all.

The next evening, at dinner, I get two extra chunks of cornbread. I must looked surprised because Ears, one of the cooks, says, “Camp Director’s orders, Janee.”

After dinner Natalie says, “I made a report on your progress in self-analysis and self-education.”

For a moment I think, I owe her. Then I think, she looks good for having someone make progress, so maybe we’re even. I try to give Paul a chunk of cornbread.

“You earned it,” he says.

“You act like I did something bad,” I say. “You told me to tell them what they want. You told me to think about it. Things would be better if everybody was socialist, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah,” he says, just agreeing with me.

“You don’t believe in socialism.”

“Janee,” he says, then stops. “Janee, you don’t ever talk about escaping anymore.”

“I am,” I say. “I’m still thinking about it. But I can’t do anything about it until spring.” I sound kind of whiny, even to me. “You never talk to me,” I say. “You think I’m stupid. I figured that stuff out myself, nobody told me.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” he says.

“Bullshit,” I say. “Look at you, Mr. Schoolteacher. You still think you’re special, an intellectual. Well, if it wasn’t for me, people like Sal would have you for lunch. And I can figure things out, too. And I can figure out that you gotta be here for a reason and you didn’t off no streetjock with the lid off a trash barrel. But you don’t want to talk about it. Why don’t you ever talk about it, huh? What are you afraid of? ‘Cept you think none of us dumbshits can understand.”

All the time he’s shaking his head, standing there shaking his head, no, no, no, no. “I wrote a couple of articles on socialist trends in America before the revolution,” he says, “about attempts to establish Christian utopias along socialist lines. I didn’t toe the party line.”

“Yeah? How come when I say something like I did at the political instruction last night you act like you’re all disappointed in me?”

“I’m not disappointed in you,” he says.

“Bullshit, jack-jockey. I been in your bunk for a couple of months, I know you pretty well, even if I don’t use twenty-dollar words to say what I’m thinking.”

“I don’t care about your vocabulary,” he says. “Janee, Janee. You’re tough and you’re smart. I’m glad you’re figuring out what they want. But when you say that the labor camp helped make you a better citizen I’m not going to like it.”

“I didn’t say that,” I say. He twists things. He twists them around. Listen to television, that’s what political people do.

“In political instruction,” he said. “What do you think you got brownie points with the Camp Director for if not your impassioned defense of reeducation?”

“That’s not true!” I say. “That’s not true! I said I didn’t want everybody to go to labor camps!”

“But if you never went to a labor camp, you never would have learned about socialism!” he says.

“So? So I might have said that. So it’s true. Maybe I had to come to a place like this, where I had to learn about it, or I never would have paid any attention.”

“And what, all of society has to go through re-education?” he says. “That’s what I was studying, in the nineteenth century, people used to try to establish socialist communities, they were all people willing to give up everything. And not one of those communities worked. Not one. They all died out after a few years, the Oneida Colony, the Shakers, all of them.”

“So you don’t believe,” I say. Which scares me, I don’t know why, but it scares me. Because what if he’s right, what if it’s all wrong?

He shakes his head. “I don’t believe in re-education. I don’t know, I don’t know what I believe. But I know one thing, I mean, look at you, practical, tough little Janee who saw this goddamn system for what it is, slave labor! And now you’re talking about re-educating all of society!”

“I don’t even understand what you’re talking about. You said that we were evolving,” I say. “First the Indians, then feudalism, then capitalism, now socialism. We still have all of these capitalist ideas in our heads, how are we going to get rid of them?”

And all of the sudden I start crying. I never cry. I mean, I feel like crying sometimes at the camp, but I never cry. And I don’t even know why I’m crying except I am. I want socialism, I want things to be better. I want to go home. Paul hugs me.

“I’m so scared,” I tell him. “I’m so scared we’re all going to die, like Nesly.”

In political instruction Natalie has lapboards again but only certain people have to write, all the rest of us can do whatever we want. Paul is one of the people who has to write. I lie in the bunk, wrapped up in both blankets and doze, waiting.

Lately, when I’m half asleep, I sort of dream. It happens when I’m sewing, it happens at break sometimes. I’m not really sound asleep, just barely into sleep. Nothing ever happens, sometimes I dream I’m at work. I always dream about things that are at the camp, and usually I’m just doing something real. This time I dream about morning, when it’s blue. While we are getting our breakfast, when the sun is just coming up and some of the sky is black and still night off in the west, Kansas turns blue, like water, like air.

It’s real beautiful when that happens. I never knew places could be blue. The lake could be blue, the sky could be blue, but I never knew hills could be blue. Blue isn’t a solid color, it’s an air color, a water color. If something as big as Kansas can turn blue, I feel like I can disappear. Nothing happens while I am dreaming, Kansas is just blue and I feel like I could disappear.

I wake up scared.

So I get up, wrapped in both blankets, and sit on the concrete at the foot of the bunk beds where I can see the end of the barracks where the political instruction is going on. I can see Paul, he’s not writing, and I can see Natalie when she walks in the part of the room where the bunks aren’t blocking my view.

Finally she stops in front of Paul and she says, “Is that all?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“You’re resisting.”

“You want me to accuse people,” he says.

She shakes her head, “No, we don’t need you to accuse people, we already know. We are trying to help you.” And when he doesn’t say anything she says, “You’re only one person. You’re full of egotism. You’re saying everyone else is wrong and you’re right.”

He is only one person. Natalie and Corbin and a lot of people believe in socialism, why should Paul be right and everybody else wrong?

Eventually Paul comes back and lies down, all tense and shaky.

He’s cold when I curl up against him, but we get our blankets all in the right place and I go right back to sleep, like falling down, like slipping under water, and Kansas is blue. Soft, without having real edges, blue. I don’t dream about anybody else, and nothing happens, just Kansas, rolling away toward the sunrise, blue.

In the morning when we get our breakfast, Kansas is blue.

When we take our break, I sit down where I can lean against the wall, and when I close my eyes, Kansas is blue.

So I work, and I eat, and I conduct self-analysis. Now in political instruction we are testifying. That means that people get up, and they say their name and what they did wrong, like when I testify I will say, “I am Janee Scott, and I am a thief and a criminal.” And then we have to tell about our life.

It’s not like it was when we stood up at the first instruction and said that, now only people who want to stand up and testify. Sometimes someone will stand up to testify and Natalie will say, “No, you’re not ready.”

I figure I’m not ready. But one day Natalie says to me, “Janee, why don’t you tell us your story.” She says it in the nice way she sometimes talks to me now, real gentle. So I stand up and I say, “I am Janee Scott and I am a thief and a criminal. I was born in Lorraine, Ohio, but my mother moved to Cleveland when I was real little.”

I tell my whole life, just standing there talking. My voice just goes on and on. And I tell about the things I did, and how unhappy I was sometimes, and how I hated people who were just normal, and I start to cry. Like I never realized how much I wanted to be like the people on television. I tell about the woman I assaulted, and how I never thought about how’d she feel, and I keep crying. It’s awful, but it feels good. And the group understands, nobody says anything, everybody just listens, we are all together.

And when I’m all done, I’m so tired, but I feel so light and empty. I feel pure. Paul is watching me, and I think he’ll never understand this feeling.

That night, when I sleep, I don’t dream about Kansas being blue.

Summer in Kansas is almost as bad as winter, it’s so hot in the factory buildings that people faint. But when we wake up it’s already getting light, and I never feel like I’m going to drown in the blue while we’re getting breakfast.

It’s been hot for awhile, it’s maybe July, and Natalie says one morning, “Paul, get your things together and don’t go over to the factory building today.”

I know what it is, he’s being transferred. I grab hold of both Paul’s hands.

“They’re transferring Politicals,” Natalie says.

Paul nods. He looks thin and sad. His hair is long and he looks scraggly.

“Natalie,” I say, “I’d like to give Paul a haircut so that group thirty-six will make a good impression when he is transferred.”

She knows I just want to say good-bye, but she nods. So Corbin lets me have a pair of scissors and I try to cut his hair.

We don’t say very much. I’m not a good barber, but he looks better when I’m finished. I even trim his beard. I don’t know what to say. I keep thinking of political instruction, sometimes I think he’s looking at me, that way he does, like he’s disappointed, but most of the time when I look at him, he is looking at his hands and he just looks sad.

I carry his blanket roll out for him, even though he could carry it himself. There are some other people waiting, other Politicals from other groups, all standing by themselves. He touches my shoulder and then my face with his long spider fingers.

“Be careful, okay?” I say.

“You pick better next time,” he says, “okay? No Politicals.”

“You find someone to look out for you,” I say.

Then I have to go back to the factory. In a funny way, I’m relieved. No one is watching me anymore.

But that night, I have a hard time falling asleep by myself. And when I do, I dream of blue Kansas, and Paul’s in my dream. Just one person, way out in the blue, hard to see.

But I know it’s Paul, who else would it be?

Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1992.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Rachel Swirsky

Rachel Swirsky is a Nebula-Award winning short story writer who has written two well-received robot-focused stories, “Grand Jete“ which appears in this volume, and the Hugo-nominated “Eros, Philia, Agape” which is available online at Tor.com. Her second collection of short stories, How the World Became Quiet, came out from Subterranean Press in 2013. Visit her website at rachelswirsky.com.

Carolyn Ives Gilman

Carolyn Ives Gilman is a museum exhibit developer by day and a science fiction writer by night. She has written two novels and four stories in the loosely connected Twenty Planets universe. Her latest novel is a space exploration adventure, Dark Orbit. Her other books include Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution, and Halfway Human. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others. She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo twice.

Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works at the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). She is also author of several nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.

Maureen F. McHugh

Maureen McHugh’s first novel, China Mountain Zhang, a dystopian story set in a China dominated future, won the James Tiptree Award. Her most recent collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse, was one of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of 2011. She currently lives in Los Angles where she writes interactive narratives and teaches Interactive Storytelling at the University of Southern California.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a five-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series, volume 2 of which was published earlier this year by Night Shade Books. His next anthology is More Human Than Human. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.