textfiles/magazines/INTERTEXT/ITv5n2.etx

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==========================================
InterText Vol. 5, No. 2 / March-April 1995
==========================================

  Contents

    FirstText: A Past and Future on the Internet......Jason Snell

    SecondText: Ready For My Hotlink, Mr. De Mille...Geoff Duncan

    Need to Know: From Paper to the Internet..........Jason Snell

  Short Fiction

    21st Century Dreamtime_..........................Steven Thorn_

    Nothing, Not a Thing_.............................Sung J. Woo_

    Flying Toasters_...................................Ken Kousen_

    Josie_.........................................Marcus Eubanks_

    Skin the Color of Blood_....................M. Stanley Bubien_

    The Spirits We Know_..........................William Trapman_

....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@etext.org                       gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
    Assistant Editor          Send subscription requests, story
    Susan Grossman              submissions, and correspondence
                                         to intertext@etext.org
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 5, No. 2. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published 
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this 
  magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold 
  (either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire 
  text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1995, Jason Snell. 
  Individual stories Copyright 1995 their original authors. 
  InterText is created using Apple Macintosh computers and then 
  published in Adobe PostScript, Setext (ASCII), Adobe Acrobat PDF 
  and World Wide Web/HTML formats. For more information about 
  InterText, send a message to intertext@etext.org with the word 
  "info" in the subject line. For writers guidelines, place the 
  word "guidelines" in the subject line.
....................................................................


  FirstText: A Past and Future on the Internet   by Jason Snell
===============================================================

  In looking back at the 23 issues of InterText that precede this 
  one, I've discovered that just about every FirstText column I 
  write seems to be discussing our anniversary. In the issue 
  before our anniversary, I would write that our anniversary was 
  coming up. The anniversary issue itself would include a column 
  recounting how InterText began, a story I've probably told a 
  half-dozen times in these pages by now. The issue after our 
  anniversary, I'd spend some time ruminating on the fact that we 
  had just had an anniversary. By my rough calculations, this 
  means that half of my FirstText columns have discussed our 
  anniversary.

  Suffice it to say that this issue marks our fourth anniversary, 
  which seems like no time at all and an eternity at the same 
  time. In March of 1991 the online world seemed to be a small 
  place -- not geographically, because before we published our 
  first issue we were an international publication, thanks to the 
  subscription list we inherited from Jim McCabe's magazine 
  _Athene_. InterText was created because I had decided that 
  without my initiative, there wouldn't be any magazine for people 
  writing fiction online to publish in except for _Quanta_, which 
  limited itself to science fiction. These days, a fellow named 
  John Labovitz spends untold hours updating his extremely large 
  "E-Zine List," wherein you can find online publications covering 
  just about every subject imaginable. And a large number of print 
  publications are now online, from Ziff-Davis' slew of computer 
  magazines to Time Warner publications like _Time_ and 
  _Entertainment Weekly_ to the (often painfully) techno-hip 
  _Wired_.

  In our early days, few people besides college students and 
  researchers had heard of the Internet. Now magazines devote 
  cover space and untold thousands of words to every aspect of the 
  Internet. At first, my parents thought InterText was some silly 
  hobby I'd outgrow before I left college. Now my father pulls me 
  aside to talk about the concept of authenticating Digital Cash 
  over the Internet.

  A glance at our mailing list database (still updated by hand, 
  though in the past two months I've automated the process 
  somewhat) also paints a picture of how the Net has changed. 
  Early entries (relics of _Athene_) are bare BITnet addresses. 
  Entries nowadays are more likely to come from domains like 
  aol.com or prodigy.com. Our "notification" distribution list, 
  most often used by people with FTP or World-Wide Web access, 
  started at a few dozen but now inches closer to 1,000 every day. 
  And as online services like America Online, CompuServe, eWorld, 
  Microsoft Network, AT&T's Interchange, Prodigy, and Delphi creep 
  out further into the Net (customers of most of these services 
  will be on the Web by the end of 1995), the size and complexion 
  of the online world will change even more.



  You get my drift. In just four years, there have been incredible 
  changes in the electronic world around InterText. The question 
  is, what place does InterText have in the wider world of the 
  Net?

  I'm no visionary. I can't answer that question. But the 
  philosophy I take with me into our fifth year of publication is 
  this: InterText is here to provide a place for readers to find 
  good fiction, as well as a place for writers to publish good 
  fiction. If the changing attitude of the Net toward commercial 
  endeavors means some form of sponsorship will allow us to pay 
  our writers, then all the better. But even if nothing changes, 
  InterText sports a large readership (many small-press magazines 
  reach only a few hundred subscribers), a _broad_ readership (we 
  have readers on all six populated continents), and a selective 
  editorial process. Like print publications, InterText is 
  particular about what we publish. We accept only a small 
  fraction of the stories we're sent, and the stories we _do_ 
  publish are carefully edited before they reach readers. That's 
  good news for readers, but it's also good for writers: it means 
  being published in InterText says something. "Selling" a story 
  to us isn't the same as selling a story to 
  _Fantasy & Science Fiction_, but it means more than posting your 
  story to alt.prose for all the world to ignore.

  There's a lot of good short fiction out there, but a very 
  limited number of places to find it (if you're a reader) or sell 
  it (if you're a writer). InterText is, as it was four years ago, 
  in the business of providing you with good reading. We'd like to 
  think we've learned a lot in four years, and we feel our issues 
  are much better now than they were in 1991. And as the Net 
  expands, the quality of InterText should improve along with it.

  Beyond that, I have no predictions. The Net will keep changing, 
  and we'll have to change with it. We have no illusions that 
  we're the only game in town, but we've been playing the game a 
  (relatively) long time,and we've managed to be flexible in 
  reacting to changes in the online world.

  Thanks for being with us, and a special thanks to those of you 
  who've been here since the very beginning -- you know who you 
  are.

  Now I've said my piece. No more talk of anniversaries from me -- 
  I _promise_ -- until next year.
  


  SecondText: I'm Ready For My Hotlink, Mr. De Mille   by Geoff Duncan
======================================================================

  As Jason Snell notes in his column, this issue of InterText 
  marks the beginning of our fifth year of publication. As things 
  go in the online world that doesn't make us antique, but it's 
  still a respectable track record. Of course, for the moment, the 
  numbers happen to work out in our favor: remember when you were 
  four years old and bragged you were _twice_ as old as that brat 
  down the street? At that age, those two years difference were 
  proportionately significant -- and therefore worth bragging 
  about.

  Now bear with me.

  During its life so far, InterText has managed to grow and build 
  a modicum of credibility. We receive a fair bit of mail from 
  people and organizations looking for advice on starting 
  electronic publications, the subscription list has steadily 
  grown, and while Jason and I used to (virtually) jump up and 
  down each time the name appeared in print or we received a 
  request for an interview, we're not nearly so rabid about it 
  these days. InterText has acquired its own momentum. It's an 
  interesting feeling when I see a news posting asking about 
  online fiction and someone has already directed them to 
  InterText. We'd like to think we've been improving our quality, 
  we've managed to keep perhaps the most consistent publication 
  schedule of the online fiction magazines, and with our first 
  theme issue (May-June 1994), we somehow pulled off a project 
  that's really yet to be equaled in the online fiction world. 
  (And speaking of that world, the number and quality of other 
  fiction magazines on the nets has grown rapidly in the last 
  year, with some noteworthy newcomers. Welcome aboard!)

  That said, now that the World-Wide Web has become the hula hoop 
  of the online world, all manner of commercial publishers are 
  setting up Web sites. The majority remind me of movie sets, 
  where what looks like a building is just a plywood facade 
  waiting for a good breeze. Most offer big, slow-to-download 
  graphics, maybe a phone number or e-mail contact, and those 
  ubiquitous "under construction" signs. But we're also seeing 
  big-name hype 'n` tripe sites that offer info-candy and Internet 
  hucksterism. A classic example was Paramount's site for the 
  movie "Star Trek Generations" (now, thankfully, taken down). 
  Another is the _Star Trek: Voyager_ site they've replaced it 
  with. Look -- you can download QuickTime movies of television 
  commercials! Too cool. Similarly, is it really worth pulling 
  down over a megabyte of data just to listen to William Gibson 
  reading the first few paragraphs of _Neuromancer_ (preceded, of 
  course, by some synth sounds and female moaning -- er, singing 
  -- which I guess serves as an audio version of a Boris Vallejo 
  dust jacket). While these items might have some appeal for truly 
  die-hard fans, I think I'm safe in saying their contribution to 
  the public good is somewhat... limited.

  As commercial media conglomerates plug into the nets, they're 
  relying on conservative, tried-and-true marketing methodologies 
  to get attention, with little obvious understanding of the 
  online world. They're using "star power" to pull people into 
  their sites. A number of sites have set themselves up as the 
  "only" authoritative source on various subjects, some in blatant 
  contradiction of one another. And they don't necessarily know 
  what they're doing: in about 10 minutes, I managed to find three 
  sites claiming to have the "first" novel ever serialized on the 
  nets. Sure -- and I'm Elvis's love child.

  Star power is a natural technique to use, especially since 
  publishers already own copious rights to that material. But 
  their manipulations are often incredibly obvious. You think Mick 
  and the Boys have been writing tunes via e-mail for years? I'll 
  bet dollars to donuts the Rolling Stones never saw a Unix prompt 
  before some wanna-be digital hipster in their PR machine thought 
  online promotion might be a good idea. For the most part, these 
  concerns seem to think of the nets as another drop in the bucket 
  of media saturation.

  But there's a fundamental difference in the star power these 
  companies use and the "fame" of the nets. People are "famous" on 
  the nets because they've contributed something significant to 
  network communities or network culture. A lot of things can do 
  it: social activities, being an archiver or moderator, writing 
  software, or simply having been in the right place at the right 
  time. And some people are infamous on the nets, often for 
  similar reasons.

  That's why I'm tired of being told I should be _excited_ about 
  these sites, and why I'm tired of hearing how _innovative_ they 
  think they are. There are huge numbers of creative, insightful 
  people who've been out here online for years. Some of these 
  people do extraordinary work. InterText brings you a small -- 
  no, a tiny -- selection of those people every other month. I'm 
  sorry, but QuickTime movies of William Shatner just don't 
  compare. If these companies are going to promote online, they're 
  going to have to understand how "fame" is works online before 
  they get any of my bandwidth. They're going to have to 
  _contribute_.

  Yes, fame is relative in the online world: someone who's a net 
  god in one context is an uncouth newbie in another. But fame is 
  relative in the real world too: my parents haven't the slightest 
  clue who Mick Jagger might be. And you know what? Famous people 
  on the nets have been out here two times, four times, five times 
  -- even 20 times -- longer than Mick Jagger. Really. Just check 
  the numbers.



  21st Century Dreamtime   by Steven Thorn
==========================================
...................................................................
  A riddle: what do an ex-astronaut, an Australian aborigine, a 
  giant stone sphere, and the planet Mars have in common?
...................................................................

  The sphere -- my sphere -- is built of stone, cut and measured 
  orange sandstone blocks, washed through with yellows and reds, 
  desert pastels, all cemented together with a flaking resinous 
  substance the color of dried blood.

  Over four meters in diameter, it rests in a bowl-shaped 
  depression on a cliff. A meandering offshoot of the East 
  Alligator River flows, murky brown and sluggish, a hundred 
  meters below.

  I found the sphere when I left Darwin nearly four months ago in 
  the olive land-cruiser that now stands, wedged nose-first in a 
  crack that zig-zags halfway across the jutting promontory.

  The little I've learned of the sphere these past few months 
  leaves me increasingly puzzled. It clearly predates white 
  settlement, yet its construction would have required advanced 
  tools and mathematics that the aborigines didn't possess.

  Architecturally it seems related to the spiral minaret of 
  Samarra -- which I have never seen -- and the Martian Helix, 
  which I have. The stones are largest around the sphere's 
  equator, and from there diminish upward and downward in spirals 
  that end at the poles with pyramidal keystones. A circular 
  opening in its southern hemisphere, though only a meter high, 
  serves as the entrance.

  It was through this entrance I would crawl each painted evening, 
  returning from the river gorges that fragment this land as if, 
  long ago, it was made of thick glass that had been shattered by 
  a rain of hammer blows. I would moor my three-meter aluminum 
  dinghy on the rocky beach below the cliff, rope together the 
  crocodile carcasses hunted during the day, and walk up the 
  narrow ledge that led to the top. Then, using the hand winch on 
  the rear of the four-wheel drive, I'd haul the heavy saurians up 
  and prepare them for Kundullajapininni, the enigmatic aboriginal 
  who guts and tans them. Then the skins are ready for sale to 
  representatives of exclusive French and Italian fashion houses. 
  It's a lucrative, though illegal, business.

  "What do you know about the sphere?" I asked him one star-fired 
  moonless evening as we contemplated our first month's profits 
  and the flickering campfire, and got drunk together.

  "Maybe it's _tjuringa_ for modern civilization. Maybe it's more 
  personal than that," he said and laughed, his voice becoming as 
  quiet as shifting sands, as deep flowing waters.

  "Churinga? What's that?"

  "Here." He threw a small stone to me, spiral-lined and colored 
  much like the sphere. "A tjuringa for you, Spaceman."

  "This is the Mars rock I gave you. You've carved it."

  He opened his eyes wide, his teeth lit red by the fire, his pale 
  palms weaving patterns in the darkness.

  I studied the churinga while listening to the flow of his 
  voice.

  "You found the rock and it found you, so it is ever yours, 
  Spaceman."

  Rough gritty stone, perfectly spherical.

  "Your tjuringa is the home of your spirit, a map of the 
  pattern of your life."

  Spiralling up and down, an impossibly continuous line, feeling 
  it in conjunction with the minute variations on the stone's 
  surface -- an impossible minute braille, sending electric 
  thrills up my fingertips, lighting haunted images, memories, in 
  my mind.

  "Accept this. Sing with me, `medicine man' of the `people 
  descended from the spirits of the sky.' Sing with me. Become 
  spirit brother of sun and moon, planets and stars. Sing with 
  me."

  And he began a chant, deep and resonant, that seared me to the 
  bone.

  "No!" I said bitterly, interrupting. "I hate the stars, the 
  planets of the stars."

  He chuckled then. "Oh well. `Destinies once set can scarce be 
  broken, but by the hand of death.'" A vaguely familiar 
  quotation. "Don't repeat the words `medicine man' or `people 
  descended from the spirits of the sky' to anyone." He had used 
  the aboriginal words for those. "They are secret, sacred, 
  _tabu_. It would be best if you forgot them."

  After an uncertain silence, punctuated by the fire's crackling 
  and the taste of whiskey, I said, "I'm sorry I couldn't accept." 
  I offered the churinga. "It's just... just the past."

  "No. What I have said holds true in any case. The tjuringa is 
  ever yours. What happened to you, to the Mars Project? Why did 
  it end?"

  "Madness. I can't say. My secrets. My tabu."

  "Ah well. Greater powers shape our lives than either of our 
  societies' primitive rituals." He often mocked his own culture 
  when we drank together. He had been born tribal, had attended 
  the Australian National University (as had the medicine men of 
  the last three generations of his tribe), and graduated with 
  honors in medicine and philosophy. That's where he had been 
  nicknamed K.J.

  And that was the only time he answered my questions about the 
  sphere with anything other than a strange look or a muttered 
  aboriginal word. He was, to me, as mysterious as the sphere 
  itself.



  I was outside cracking the empty blue dawn with rifle fire when 
  the autogiro appeared, a distant whirring insect, in my 
  crosshairs. Coke cans and bottles exploded off the 
  bullet-riddled hulk of the land cruiser as I let loose with the 
  rifle. They lay scattered and ruined, fragments in the dirt like 
  yesterday's forgotten dreams and remembered failures.

  Harris, the Yank, and Kate.

  I pulled the rim of the gray Akubra I was wearing over my eyes, 
  protecting them from the dust swirling up as the 'giro swept in 
  and came to rest just beyond the upturned land cruiser.

  As I walked over to meet them, I reloaded the Ruger. They hopped 
  out and walked toward me, Kate in jeans and white singlet, as 
  beautiful as ever, Harris in a gray business suit, sweating even 
  though the sun had not yet broken the horizon, grinning broadly 
  with patent American insincerity.

  "You're up early," I said as they hesitated. I slung the rifle 
  over my shoulder. "How did you find me?"

  Harris answered, "That aboriginal pal of yours said to follow 
  the East Alligator River 'til we saw a patch of red desert in 
  the middle of the jungle. He came into Darwin last week, sold 
  some gator hides to a friend of mine."

  "Crocodile skins," I corrected.

  "Croc, gator, what the hell." He grinned again.

  "So you found me. Why?"

  "I was worried about you, Mark," said Kate. Harris slid his arm 
  around her waist. Something between jealousy and hatred rose in 
  my throat. I swallowed it.

  "Going off on walkabout like that, not telling anyone. Thought 
  you damned well killed yourself." Their eyes -- his blue, hers 
  gray -- wandered over the land-cruiser.

  "Unfortunately, I didn't damn well kill myself. You shouldn't 
  have bothered coming here." I regretted saying it immediately, 
  because Kate frowned and I realized she probably thought so too. 
  I _did_ want her to stay. I could put up with Harris and the 
  emotions I thought I'd purged through rifle fire, alcohol and 
  solitude, for just a few hours with Kate.

  We had met one year after the Mars Project ended, with my three 
  months of isolation finished and six months of rehabilitation 
  ahead of me. We had been together for two years before coming to 
  Darwin trying to trace the origins of a unique aboriginal 
  artifact I'd bought, cheaply, at an auction in Brisbane.

  It was cheap because most doubted its authenticity; two spheres, 
  one slightly larger than the other, connected by a helix, carved 
  out of a single piece of a dark, hard fined-grained wood. 
  Aboriginal? Unlikely, said the assayers.

  A strange, geometrically perfect scepter or club.

  Strange to me because it summoned images, memories: through 
  filtering glass, a blood-red, rock-strewn plain. Towering, twin 
  spirals connected by sets of three bars 10 meters in length, 
  each set indefinably patterned. Two vac-suited figures 
  approaching from left and right. We form the points of a 
  diminishing triangle around the Martian Helix.

  Then... not even a scream. Static. Two vac-suits rippling as 
  though the bodies within are turning inside-out. A blackness, 
  consuming, feeling more like burning incandescent light. The 
  image faded. I bought the scepter.

  At Kate's suggestion we presented the Heritage Foundation with 
  the artifact, and they presented us with a substantial research 
  grant. After all, an anomic ex-astronaut can gain the kind of 
  sympathy and publicity that cuts through the usual red tape, and 
  an ex-astro's pension isn't that generous.

  I loved her then. I loved her when she left me for Harris five 
  months ago. I loved her now.

  "Mark, are you still so serious, so dramatic about 
  everything?" she asked.

  Was I? I looked to the ground, where I was unconsciously tracing 
  a circle in the red dirt with the toe of my boot. Were the 
  powerful emotions that ran through me, that had motivated me 
  since the end of my rehabilitation, just shallow melodrama?

  I caused several ugly, embarrassing scenes during that last 
  month in Darwin after Kate left me, and in a moment of clarity 
  in the midst of a dizzying hangover, I stocked the land cruiser 
  and left so my self-pity, bitter jealousy and anger wouldn't 
  taint Kate's newfound happiness. A selfless act, I thought, a 
  brave act of self-sacrifice for the woman I loved. Or, as I 
  thought later in moments of drunken melancholy, the actions of 
  an immature, emotionally self-indulgent, unsophisticated 
  romantic fool.

  Shallow melodrama? Only to those who lack a deeper sense of 
  feeling, of understanding.

  "Come on, Mark, lighten up. Let's talk things over. I've got a 
  case of beer and a few quarts of Chivas in the 'giro." said 
  Harris.

  "Bring the scotch." I said, forcing a weak smile. He grinned and 
  ducked back into the cab, then came out, still grinning, a 
  bottle in his hand. Harris couldn't be that bad -- after all, 
  Kate loved him, or at least thought she did.



  "Weird place," Kate said as we passed the strange monument of 
  the land cruiser, with its bullet-riddled panels, dusted all 
  around with the jewels of broken glass and torn Coke cans, the 
  rope from the hand winch vanishing into the gorge, and the wide 
  bowl with its curious globe. My monuments to possibility and 
  enigma.

  "What is it?" asked Kate as we approached.

  "I don't really know. But you know what it's related to, don't 
  you?" Kate touched her fingertips gently to the surface of the 
  sphere, and a thrill rushed through me. I watched her intensely, 
  edging between her and Harris.

  "The scepter and the Helix." Kate had shared my obsession, had 
  become part of it. Maybe that was why I felt so hurt, so bitter 
  and betrayed -- I had shared part of my delicately restructured 
  soul with her. I placed my palm on the sphere close to her's, 
  felt myself rocked by another emotional charge.

  "I know the abs didn't build it, but it's too old to have been 
  built by whites. I had a piece radiometrically dated and though 
  that's only accurate up to a point, it dates back to the early 
  paleolithic. No one's ever really explored this land properly, 
  dug down to where its secrets are buried. There's been ages 
  enough for a dozen civilizations to have flourished and died out 
  here. Died without a trace. There's a lot of paradoxes, I know, 
  but...."

  I was again sharing my obsession with her. This was something 
  between us, something that excluded Harris. If Kate had any 
  ideas on the subject, she kept them to herself. Had I raved too 
  fervently? Did I stare too intensely? Obviously she doubted 
  everything I said and probably thought I was mad, otherwise she 
  would have believed in the connection between the Helix and the 
  scepter. Wasn't the sphere further proof?

  "Looks like a crummy model of Mars," said Harris, reaching 
  between Kate and me, pulling her hand from its intimate study of 
  the texture of the sphere.

  I crawled into the cool interior, followed by Kate, then Harris. 
  I lit the gas lamp; hissing and flickering, it revealed the 
  incongruous evidence of human habitation: a small gas-powered 
  refrigerator; the back seat of the land cruiser, neatly covered 
  in blankets; stacked and fallen paperbacks; Coke cans; tinned 
  food; an albino crocodile's hide; bullets and bottles all 
  pointing to the center of the floor as if by some curious 
  magnetism; folded canvas chairs and two rifles leaning by the 
  entrance.

  I placed the Ruger with the other rifles and unfolded the 
  chairs, while Harris and Kate puzzled at the unsettling, 
  baffling effect of the interior of the sphere. Everything 
  leaning at crazy angles and the illusory impact of spinning 
  created by both the spiral pattern of the bricks, and the swirls 
  and whorls in the colors of the stone, a chaos of indefinable 
  pattern, giddied and disturbed them.

  "Ice?" I asked as they sat, relieved, their sight now distracted 
  by mundane things, though with that ever-wheeling universe 
  fluttering on the edges of vision and consciousness.

  Both nodded, I passed them glasses and sat myself. Harris poured 
  the scotch, spilling it at first, again tricked by the angles.

  "It fills to just above the entrance in the rainy season -- you 
  can see the water line. So I'll have to..." I was going to say 
  I'd have to come back to Darwin soon anyway, but I stopped, 
  because it occurred to me that the whole depressing situation 
  had caught up with me again. I gulped the scotch, picked up the 
  bottle and poured another. I sat avoiding Kate's eyes, avoiding 
  my own reflection in the bottom of the glass.

  Harris eventually broke the silence. "A friend of mine'd pay a 
  fortune if we could dismantle this thing and ship it to the 
  U.S." I decided to argue with him, score some points off him in 
  Kate's eyes.

  "That's all you Yanks do, exploit and plunder everything you get 
  your hands on. No wonder half the rock paintings have been 
  chiselled off the walls since the tourist invasion. You bastards 
  think you own the place."

  "As a matter of fact, we almost do," he said, face flushed with 
  anger. We'd been friends once, for a while in Darwin. I don't 
  think he understood why I was attacking him. "I just leased the 
  mineral rights from the tribal council. It's no worse than what 
  you're doing -- illegally killing the wildlife."

  "The government makes it illegal or legal at the drop of a hat. 
  Anyway, hunting's man's work. It's not double-talking the abs 
  out of their land by bribing crooked government officials. You 
  think you can buy anything with your all-powerful bloody Yankee 
  dollar."

  "I can, and I have," he said quietly.

  "Will you two please stop arguing," Kate said. Harris and I both 
  looked at her. She turned to him and, whispering something, 
  caressed his shoulder the way she used to caress mine. He 
  grinned. I burned.

  I stood, kicking back the canvas chair, and smashed the glass in 
  my hand against the wall. Fragments.

  "You Yanks are such hot shit? Let's see what you can do. I'm 
  going hunting -- either come with me or piss off." I grabbed the 
  Ruger, then picked up the Winchester and tossed it violently at 
  Harris. He caught it, accepting the challenge.



  The sun burned behind the sphere now, filaments of light spread 
  and danced around its silhouette. We stood trapped between the 
  deep blue bowl of sky, the red cracked dish of land, the 
  green-brown shimmering horizon, in the black shadow cast by this 
  unlikely eclipse. Forgotten satellites on collision courses, our 
  converging orbits hidden in emptiness.

  We walked down into the still-cool shadow of the gorge, 
  cancerous cells corrupting the land's veins. Harris jumped into 
  the dinghy, Kate hesitated.

  "Let's just leave, Harris, please!" She said as if I couldn't 
  hear. "The sphere, the desert, they've driven him insane." The 
  words fell dead on my ears. Nothing more could penetrate the 
  armor of my inner turmoil.

  "No," said Harris.

  I pushed and the dinghy slid into the water, stones grating on 
  the smooth hull. I jumped in, rocking it, and ripped the cord. 
  The outboard screamed as I over-revved, and we roared off 
  dangerously, our wake lapping the corrugated walls of the gorge.

  Kate screamed. Harris shouted, "Slow down, goddamn you! Slow 
  down!" Echoes bellowed through the chasm as I cut the engine, 
  not wishing to endanger Kate. Did I love her? Did I hate her? 
  The dinghy slewed around a crooked elbow bend and clanged 
  against the cliff wall.

  "Look," I said, "There's no need to worry. I know these rivers 
  like the lines in my palm."

  "Just take it easy, OK?" Harris said, then mumbled, "Damn, I 
  should've brought the scotch."

  "OK. OK. A slow ride," I said, placating them. I knew where to 
  head. The crocs would be moving downstream now, disturbed by the 
  noise and shocked water. They knew when death was around, and 
  would move away from it.

  Slowly now, like bored, discomfited tourists, we broke from 
  shadowy black water to where the sunlight sparkled on green.

  Up ahead I saw bubble trails break the surface, signalling crocs 
  underwater. I held the throttle at a dull throb, herding the 
  beasts up a dead-end canal. Cliffs loomed above us, silent, 
  watchful.

  Harris sprang up and rapidly fired three wild shots, dangerously 
  rocking the dinghy. Reverberations pounded back and forth like 
  the cliff's rumbling anger.

  "I saw one! A dark shadow under the water," Harris said, 
  pointing with the rifle at the refuting water.

  "Get down, you idiot," I said. "Don't stand up in the dinghy." 
  Harris sat, still peering into the water. The crocs would be 
  moving faster now, as death came closer. A dark stream clouded 
  the green-gold water and Harris smiled.

  "I hit one," he said.

  "Don't shoot at 'em if they're under the surface."

  "Why?" he asked, a puzzled look on his face.

  "Because if you don't kill it with one shot, it's likely to leap 
  out of the water and kill you." He grinned and laughed. I did 
  too, though for different reasons. Kate sat quietly, frightened, 
  or at least apprehensive.

  We drifted into the lagoon that ended this canal. I cut the 
  engine and felt my heart quicken to the rhythm of the water, 
  thick with growth, that slapped and dragged at the boat. Lily 
  pads smothered the surface, hid the depths. Gently swaying bull 
  rushes fringed the sides. Dark algae crawled up the walls, 
  coated the black wood that lay like the rotting corpse of some 
  forgotten giant: fallen boulders against the far cliff his 
  knobby skull; sharp stone ridges the bared bones of his broken, 
  hollow rib cage; dead gum trees his skeletal hands clawing 
  opposite sides of his grave; one knee, a stone arch lifting from 
  the water, the other the snapped trunk of a once enormous tree; 
  the bones of his feet a series of stone pillars that thrust from 
  the water on each side of the entrance.

  All clothed in glaucous algae, ragged swathes of dead brown 
  weeds and bilious hanging moss: his torn and festering flesh. 
  Buzzing clouds of insects rose and fell feasting on decaying 
  vegetation.

  This macabre apparition, the stagnation, the slow pulsation of 
  the water, and the beat of a death chant filled me with despair, 
  recalling my love, now dead, corrupted by a cancerous hatred and 
  putrid jealousy that I had fed with self-pity until malignant. 
  Now it pulsed within me, an adamantine fist clenching my 
  withered heart. Harris and Kate sat quiet, oblivious to the 
  vision.

  Rushes to our left suddenly rustled. Harris fired as a dark 
  shape slid into the water. Screeching birds flocked away over 
  the cliff's edge. One remained, however -- a cawing crow in the 
  tangled branches of a swollen boabab tree above the giant's 
  skull, the highest point of the escarpment. I aimed my rifle at 
  it, and, still cawing, it flapped lazily away.

  "Here," I said handing an oar to Harris, "paddle us up to that 
  rock."

  "I thought you said there'd be some crocs?" Harris said, 
  snorting, as the dinghy nosed into the skull's half-submerged 
  eyesocket. I stepped onto the boulder and pointed to the lily 
  pads closing over our wake. "Look."

  He stood and turned as dark menacing eyes, long snouts and 
  serrated backs surfaced. They seemed to watch us with a cool, 
  appraising intelligence.

  Then Harris fired, spasms of irrational fear shook him, and he 
  fell backward into the water.

  A four-meter croc slashed forward toward Harris, screaming and 
  thrashing in the water. Another surfaced and snapped as Harris 
  got a grip on the boat's edge. Kate screamed and shouted Harris' 
  name.

  I think I saw movement out of the corner of my eyes, but I shot 
  the crocodile behind Harris as he hung halfway in the dinghy, 
  then felt the crunching and tugging at my leg. I fell and 
  started sliding down into the water.

  Strangely, I was cool and calm, the pain in my leg seemed a 
  distant remembered pain. Overhead, a crow circled and laughed. A 
  flaming crescent sun broke the edge of the escarpment, a dark 
  shape stood silhouetted there. I heard a booming, felt water 
  cover my face, felt hands grip mine and felt no more.

  Blurred memories: the boat slicing through water; the sky framed 
  by cliffs; Kate crying; Harris somber and silent, and K.J. 
  muttering and bandaging my foot?

  The autogiro, a crow flying into the white hot disk of sun. 
  Darwin below, a strange circuit board. Waking in Darwin Base 
  Hospital, a searing pain in my left foot that was no longer 
  there.



  After a month in hospital, another in rehab, against my doctor's 
  recommendation I left Darwin. I saw Kate the day before I left. 
  She was going to the U.S. with Harris. She thanked me for saving 
  his life. Is that what I did? And said he had deposited 20 thou 
  in my account and promised more. He had signed over the 'giro to 
  me as well. She said something about her contract being 
  finished, her assignment, cancelled, over. Two years with her 
  and I hadn't realized. She was from the Project.

  I didn't care. I was past caring.

  No longer sure of my ability to fly a 'giro, I hired a pilot and 
  left Darwin, searching for the sphere, the patch of red desert 
  in the middle of the sub-tropical jungle. I searched for weeks. 
  I asked the tribal aborigines if they knew of it, knew of 
  Kundullajapininni.

  They knew of neither.

  Now living back in Darwin, I feel disassociated from the images 
  that run through my mind. They seem as vague, blurred and unreal 
  as a half-remembered dream. But when my plastic and aluminum 
  prosthetic foot takes the weight of my body and I feel the 
  echoes of pain, I see fiery eclipses, fractured landscapes, 
  helixes and spheres, skeletal giants and the slow-beating wings 
  of a crow.

  Delusions, says the doctor. But what delusions?

  Of being the sole survivor of the Mars Project? Fantasies of 
  being a crocodile hunter? An imagined aboriginal friend? An 
  illusory relationship with a dream girl?

  A car accident, they say. Injury, exposure, shock.

  Trauma. A common enough occurrence, they say. But I hear them 
  whispering about personality reconstruction and genetic 
  fluctuation and remember it from before. Confusion. Fantasy. 
  Therapy.

  I turn the small, lined rock in my hands and study the dark 
  specks on my fingertips, and I realize the truth, the 
  connection. From the wardroom's window I watch the aborigines 
  smile at each other with a confidence and knowledge that runs as 
  deep, as ancient, as alien, and as strong as their genes.

  So I wait.



  Steven Thorn (steven_thorn@macconn.mpx.com.au)
------------------------------------------------

  Steven Thorn grew up on the fringes of New South Wales country 
  towns, in the Adelaide Hills, the streets of Sydney, and the 
  roads in between. He left school at 16 and spent the next few 
  years travelling around Australia before going to college. He 
  studies writing, film, performance, and aboriginal cultures and 
  beliefs. He has written and published science fiction, fantasy 
  and horror stories in fanzines, student newspapers and other 
  small print media. He also writes poetry and screenplays. This 
  is his first electronic, international publication.



  Nothing, Not a Thing   by Sung J. Woo
=======================================
...................................................................
  Some people have their lives mapped out to the last detail; 
  others take opportunities as they present themselves. So what 
  happens if there are no opportunities?
...................................................................

  You find yourself wearing sunglasses a lot, even when the skies 
  are thick with clouds. Your mother has not yet asked just why 
  you wear your sunglasses all the time, but she's going to. She 
  has that inquisitive look about her lately. If she were to ask, 
  maybe you would lie to her, tell her that your eyes have 
  suddenly become hyper-sensitive, that sunlight, even in low 
  doses, does nasty things to your vision.

  The real reason, of course, is that you wish to be unknown. 
  Nothing frightens you more than running into someone you knew in 
  high school. You've never been very good at ignoring people. 
  Throughout your life, you've always found the need to say at 
  least a friendly hello. Besides, ignoring your problems is no 
  way to solve them. You've heard that at least a million times.

  But there's no way you're going anywhere come Thanksgiving and 
  near Christmas. That's when they're all back. You've already 
  crossed off November 23rd to November 27th, and you're going to 
  do your Christmas shopping very, very early. Maybe tomorrow.

  "Why are you wearing your dark glasses?" your mother asks in the 
  car. She never says sunglasses, always dark glasses -- with that 
  emphasis on the _dark_ -- as if they're innately bad. It's 6:43 
  PM. There's no sunlight at all.

  You ready your mouth for a lie, but before you can say anything, 
  you find yourself taking your sunglasses off. "I guess I 
  forgot," you say, and breathe out a sigh so deep that you fog up 
  the windshield.



  You carry up four grocery bags to your parents' apartment. 
  "You're going to break your back one day," your mother yells, so 
  you take only two bags on the second trip. Only one bag remains, 
  and your mother carries that one up herself.

  She puts away one item after another while you wait. Ever since 
  you can remember, your mother put the food away and you folded 
  the paper bags into a neat pile. She saves those bags for the 
  bathroom garbage and for other things. She is, as you often 
  jokingly call her, the kitchen goddess.

  While folding one bag after another, you suddenly remember how 
  you used to cover your books with grocery bags back in grammar 
  school. You always wrote the name of the class, your name, and 
  the classroom number on those brown covers. You've been having 
  these flashbacks a lot lately. You wonder if it's about time you 
  take up Bingo and talk about how glorious the "old days" used to 
  be.

  You were lucky this time, not running into anyone you know at 
  the supermarket. But you know it's going to happen sooner or 
  later. You're going to run into someone you know, and you're 
  going to have to tell them your whole sad story.

  You close the door to your room and lie down on the bed 
  face-first. It's not even noon yet, but you feel like you've run 
  30 miles. You never thought you'd be this tired at 23.

  You blindly feel for the remote control, and your hands finally 
  find it hiding between the folds of your comforter. You turn on 
  the radio to hear some loudmouth DJ making fun of one of your 
  favorite bands, but you do nothing about it. Actually, it's kind 
  of funny.

  You slowly turn over and face the ceiling. Your room was turned 
  into a study while you were gone for these last four years. You 
  can see your father's business books where your favorite novels 
  used to sit. And a lot of his bookkeeping stuff is piled on your 
  desk. You thought about moving it somewhere, but you no longer 
  have a use for a desk. After all, your time in school is over.

  Your college diploma hangs over your bed. It's one of those 
  laminated jobs. After graduation, while you were hanging out and 
  drinking your summer away on campus, your parents took your 
  diploma and had it sealed into a plaque.

  Your old toys decorate the top shelf of the bookcase on the 
  wall. Your mother did that just before you came back from 
  college, as if to signify that all was good and that you were 
  welcomed back with open arms and warm hands. But when you look 
  at those toys now, one Tonka truck after another, you feel 
  relentlessly out of place. You feel the way Alice must have felt 
  in Wonderland after she grew really huge in that house. 
  Strangely, totally, utterly out of place.



  You've been back from college for a month and you still can't 
  quite believe that you won't be going back to school. All your 
  life you've gone to school. When September came, you were in a 
  classroom, listening to the familiar buzz of a professorial 
  filibuster.

  The first week back, you were OK. It was like a vacation, like 
  coming home for Spring Break. But for the last couple of days, 
  you've been feeling empty and terribly lost, like a tongue 
  poking around the spot where a tooth used to be.

  You find yourself eating, sleeping, and watching a lot of 
  television. You never watched television in college, never could 
  find the time -- and there was always something better to do -- 
  but now at home, alone, you cannot find a better companion. It 
  is always there for you. Even when it's turned off, you can 
  almost hear the voices of premieres and reruns, megastars and 
  fadeaways, chattering endlessly in their electronic vernacular.

  Of course, you could have gotten a job like some of your 
  friends, who are now working in New York or San Francisco, some 
  big city, typing at their keyboards and making deals with big 
  business people everywhere. You tried, tried for a couple of 
  places, going to interviews wearing your killer black suit and 
  wing-tipped shoes, but nothing really piqued your interest. At 
  that time, you really didn't care enough to do anything.

  You don't feel so badly for yourself -- for you are a young and 
  healthy man -- but you feel terrible for your parents. They 
  invested almost a hundred thousand dollars for your higher 
  education and now you are home with nothing, not a thing. On the 
  weekends, when your parents are home from their jobs, you almost 
  don't want to get the phone. Because every time you get it, it's 
  one of your mother's friends. What is your son doing? Isn't he 
  out of school? Oh, he doesn't have a job. My child? He's in 
  Harvard med. She's with Chase Manhattan. He's doing this, she's 
  doing that. You can only hear your mother's side of the 
  conversation, and you know your mother is ashamed because her 
  voice gets very soft and whimpery when she has to say her son is 
  home and no, he doesn't have a job. Hearing her say that is like 
  being pricked by a pin. It's not fatal, but it really smarts.



  Another miserable Monday comes. You go out every morning to jog 
  a few miles, and you've done it for a month now, which must be a 
  record. You run for 20 minutes, stretch for five, and do some 
  push-ups and sit-ups.

  By the time you are back in the apartment, both your father and 
  your mother have left for work. Your mother always leaves some 
  food behind for your lunch, and today's no exception. You've 
  told her numerous times that she didn't have to do that, that 
  you are certainly old enough to make your own lunch, but she 
  doesn't listen. In her eyes, you're still just a baby.

  Last night, before _The Simpsons_ came on, you called Marty. 
  He's about the only friend from college you talk to now. You've 
  thought about calling other people, but it just isn't worth it. 
  All they'd talk about is their new job and their new place and 
  maybe a new love interest. You made the mistake of calling Chris 
  a couple of weeks back, and he just blabbed and blabbed about 
  how terrible his new job was and how he was getting only 32 
  grand for it.

  Marty was one year your senior, and he's still living at home 
  with his parents, working at a low-paying, dead-end publishing 
  firm. Surprisingly enough, you kept in touch with him all last 
  year. While you and Marty weren't very close in college, your 
  friendship managed to grow through occasional phone calls and a 
  barrage of e-mail. You even talked about renting an apartment 
  together, once you landed a steady job.

  You asked him for advice, and he told you to find some temporary 
  employment agencies. "That's what I did when I got out of 
  school," he said. "They find work for you. Companies hire temps 
  because they don't have to shell out any benefits."

  So you spend your morning with a bowl of Cheerios, a cup of 
  decaf, and the Yellow Pages. You hunt for those temp agencies, 
  and one catches your eye.


>     POWER-4 TEMPORARY SERVICES
>     Putting Quality to Work

  There are a dozen more temp agencies, but you decide to call up 
  P-4. You ask a woman named Rita if they have any time today to 
  interview, and she tells you that Mondays are always out. You 
  tell her to pen you in for tomorrow at 10, to which she agrees 
  wholeheartedly.

  After finishing your bowl of cereal, you start doing the dishes. 
  Your mother told you not to do them, that it's her work, but you 
  have been feeling so useless that you need to do something, 
  anything -- even something as mindless and menial as dishwashing 
  -- to find some reason for your present existence. After 
  soaping, scrubbing, and rinsing, it's half past 11. You realize 
  that your mother could do them at twice your speed, and probably 
  do them a lot better.



  The cheapest answering machine you can find is at Sears. It has 
  one spy-sized cassette under a secret door and has two shiny 
  buttons. You realize that you've never owned an answering 
  machine before; your roommates and apartment-mates have always 
  provided you with one.

  According to Marty, having an answering machine was essential 
  when you worked for a temp agency. The place he used to work for 
  called him all the time, asking him to call him back to take a 
  job for a day or a week, or if he were really lucky, a month.

  You look for this $24.95 wonder in a box, but it's nowhere to be 
  found. You search the area, but it seems like they don't have 
  any in stock.

  "I don't think you'll find any other ones," a woman's voice says 
  behind you. You recognize that voice, but you're not sure from 
  where.

  You turn around. "Do you work here?" you ask staring at this 
  tall, gawky looking woman. She used to be your English teacher 
  back in high school. "Oh, Ms. O'Brien," you say. "How are you?"

  She says she's fine and how are you doing and what are you doing 
  here, shouldn't you be in school?

  "I'm finished with school," you say faintly, looking down at the 
  answering machine.

  "Oh," she says. "That's right, you graduated last May. 
  Congratulations. And from such a fine school."

  "Well..." you say, looking at the answering machine.

  "You did graduate with a major in English, did you not?" You nod 
  your head. "Good choice," she says, and offers you a smile. You 
  smile, too. "What's the answering machine for?"

  "It's for my mother," you say. "I've got to go. It was nice 
  seeing you."

  "You too," she says, and she's about to say something else but 
  you turn and walk away. That's how you'll always remember her: 
  her mouth half open, her voice stuck in her throat, her eyes 
  wide with pity.

  You run out of Sears and go to Radio Shack, whose cheapest 
  answering machine runs for two bucks more. You pay the man and 
  rush to your car, head down, sunglasses on.



  Inside the testing room of Power-4 Temporary Services, you 
  transcribe a fake hand-written office memo on the word 
  processor. It's not a terribly difficult task, but it's somewhat 
  intimidating. You've never actually written a real office memo 
  before, and it's been ages since you've had a real test -- maybe 
  two or three years. But it seems simple enough, and after 
  clicking away for a couple of minutes, you tell Rita that you 
  are finished.

  "So soon?" she says. "Wow, what a typer." You realize that Rita 
  is the nice one and Colleen is the bad one. It's almost like the 
  good-cop-bad-cop charade they use in bad police flicks. Rita is 
  bouncy, attentive, and smiles and frowns to your every response. 
  Colleen, on the other hand, is serious, professional, and 
  straightforward. Colleen's got killer eyes, though, a shade of 
  brown that's at once familiar and mysterious.

  "Let's take a look at the results," Colleen says, staring you 
  down. The automated grading system gave you an accuracy rating 
  of 67 percent and a speed rating of "Very Fast." Almost all the 
  mistakes come from a lack of knowledge in business writing, so 
  you point out this fact.

  "A lot of people such as yourself," Colleen says, emphasizing 
  and enjoying her emphasis on the word _yourself_, "they come in 
  here and say they're really familiar with WordPerfect. Experts, 
  no less. But all they've done on their computers in college is 
  type term papers. Uh-uh," she says, wagging her index finger in 
  front of your face as if you were a bratty little kid, "that's 
  wrong. What you need in the real world is business writing 
  skills."

  "These mistakes," Rita says, scrutinizing the graded paper, "are 
  the same mistakes I made when I first started."

  "Anyway," Colleen says to you, "you're pretty good at typing, 
  though. Maybe we can find you some data entry jobs. Meanwhile, 
  let me set you up with these videos." She leads you into a tiny 
  glassed room in the corner. A TV-VCR combo is mounted against 
  the far wall.

  She gives you a pair of workbooks. The first one is titled 
  _Power-4 Philosophy._ After a brief introduction, idiot 
  questions about the badly-acted scenarios follow.

  "Watch the video and follow with the workbooks," she says, and 
  closes the door. It's like watching a red-eye infomercial. 
  Strong-jawed male with dark mane, cute blonde female with 
  perfect makeup. You recognize the woman. She played a leathery 
  lesbian in a porn video you saw couple of months back, "Dare to 
  Wet Dream." It's weird seeing her in a business suit and talking 
  so much.

  In the video, whenever the woman talks, the guy looks at you and 
  nods. Then he smiles for a few seconds. Then he goes back to 
  nodding. And when he talks, she does the same thing. It's like 
  watching a pair of used car salesmen trying to double up on a 
  customer. Hey, she's good, real good. Yeah, but he's better, a 
  real pro. No, really. No, really.

  It's too much excitement for one day. The workbook has answers 
  for the idiot questions in the back, so you just copy them. You 
  do the exact same for the second video, "Power-4 Quality 
  Service." It's the same duo, perfect man and perfect woman.

  You imagine them ripping open their shirts: the guy with a 
  yellow-and- orange P inscribed within an upside-down triangle on 
  his pects, the woman with pink P tassels hanging from her 
  nipples. It's so funny you double over laughing, earning an icy 
  stare from Colleen.



  The answering machine was so cheap that it didn't even let you 
  record a greeting. All you were allowed to do was enter your 
  seven-digit phone number, which was then melded into the 
  Automatic Greeting Program. The sweet voice of a well-educated 
  woman said, "You have reached XXX-XXXX. Please leave a message 
  at the tone." It did the job. And when you get back from the 
  temp agency interview, you find a message on the machine, your 
  very first.

  You play it and listen to some woman who called from Everglades 
  Publishing looking for you. Everglades Publishing was one of two 
  companies who interviewed you in the spring. Your heart beats a 
  little harder as you dial the number.

  "Hello, Mary Landis speaking," the phone says. You state your 
  name and your business in your very best voice. She tells you 
  that the assistant managing editor of _Upbeat_ magazine would 
  like to interview you. "Could you please come to our office in 
  Manhattan?"

  You're there. You're hip. You make an appointment for tomorrow. 
  After you hang up, you head for the library. You have some 
  serious catching up to do with past issues of _Upbeat_.



  You take a quick peek at your wristwatch, and you relax. You've 
  been talking to Helen D. McDougall for more than an hour, and 
  she still looks interested in everything you say. You're looking 
  dashing today, even down to your socks, a 12-dollar pair of Ivy 
  League argyle hosiery. When you cross your legs, Ms. McDougall, 
  the assistant managing editor, compliments on your spiffy 
  attire. You wave her off and laugh a finely controlled laughter, 
  full of good intentions and genuine humility. You tell her a 
  little more about your work with your college newspaper, about 
  all the deadlines you had to meet, the pressures of being behind 
  the night editor's desk.

  Ms. McDougall tells you a little more about the job, an 
  editorial researcher position. Lots of phone calls, some 
  paperwork, but most of all, detail work, she tells you. You need 
  the eyes of a jeweler -- very, very careful -- but not sluggish. 
  And you need to be anal-retentive. `We pride ourselves in the 
  accuracy of the reported material.'

  It sounds like a boring job, but it would get you out of your 
  parents' house. It doesn't pay very much -- if you're looking to 
  get rich in publishing, she tells you with a jackknifed smile, 
  you're going to be very disappointed -- but it would be room and 
  board, and probably a bit left over for some used CDs.

  She shakes your hand. "You're a really strong candidate," she 
  says, and it actually seems genuine. She wouldn't be able to say 
  it in that way if she didn't mean it.

  "Thank you," you say, giving her a fairly hard handshake. You're 
  still not too sure about shaking women's hands. With men, you 
  shake as hard as you can. But with women, it really all depends 
  on the woman and her attitude.

  "Ms. Landis in Human Resources will be in touch with you very 
  shortly," she says. "We need someone right away."

  "Thanks again," you say, and close the door behind you. On your 
  way to the elevator, you take in the surroundings. It's like all 
  the other publishing houses you've ever been to. The senior 
  editors and above have their own offices and the assistant 
  editors live in their maze of cubicles. You'd probably have your 
  own cubicle, too, and your own felt wall for pinning up little 
  _New Yorker_ cartoons.

  It wouldn't be a great job, you think as you muse to the quiet 
  hum of the elevator, but it would be a living. At least for a 
  little while. And when you get this job, maybe you'll go back to 
  Power-4 Temporary Services and tell Colleen she can shove her 
  attitude up her fat butt.



  You watch talk show after talk show, then reruns of old shows 
  like _Bewitched_ and _I Dream of Jeannie._ You were never a fan 
  of _Bewitched,_ mostly because it was made after _Jeannie_ and 
  was a cheesy copy of a great idea. You hate that -- copycats 
  with no creative abilities of their own, vultures who feed on 
  the leftovers of geniuses.

  When you told your parents about the interview, they were 
  ecstatic, especially your mother. After hearing the wonderful 
  news, her whole tone was different in her phone conversations 
  with her friends. She didn't even talk about you, but you could 
  tell from her peppy little voice, slightly higher and faster, 
  almost chipmunk-like, just how happy she was.

  But now two weeks have passed and nothing. No phone calls, no 
  messages. The answering machine just sits there doing nothing. 
  Sort of like you. Except it doesn't eat as much.

  You've done the dishes, the laundry, even cleaned the toilet 
  with a scrub pad, left it so clean that it could be the star of 
  a Ty-D-Bowl commercial. You rearranged the closet, which didn't 
  need rearranging, but you wiped and scoured and dusted and 
  shined and now that closet is immaculate, hypo-allergenic, 
  brilliant.

  Your mother doesn't ask, but when she comes home from work, she 
  has that look, that hopeful look. But all it takes is one glance 
  at your face and she knows that nothing has happened.

  But something did happen. You broke down and called Everglades 
  yesterday afternoon, and Mary Landis told you that you were a 
  very strong candidate but they hired someone else. Somebody who 
  wasn't exactly more qualified, but "more directed for the 
  position," whatever the hell that meant.

  You hear the slow steps of your mother coming back from work. 
  It's half past four, which is a bit earlier than usual. There is 
  no longer that hopeful look about her face. She's already given 
  up on Everglades Publishing, so there's no reason to tell her 
  anything. She shuffles in and goes into the kitchen.

  "Did you have enough for lunch?" she yells from the kitchen. 
  "Yes, mom," you say sleepily. You've been watching TV since you 
  got up. "You know that Marty called last night, right?" "No," 
  you say, although you heard her answer the phone call. She comes 
  out of the kitchen and goes to the answering machine. "I taped 
  this note here for you," she says, bringing a ripped corner of a 
  newspaper. You take it and put it in your pocket. She goes back 
  into the kitchen, clanging pots and turning on the water.

  "He told me he got a new job," she screamed from the kitchen. 
  You never understood why she insisted on talking with the faucet 
  running, because she could never hear what you were saying.

  "Yeah," you say to yourself, vegetating on some PBS documentary 
  on the birth of the universe.

  "He says it pays pretty good," she yells again. "Yeah," you say 
  again.

  "Call him back. He said he hasn't talked to you in ages," she 
  says. The bearded host guides you through a computer-drawn movie 
  of the universe. It's going backward, and everything becomes 
  smaller and smaller, then there's a humongous explosion. Or 
  implosion. It's hard to tell when everything is going in 
  reverse.



  You get back from your daily run to hear the phone ringing. You 
  somehow find the strength to rush up the stairs.

  "Hello," you say into the phone, trying to silence the panting. 
  "This is Colleen from P-4, and I think I'm talking to the right 
  person." "You are," you say, and sit down on the couch. "Got a 
  data entry job for you, but you have to start today. Can you do 
  that?"

  "Today?" you ask. Marty warned you that temp services were like 
  this. Today's Friday, too. But then again, if wasn't as if you'd 
  just had four previous days of backbreaking work.

  "If you don't want it, I'll give it to someone else," she said. 
  "Take it or leave it."

  "All right, all right, I'll take it," you say. She gives you the 
  address, the directions, and the name of the person you have to 
  report to. After you hang up, you take a quick shower, eat a 
  quick tuna sandwich, and quickly jump into your car. It's a 
  45-minute drive, and you wonder if this is really worth it for 
  three measly days of grunt work.

  The directions are not correct. You pass three traffic lights 
  instead of two after turning off the highway. Maybe Colleen was 
  trying to screw you up, laughing hysterically in her office 
  right now as she showed her awful videos to more overeducated 
  and underemployed victims.

  You finally get to Savon Equipment, a huge building at the end 
  of Fulton Road. At least Colleen got that much right. You touch 
  up your hair, straighten your tie, and head for the entrance.



  You can't remember the last time you've done something as 
  mindless as this. Enter item number then S then Y then N then N 
  then F12, RETURN, thank you, next. Over and over again. You're 
  not entirely sure what you are really doing -- for all you know, 
  you may be typing the launch code sequence for an ICBM to North 
  Korea.

  You've become intimate with the keyboard and the computer 
  screen, which is a familiar shade of amber. Colleen's eyes are 
  exactly that color, you realize in the middle of one entry, but 
  you keep on chugging away, one line after another. Your life has 
  become quadchromatic: white, green, amber, and black. The sheets 
  you are using are the wide, white-and-green computer printouts, 
  the kind that computer geeks ogle and giggle at.

  Barbara, the woman you reported to, was in charge of all facets 
  of computer life in this company, and it shows. She's tired and 
  groggy and talks frequently about her upcoming vacation. She has 
  a foreign accent, probably Czechoslovakian, although you can't 
  be sure. "My name is Bar-ba-ra," she said when introducing 
  herself, pronouncing every syllable, and it dawned on you that 
  Barbra Streisand was the only woman named Barbara whose spelling 
  and pronunciation correlated.

  You get up from your chair and stretch. After downing four cups 
  of coffee, your bladder thuds for some relief.

  Savon Equipment has some of the widest halls you've ever seen. 
  You could probably walk these halls for a month without ever 
  bumping into another human being. No wonder the workers look the 
  way they do.

  A man walks by you and looks at you funny. It's the tie, you 
  think. Barbara was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of faded 
  jeans. It was Friday, Dress Down Day. You are probably the only 
  guy in the whole place with a tie today. You briefly thought 
  about taking it off, but then what would the people think? He 
  had the tie on, and then he took it off. Wouldn't that be worse 
  than just wearing it?

  When you get back to work, a girl is sitting in the booth next 
  to yours. She smiles in a friendly way and keeps your gaze until 
  you break it. You make some idle conversation throughout the day 
  while sizing her up. She's kind of cute, you think, maybe a 
  little short. You have lunch together, and she plays with your 
  food. She's a high school dropout, and she likes to smoke grass. 
  Her name is also Barbara, but she pronounces it like everybody 
  else.



  She's only 16, but she kisses better than any girl you've ever 
  been with. Her lips are strong and assertive. Her tongue is 
  everywhere inside your mouth, probing, pushing, shoving. She 
  tastes like honey.

  The car is so hot that it's all fogged up inside. Barbara pushes 
  you against the door, her hands inside your shirt, her long, 
  strawberry-scented hair covering both of your faces.

  You try to remember when you last made out in your car, and you 
  realize that you've never done it. When you were in high school, 
  you never had a girlfriend, and in college, there was always a 
  room available somewhere.

  She starts taking off her shirt, and you can see that she's not 
  wearing a bra. They are sad little mounds, barely big enough for 
  your hands, but you cup her breasts anyway.

  And when she has her hands on your belt buckle, you start 
  sobbing. She's off of you in a flash, as if shocked by 
  electricity. She is silent, completely still, and watches you 
  without blinking. She's pushed herself as far away as she can, 
  smearing the condensation on the window.

  "What's wrong?" she finally says. "Did I do something?" But you 
  can't tell her anything because you're crying louder than ever, 
  wailing away. You can't tell Barbara how low you feel, how you 
  have no idea what you want to do with your life, how your mother 
  can't stand the sight of you, how you thought about fucking her 
  anyway even though it would be statutory rape. All you can do is 
  let the tears flow on and on.

  Eventually she comes to you -- crawls to you slowly and 
  carefully -- to hold your quivering face against her bare 
  breasts.



  The phone rings and you let the answering machine pick it up.

  "This is Colleen from P-4," it says, but you pick up the phone 
  before she can finish. You turn the TV down with the remote, 
  Gilligan's voice fading slowly to silence. It's another data 
  entry job. She gives you the directions, which you copy onto the 
  back of last week's _TV Guide._

  You leave the turnpike on Exit 15 and get on Route 46. You go 
  for half a mile, trying to find Gate Drive. You make a left and 
  search for a brown and white building immediately on your left.

  You keep driving for a couple more minutes, but you can't find 
  it anywhere. You eventually turn around, looking for a road 
  sign. You're on Payne Drive. It was probably the fork a couple 
  of miles back; maybe you should have veered right instead of 
  left. You study the directions on the back of the _TV Guide,_ 
  but they tell you nothing you didn't know before.

  You backtrack and try to find Route 46, but somehow you end up 
  on Route 17. Route 17 looks just like Route 46. There is no 
  difference.



  Sung J. Woo (swoo@ieee.org)
-----------------------------

  Sung J. Woo is an Assistant Editor at IEEE 
  Transactions/Journals. He is the editor of the online magazine 
  _Whirlwind._



  Flying Toasters   by Ken Kousen
=================================
...................................................................
  So when was the last time you were at a garage sale halfway 
  around the world, offered someone a ride home, crash-landed in 
  the middle of Ohio, and learned about some nifty antiques?
...................................................................

  Fred first saw Nancy in Caracas, in the Venezuelan Free State, 
  at an antique show featuring 20th-century bric-a-brac. 
  Immediately, his heart was captured. Fred's eyes swept from the 
  top of her spiraling blonde twirl-cut, down along her iridescent 
  monokini (where they lingered in the obvious places), and 
  finally reached her flats, upon which she bounced lightly. Of 
  course, what _really_ caught his attention was her long blue 
  tail, which swished back and forth excitedly, and, thought Fred, 
  excitingly.

  For his part, Fred was unremarkable, decked out as he was in his 
  standard, blue-pinstriped skinsuit, all business. He leaned 
  forward hesitantly, partly to start a conversation and partly to 
  get a glimpse at the treasures so amply filling Nancy's 
  monokini. She abruptly straightened, however, with a shiny, flat 
  metal object in her hands.

  "Isn't this just _divine_?" she asked rhetorically. Fred looked 
  about quickly, and decided she must be talking to him. He 
  straightened in an attempt to look dignified.

  "Hmm, yes, of course," he said.

  Nancy turned to face him, revealing sparkling silver eyes. Fred 
  was captured all over again.

  "I've looked _everywhere_ for one of these, and here they've got 
  a set of four," she said. "The last two weeks I've been from one 
  end of the east coast to the other, from Scotia to Atlantahassee 
  to Rio. I thought I'd found one in Carolina, but it turned out 
  to be a fake. I was glad, though, because I never could have 
  gotten it through customs. Have you ever been to Carolina?"

  "Sorry, no. But I -- "

  "Well, don't go!" she said emphatically. "They're always hurting 
  for hard currency and they'll do _anything_ they can to cheat 
  you out of yours. And all you hear all day long is moaning about 
  tobacco. Tobacco this, tobacco that. Honestly, if they hadn't 
  wanted to be a one product economy, they shouldn't have seceded 
  in the first place! If my message filters hadn't heard about 
  their toaster, I _never_ would have gone."

  Fred observed her tail performed an astonishing set of loops and 
  rolls as she spoke. Something she said caught his attention, 
  however, and brought him back into the conversation.

  "Toaster?" he said. "What's a toaster?"

  Her tail stood straight up in the air, and he wondered if he 
  hadn't asked the wrong question.

  "Why, one of _these_," she said, thrusting the metal object at 
  him. It was shaped roughly like a comm unit, rounded along its 
  upper surface. Two gaping wide openings had been driven into it, 
  which seemed absurdly large for data disks. From one corner 
  dangled a long black cord, which presumably connected the unit 
  to an external power source.

  She held it up so he could see better, and he noticed that the 
  sides had been polished to a glassy brightness. "It was used for 
  baking bread," she said. "Back in the 20th century they were 
  amazingly common kitchen items."

  "I see," he said, trying hard to be enthusiastic. Not hard 
  enough, he thought, because the light that animated her so 
  brightly had already turned from him. He felt as though the sun 
  had just gone behind a cloud, which in fact it had, Fred noted.

  She turned away and motioned for the roboid to give her a price. 
  The roboid was old, which fit the surroundings, and wasn't 
  terribly sophisticated. It haggled a bit, but once it reached 
  its narrowly defined limit, it was finished.

  "Six hundred nacus," it droned.

  "Oh, _please_," she said. "I've only got 400 nacus with me, and 
  I need transit fare back to Hio. Would you accept Hio dollars?"

  "Six hundred nacus. We are sorry, but we accept North American 
  Currency Units only."

  "Look, I'm the only customer here, and I haven't seen anyone 
  else in the last two hours. Surely it would be better to sell 
  something rather than nothing, right? Closing time is coming 
  soon, the dome will go up, and you'll just be stuck with it."

  "Six hundred nacus."

  Her tail slashed from side to side in obvious anger. It struck 
  Fred lightly, by accident, but the contact was enough to wake 
  him from his complacency.

  "Wait," he said, straightening up and resting a hand on her 
  shoulder. The touch sent surges of power through him. "Maybe I 
  can help."

  She looked up at him, surprised, but hopeful.

  "Yes," he continued, mentally counting his own money. "I could 
  lend you 200 nacus, and give you a ride home."

  Her tail went up to half-mast, which he interpreted as hopeful 
  caution.

  "I don't know if I should," she said. "I don't even know your 
  name."

  "Fred Tannen," he said. He held out a hand to her. She tucked 
  the toaster under one arm and took his hand, which made the 
  previous power surge feel like popguns next to plasma cannons. 
  Two hundred nacus was not too much to pay to stay near that 
  feeling. Not at all.

  "Nancy Adams," she said.

  "I know I'm being rather forward, but I promise to be a 
  gentleman. I'm a just minor executive with a multinational, and 
  I was only stopping by here to pick up something for my 
  daughter. My lift is out back, and I can surely spare the room."

  The tail curled slightly, so he felt like he was making 
  progress.

  "Well, OK," she said, "but did you want to pick up something for 
  your wife as well?"

  "No, I wouldn't," he said. "I am not currently wedded, or I 
  wouldn't be offering rides to beautiful young women." There, he 
  thought, that was good. Get a compliment in and show her I'm 
  available. Nice work.

  "Oh, I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I'd be delighted to accept 
  your help. Once I'm back in Hio, I can get the money to pay you 
  back."

  "Fine, under one condition."

  "Yes?"

  "That you have dinner with me tonight."

  The tail swished back and forth rapidly, but she smiled.

  "Very well," she said.



  They boarded his lift at the Caracas spaceport, after Nancy made 
  appropriate complimentary noises about its shine and condition. 
  Fred stored her gear with his in the sleeping compartment aft, 
  except for the bag containing her toasters and his little 
  doohickey he had picked up for his daughter. The roboid had 
  called an "eggbeater."

  They settled into the contoured pilot seats. Fred had wondered 
  how Nancy would accommodate her tail, but she seemed content to 
  simply slide it down between her legs and coil it in her lap. 
  His temperature rose several degrees as he surreptitiously 
  watched this maneuver. To cover up his reaction, he leaned over 
  the computer interface and made a great show of concentrating on 
  keying in her destination. After a minor delay, the tower gave 
  them clearance to launch, with only a mild warning about the 
  possibility of bad weather over the Midwest Territories.

  The launch shook Nancy up a bit. Fred reflected that she no 
  doubt normally traveled by transit liner, which was a much 
  larger craft and gave a correspondingly smoother ride. He began 
  to apologize for the air buffeting, but she waved him off.

  "No, don't worry," she said. "This is _fun!_ I've never ridden 
  in a single family lift before. How long have you owned it?"

  "Actually, I don't own it. It's a company vehicle."

  "Really? I thought you said you were a _minor_ executive."

  Fred squirmed in his seat. "Well, there's minor, and there's 
  minor. My former wife was a pilot for Star Ways, which is where 
  I work, and they gave me this vehicle when she left."

  A look of concern came over her face, which turned her eyes from 
  silver to light blue. "Oh, I'm sorry. I had no idea."

  "Oh no -- it's not like it sounds. She was given command of the 
  _Toreador_ 10 years ago. You know, the interstellar craft taking 
  all those settlers to Rigel?"

  Nancy nodded.

  "Well, it's a relativistic trip, so by the time she gets back 
  she'll have aged only four years, but I'll be 172."

  "How tragic," she said, resting her hand on his shoulder, which 
  made Fred dizzy. "And leaving you with a daughter to raise all 
  alone like that."

  "Um, well, truth to tell, I can't be too upset. We knew this was 
  a possibility when we got married. My wife was born to be an 
  explorer. Besides, she didn't exactly leave me with a daughter."

  "No?"

  "No. Shyrra is actually a clone of my wife I'm raising with help 
  from Star Ways. They've been great about the whole thing, both 
  financially and otherwise. I'll tell you, though, it feels 
  awfully weird raising my wife as a child. I'm really not looking 
  forward to puberty."

  "I'll bet."

  "Yeah," Fred smiled. "The Freudian implications alone are 
  staggering."

  As the ship rose higher into the atmosphere, the thinning air 
  shook them less and less and the sky became progressively 
  darker. Fred and Nancy both gazed out the viewport, waiting for 
  that brief time when they would clear the atmosphere and rotate 
  into a descent angle. During that time they would be able to see 
  the Earth below them, beautiful, blue, and majestic. When it 
  happened, Fred cautiously reached out his hand to Nancy, who 
  took it into her own. They remained like that, silent and 
  connected, until the ship turned in such a way that the sun 
  shone directly into the viewport. The computer automatically 
  darkened it in response, and there was nothing to see until they 
  rotated out of the way again.

  "So tell me about yourself," Fred said hesitantly, releasing her 
  hand. He reached over to a nearby, well-worn knob and adjusted 
  it, which filled the cabin with soft music. "What do you do," he 
  said, "and why all the interest in toasters?"

  Nancy laughed. "Me? I'm just an analyst working for the Midwest 
  Territorial government. Crop price projections, that sort of 
  thing. I guess all the time I spend studying forecasting grain 
  got me interested in the old ways of using it."

  "You mean in bread and stuff like that?"

  "Right." She stood up to open the compartment over the viewport 
  and carefully brought down the bag containing the toasters. She 
  took one out and held it carefully. "You know, people used to 
  use these all the time. They put bread in these slots and 
  pushed this little handle, and it gets all hot inside, which 
  bakes the bread. Eventually it would pop back up with the 
  finished product. They called it `toast,' naturally enough."

  Fred regarded the little device skeptically. "I don't know," he 
  said. "It looks like the innards would get pretty gamy."

  "Not if you clean it, silly," she said. "It's not self-cleaning. 
  You have to take it apart."

  She handed him the toaster and leaned over him to point out the 
  various latches and levers. Her proximity suddenly caused Fred 
  to wonder about the efficiency of the air circulation.

  "I'd show you how it works, but it needs a power source," she 
  said.

  Fred felt she was generating enough power herself, but he didn't 
  think it was proper to say so. An idea struck him, though.

  "Computer," he said, sitting up in his seat.

  The computer responded with a short beep.

  "Can you devise a power coupling for this object?" He placed the 
  toaster in a small opening in the cabin, which served as an 
  interface compartment for computer-manufactured devices. The 
  light in the opening glowed on and off a few times.

  The computer said, "Affirmative," and beeped again.

  "Then do so -- what's that, Nancy?"

  "Your lift can do that?" asked Nancy incredulously.

  "Top of the line," replied Fred.

  "Please restate request," the computer said.

  Nancy tugged at his sleeve. "We've got _four_ of them," she 
  said. "Let's plug them all in!" Sparkles appeared in her eyes, 
  which Fred identified upon closer examination as flecks of gold 
  swimming in the silver.

  "Computer," Fred said, staring into Nancy's eyes. "Please 
  generate four functional power couplings for this device."

  "Working," said the computer, and it beeped.

  Meanwhile, the ship began its descent into the atmosphere. The 
  viewport cleared, but was quickly replaced by another color 
  shift as the computer selectively activated a thin injected 
  fluid layer to prevent overheating. This, combined with careful 
  navigational adjustments, automatic communication with flight 
  control systems, and the power conduit manufacturing process, 
  dramatically reduced available computational resources. An light 
  flashed on Fred's console indicating voice control was no longer 
  available, but he didn't notice. The computer attempted to 
  compensate by turning off the music and, conveniently, lowering 
  the lights.

  "Oh, how romantic," Nancy said as the lights dimmed. She leaned 
  against Fred, which provided more than enough distraction to 
  keep him from wondering why the lights went down.

  Fred put his arm around Nancy as the computer flashed another 
  warning and tried to correct their course through the 
  atmosphere, which had been turning into a unusually steep 
  descent. Finally, two of the power couplings were finished and 
  dropped unceremoniously into the interface compartment.

  The plop sound they made as they fell startled Nancy. "What was 
  that?" she asked.

  "A couple of our power couplings are ready! Get out the 
  toasters!"

  They removed two toasters from the bag and connected them to the 
  couplings. Nancy depressed the levers on the side and the 
  toasters immediately began to get warm.

  The computer searched desperately for systems to off-load, but 
  the primary tasks of heat-shielding, navigation, and life 
  support were all off-limits. The internal synthesis of the 
  remaining power conduits could not be aborted. This left few 
  choices for disconnect, but those available were taken with 
  abandon.

  The lights went completely out, along with the circulation fans, 
  the built-in acceleration dampers in the couches, and the waste 
  recycling pumps. This brought the power drain to within safe 
  parameters, so the computer desisted just before power would 
  have been removed from the toasters.

  Suddenly, Fred and Nancy were plunged into darkness and silence, 
  and were jostled randomly by the passage of the craft through 
  the atmosphere.

  "Oh my!" Nancy said. "What's happening?"

  "I don't know," Fred replied, but began using his brain instead 
  of another part of his anatomy for the first time since the trip 
  started. He saw the indicator lights on the pilot's console. 
  "We've lost power," he said. "We've got to shut down all 
  unnecessary systems."

  As he was about to contact the computer, the final two power 
  couplings were finished, and plopped into the interface 
  compartment. The lights came back on.

  "Whew!" Nancy said. "That was close! Fred? What's the matter?"

  Fred stared at the blackness in front of him, then gasped when 
  he looked at the navigational viewscreen. The "possibility" of 
  bad weather over the Hio region had developed into a raging 
  thunderstorm, and the lift was plunging right into its heart.

  Lightning arced around the ship, almost blinding them. The 
  computer made adjustments as quickly as possible to handle the 
  swirling air currents, but the ride began to get violent. "Strap 
  in!" Fred shouted, dropping his toaster.

  A series of lightning bolts hit the ship and thunder shook her 
  hull. Fred and Nancy clung to each other for dear life. The 
  ship's heat shields were vaporizing. The temperature inside the 
  cabin rose rapidly.

  A loud beep from the computer signaled the breakdown. Fred 
  pulled himself away from her and read the displays. "Shield 
  failure!" he shouted. "We've got to get out of here soon, or 
  we'll burn up! Follow me!"

  Fred and Nancy scrambled out of their seats and made their way 
  unsteadily aft as the lift pitched and rocked. Lightning 
  flashed, flooding the cabin with bursts of blinding 
  illumination. Nancy used her tail to provide balance and kept 
  them from falling by wrapping it around a passenger seat.

  "There's an escape pod at tail," Fred said. "It's got its own 
  shielding -- if we can get to it, we might make it."

  "My toasters! They'll burn up with the lift!"

  Fred leaned back to grab one, unplugging both of them in the 
  process. "Computer! Transfer power to the escape pod! Prepare 
  for emergency evacuation!" A series of beeps answered him.

  When they reached the pod entrance, Fred reached for the handle 
  and immediately pulled his hand away. "It's too hot!" Fred 
  motioned Nancy to the other side of the round door handle as he 
  tore off the top of his skinsuit, wrapping it around the handle. 
  Between them, they twisted the handle until it opened, then 
  jumped inside.

  The pod was small, but serviceable. Thick cushions lined all the 
  walls to prevent injury. A wide couch lay in the center of the 
  cabin. Rather than a limited number of individual couches, the 
  designers had chosen to create a single couch capable of holding 
  as many people as possible in an emergency.

  Fred tossed the toaster to one side and they scrambled into the 
  couch, which automatically strapped them in. "Computer!" Fred 
  yelled, "release the escape pod!"

  The computer replied with a single beep, and dropped the pod. 
  They felt a sickening plummet and almost passed out, then the 
  roar of the pod's thrusters kicked in. Wings unfolded from the 
  sides, and a tail surface rose from the rear. The onboard 
  piloting system engaged and stabilized their flight, spiraling 
  away from the last known course of the lift and scanning for a 
  level surface on the ground below. When it found one, it slowed 
  their descent, lowered the gear, and banked toward it.

  "Brace for crash landing," the piloting system intoned, as a 
  deceleration chute was deployed.

  The pod thumped hard, bounced twice, and scraped to a halt. The 
  stabilizing thrusters suddenly went silent.

  Fred and Nancy opened their eyes. "Are you OK?" Fred asked.

  "I think so. How about you?"

  "A bit bruised," Fred replied, "but all the parts are working."

  Lying together curled on the couch, Nancy quickly became aware 
  that Fred was telling the truth. She turned and smiled at him, 
  and Fred was, once again, completely captured.

  "Initiating distress signal," said the pod.

  "Don't do that right now."

  "Do you wish to override emergency proced -- "

  "Yes!" Fred looked deep into Nancy's eyes. "And, computer? Don't 
  disturb us." As nature took its course, Fred was amazed at the 
  interesting uses to which Nancy was able to put her tail. He 
  seriously considered acquiring one of his own.

  Later, Nancy started laughing.

  "What's so funny?" Fred asked, defensively.

  "Oh, not you, darling. You were _wonderful,"_ she said, wrapping 
  her tail around him. "But something funny just occurred to me."

  "What's that?" he asked.

  "I was telling you about toasters, right? Well, we were in the 
  ship, and the walls got hot, and we were ejected, right? Toast!"

  Fred laughed. "Still," he said, "bread rises when it's baked, 
  right?"

  "Sure, but that's different."

  "Not in this case," he replied, and pulled her close again.

  "Oh my," she said. "I see what you mean."
  
  
  Ken Kousen (kousen@rayleigh.res.utc.com)
------------------------------------------  

  Ken Kousen is a research engineer at United Technologies 
  Research Center in East Hartford, Connecticut. This story marks 
  his return to InterText after a long absence. His previous 
  stories have appeared in Mystic Fiction, Nuthouse, and the 
  anthology The Magic Within.



  Josie   by Marcus Eubanks
===========================
...................................................................
  We hold that every action has an equal and opposite reaction: a 
  zero-sum game. So can value be found in anything we do, or are 
  all acts doomed to be cancelled out?
...................................................................

  She glanced down at the clock on the dash: 18:52. Still about 
  three minutes from work and she didn't have to be on shift until 
  19:00. She had a big truck -- a rough-looking Rover, about 15 
  years old. Its appearance was intentional; actually, the car was 
  very carefully maintained. She refused to wash it, so the 
  once-tasteful gunmetal paint job was now closer to a matte 
  black. The windows, all but the windscreen, were dark enough to 
  seem opaque from the outside, and years' worth of city filth 
  only strengthened the impression.

  The headlamps added illumination to a group of kids, late teens 
  to early twenties, shooting hoops under a streetlight in the 
  middle of the block. Some trick of the lighting made for a 
  stage-like setting, rendering the shadows on the side of the 
  street impenetrable lakes of pure black. Reflexively, she slowed 
  down.

  Her subconscious muttered quiet nothings to her as the car 
  slowed. The group seemed to thicken before her as kids flowed in 
  ones and twos from various shadows, quickly adding themselves to 
  the game. In only a few seconds the group had become a mob. With 
  a deep breath its periphery expanded, and she was among them. A 
  tiny splash of reflected light on the roofliner caught her eye 
  as a figure immediately ahead of her turned, bringing a 
  sawed-off pump to bear even as she downshifted. The truck dipped 
  once as someone reached for the mirror mount and landed on the 
  passenger running board, but he rolled along the side and fell 
  away as the beast abruptly leaped forward.

  The animal mind of the group took time to react -- it only 
  gradually realized that something was wrong. Bodies tried to 
  scramble out of the way when they heard the engine note change, 
  but one didn't quite make it. She felt the transmitted shock as 
  something bounced off the right fender, noting that neither the 
  front nor rear end lifted as it would have if a tire had climbed 
  over flesh. The pump went off to her side, pounding into the 
  vehicle but not crazing the glass. Her friends had accused her 
  of paranoia when she'd had the rear side windows replaced with 
  steel and sprung for custom glass elsewhere, but incidents like 
  this made her figure she'd gotten her money's worth.



  Three minutes later and eight blocks away, she locked her own 
  12-gauge pump into the rack and stowed the flak jacket in her 
  locker. The jacket was better protection than the kevlar vest 
  for which she was exchanging it, but she needed the additional 
  mobility afforded by the arm cutouts. Even with metal detectors 
  and professional security, this was a dangerous place to work. 
  She grabbed a cup of burnt coffee, paused over the first too-hot 
  sip as she collected her wits, and then stepped out into the 
  melee.

  "Hey Josie! Expand the market any on your way in?" Josie peered 
  over the counter the voice had come from, taking in the 
  sprawled-out form reclining there, feet on the desktop, eyebrows 
  raised cynically over a coffee mug of his own.

  "Fuck off, Carter, you're not funny. Just give me your report 
  and get the hell out of here."

  "OK, OK. Jeez." He tried to look hurt, but failed. He grinned 
  archly. "Premenstrual again? Wasn't that last week? You're gonna 
  be the beacon of pure joy tomorrow morning."

  She sat down with him to run the list, thinking about the last 
  time she'd had trouble coming in, only a couple of weeks back. 
  She could picture the kid's face vividly as she replayed the 
  scene, the malicious joy on his features turning to wordless 
  astonishment as the gaping mouth of the Remington laid his chest 
  open. There had been no question about creating a customer that 
  night; that particular one went to the morgue.

  Carter was in full swing, colorfully editorializing his way 
  through the status report when she heard the alarm tone sound 
  over the PA. She didn't need to listen to the words, but they 
  sang themselves to her, an oft-repeated mantra. She knew which 
  operator was working by the voice -- this was the one who always 
  sounded happy, carefully inflecting her words in rich, 
  well-modulated tones. "Christ," she thought to herself. "The 
  bitch could at least try to sound a bit bummed about it."

  "Well, fuck me with a chainsaw!" That was Carter. "It's been 
  like this all day. C'mon, I'll help you get this one started. 
  You'll be totally swamped in a couple of hours." She smiled 
  thanks at him, leaned back to stretch as she stole another 
  swallow of coffee, and then got up to see what was coming in. It 
  was 13 minutes after the shift change, so this was officially 
  her baby.

  It was all noise and confusion.

  "Just shootin' hoops, man, and this big fuckin' black truck -- "

  "Respiration 32, pulse 140, pressure 70 over 5. I'm calling him 
  a nine on the Glasgow scale -- "

  "Bitch drivin' didn't even slow down! Izzee gonna make it? Aw 
  man aw man -- "

  "Christ, he's flailed on the right! Gimme four of positive 
  pressure on the vent and get _him_ the hell out of here!"

  "Gonna kill that bitch, aw man aw -- "

  "Sir, you'll have to leave, no sir, I mean now. I'm sorry, but 
  -- "

  "Mastoid hematoma and orbital bruising, 10-centimeter avulsed 
  occipital laceration with a depressed fracture. Someone call 
  neuro, call CT-scan -- "

  In the midst of it all Carter, worrying with the vent settings, 
  glanced at her and cocked an eyebrow. "Black truck? That you, 
  girl?"

  She examined the tape on the endotracheal tube, decided it would 
  do, then looked up at him, grimacing. She started to speak, 
  stopped herself. Instead she rolled her eyes. "A girl's gotta 
  work...."



  Marcus Eubanks (eubanks@astro.ocis.temple.edu)
------------------------------------------------

  Marcus Eubanks is an angry young medical student who has 
  conceived an incredible passion for emergency medicine. He 
  persists in his belief that he has the coolest job in the world.



  Skin the Color of Blood   by M. Stanley Bubien
================================================
...................................................................
  Just as humanity seems driven by greed, it also seems driven to 
  demand an eye for an eye, blood for blood, and a wrong for a 
  wrong.
...................................................................

  Reservation night dark like a blanked stained in blackness. And 
  in the darkness, bringing the comfort of stone, Lisa Jumping 
  Bear lived a vision.

  Through her mind she traveled across the scape. Her feet trod 
  the bare earth, the dust of life, as she traversed its 
  perimeter.

  Tepid wind curled dust into her hair as it passed, its voice 
  whispering through her, "Yours, yours, yours..." Then trailing 
  off, out of her vision's reach.

  A cloud descended, engulfing her with its wetness, taming the 
  dust that had risen upon her. With the voice of the wind, it too 
  spoke through her, "Yours, yours, yours..." Fading around her, 
  only silence was left, joined with the gray, sunless sky.

  Mud clung with dampness about her, a hardening clay covering her 
  nakedness. Quiet as sand, its voice moved through her flesh, 
  "Yours, yours, yours..." Slowly it became cast, solidifying 
  itself within her.

  Without a struggle, she became the stone.

  Ages passed, the engine came. She felt it rumble through her 
  rigid ears. She tasted the reek upon her taut lips. She felt the 
  hammer fall upon her granite skin.

  As it battled to shatter her, its voice thundered, "Mine, mine, 
  mine..." Louder and louder it roared, until she was battered 
  into lifeless dust upon the earth.



  Awake! Lisa Jumping Bear still felt the thunder surround her. It 
  grew briefly deeper then fell to silence.

  She blinked water from her eyes, then bolted upright. Like the 
  gust of the wind, she knew the sound -- a car falling away from 
  the road in violence.

  Forcing the vision-confusion away and tasting nausea in its 
  wake, the need for awareness was upon her.

  She reached the telephone and dialed Emergency. Not recognizing 
  the voice -- not caring enough to recognize it -- she spoke her 
  address urgently, waited for the promise of help and hung up.

  She pulled on her pants and T-shirt, grabbed a flashlight and a 
  white sheet, then ran out the door.



  The night still blanketed the land, but she knew where the car 
  had flown from the road. Stepping to the edge of the hill, she 
  curled the sheet into a marker and placed it at her feet.

  Her gaze fell down the embankment, united with her light 
  flashing across the scattered wreckage. Glimmers and reflections 
  cast silent beacons back from glass shards and metal fragments. 
  The sparkles danced a trail over the sloping descent, carrying 
  Lisa's gaze to the crushed heap laying with wheels pointed 
  skyward -- a noiseless contrast to its thundering destruction.

  Her feet left the solidity of the hilltop and wove their way 
  downward toward the automobile. Dodging through the litter, her 
  light glanced across a shrouded object. She altered her course.

  In the dirt lay a boy barely measuring enough years to be a 
  driver. He was on his back, arms outstretched and legs folded 
  beneath him. His face was battered and freshly scarred, covered 
  with the thick crimson of the heavy bleeding from above his 
  eyes.

  Lisa knelt, considered the length of white cloth she had 
  abandoned at the hilltop, then ripped a strand from the bottom 
  of her shirt. With one hand she pulled the boy's severed 
  hairline back upon his forehead and used the other to block the 
  flow of blood with her cloth.

  She felt the wetness stain her skin, but sensed a slackening in 
  the bleeding.

  Now, she would just wait.

  But in her vision-drenched mind she knew not for whom she 
  waited. Was it the bright light of promised help to arrive atop 
  the hill? Or did she wait for death -- standing close, 
  considering its chance to pull the boy's soul from her reddening 
  grasp?



  The light broke a path through the night's cover. Lisa heard the 
  engine stop, the doors slam, the voices beckon from the 
  roadside. She turned her flashlight to arc a signal toward the 
  rescuers.

  Appearing on the hilltop a silhouette motioned and then called, 
  "I see ya there! We'll be right down!"

  There were two. As they traversed the hill carrying lanterns, 
  light reflected from their hair. The one hefting the medical 
  gear was obviously blond. The other moved stiffly but quickly; 
  Lisa guessed the color of his head was due to the weight of his 
  years.

  It was he who arrived first, unhindered by the equipment his 
  companion was forced to shoulder down the hill. He bent to set 
  his light down. "You the one who called?"

  Lisa nodded, and he replied, "Well, it's OK now. You go ahead 
  and move away, we'll take it from here."

  Lisa searched the man for compassion, but the shadows danced a 
  murky beat across his white face. The sight brought the return 
  of nausea. She peered toward his eyes, but they stared back with 
  the color of the night. The shadow dance began to move across 
  his body, sending him into a rhythm of darkness played by an 
  illusory drummer. He stood erect and loomed with the arms of a 
  great bat ready to engulf her.

  She forced the vision away.

  "Young lady, I _said_ we could handle it now." He stepped 
  forward, bringing the scent of medicine with his breath.

  "No!" she burst out, not used to the sound of her voice after so 
  much consuming silence. "He can't... I can't let go. He'll bleed 
  to death."

  "No, he won't -- we're here to keep that from happenin'. We'll 
  stop that bleedin' and get him up to the ambulance."

  "You can't.... His skin.... His head's been cut and I have to 
  hold it together."

  The second light and the equipment arrived. The blond brought 
  his lantern nearer. "Little lady," the first man continued, "if 
  you don't let me in there to look, I can't do a thing. Not a 
  thing at all."

  Lisa tried to read the man's eyes, but they remained black and 
  silent. Blood ran from her hands as the boy's life leaked 
  between her fingers.

  She relented. "Come here close before I let go. I don't want to 
  spill any more blood into the soil."

  "Good." The man dropped down next to Lisa. "Johnson, come here 
  with that light! I can't see a damned thing."

  The blond stepped closer and held the lantern over the three 
  figures on the earth. The light flickered briefly then subsided.

  "OK," The elder said to Lisa after he took her place. "You can 
  just step back now, you'll be out of my light." She obeyed as 
  her feet pulled her two paces back.

  "Now, I'm just gonna lift this back and look at the wound." He 
  moved his hand away. Through the inconsistent light the gash 
  across the boys head shown to be an endless chasm dug to the 
  bone. Below the cut, illumination revealed now what blood had 
  earlier hidden -- battered cheeks, an unhinged jaw, a twisted, 
  broken nose -- blackened marks clouding his complexion.

  Silence met her with the sight of the broken boy. But a sound, 
  small and throaty, began to cut its way through to her. It came 
  from the direction of the blond man. Before she could pinpoint 
  the source it gained strength, built itself into a pealing 
  thunder, and found her. Its grasp held her, echoed upon her, and 
  jarred the nausea within.

  A flood unleashed, the nausea rose up and washed over her, the 
  roar of its fury mingling with the torrent from without. She 
  felt the earth buckle under the resonating forces. Ground and 
  sky fell away and she was left comfortless, floating through the 
  landless blackness.

  She was no longer standing over the boy's body, and her only 
  companion -- the booming thunder which rang in her ears -- 
  sought to break through her.



  The thunder took on form. Beneath her feet, it bent into 
  splintered planks. Surrounding her, it rose up into the paneled 
  walls of a bar. About her, it shaped itself into voices.

  Its power gave substance to the motions about the room.

  A crowd filled the wooded barroom. White, faceless voids 
  oscillated as the thunder boomed from a corner jukebox. Each man 
  wore a hat and boots and a woman on one arm. They carried cups 
  so overflowing the liquid spilled upon the floor with the 
  rhythm. All were dancing together.

  They became aware of Lisa. Around her a writhing circle formed. 
  Nearer with each beat the ring flowed until they threatened to 
  crush her with their proximity. The rumbling music eased from 
  the room, and the dancers halted.

  Surrounded, Lisa tasted their closeness. A leather stench and 
  medicine reek breathed from stale lungs.

  With the clear-eyed stare of hatred, the crowed raised their 
  fists to the ceiling. They stepped forward and let the weight of 
  their thousand fists fall upon her. The arms rose and fell. The 
  hammering repeated itself over and over, trying to shatter her 
  like the earth.

  Raising her hands for protection, Lisa saw they were not her 
  own. Instead, the skin had a youthful roughness, with knuckles 
  gnarled into the grip of a farm boy. They offered no protection 
  from her enemy. Lisa's face bruised, her nose twisted 
  shapelessly, her jaw cracked, and her legs collapsed as the 
  pressure sent her to her knees.

  Her assailants' eyes, still clear, now glowed with elation. With 
  their flickering, the silence shattered as the throng broke into 
  a roar of laughter.

  From their throats Lisa recognized the sonic form which had 
  carried her here. It beat against her chest with each blow of 
  the thousand fists.

  Lisa let her head bend, her body go limp, and she slid toward 
  the floor. But it was not the barbed splinters of oaken planks 
  which met her. It was a smooth, moist earth which embraced her 
  fall.



  She lifted her face from the dirt and sought the marks of her 
  beating. Her touch found only soft skin, but her ears still rang 
  with the horror of the wooded barroom.

  Raising her head higher, her eyes caught the flickering scene. 
  In front of her, she saw the specter of her vision, the source 
  of the ringing in her ears. It took form in the scorning 
  laughter pouring between the crooked teeth of the younger, blond 
  man.

  "That's Dark Feather's boy!" he laughed, pointing. "And ain't it 
  just a shame. He's been scalped!"

  "What?" the elder reared in surprise. "What the hell's so funny 
  about that?"

  "Dark Feather!" he said, as though the name would be explanation 
  enough. He waited for an answer, and when there was only an 
  empty stare, he continued. "Don't you know? The Skin who's been 
  fightin' over them grazin' rights!"

  They became caught up within themselves, forgetting, for the 
  moment, Lisa's presence. "What?" the elder questioned. "We don't 
  have time for this!"

  "Ah, c'mon! I can't believe you don't know! You live in a hole 
  or somethin'?"

  "Watch it, boy! I'm warning you!"

  "Yeah, yeah -- Dark Feather's the one who been leadin' the Skins 
  in rebellion. They's the ones not wantin' cows grazin' on rez 
  land."

  "I remember. Something about only Indian-owned cattle being 
  allowed to graze." The elder put the bandage back in place and 
  began to check the boy's eyes. "The white ranchers've been up in 
  arms about it."

  "Yeah. They told ol' man Dark Feather he was gonna regret it. 
  Looks like they weren't kiddin' none either!"

  The older man paused. "What're you saying?"

  "Look at the bruises! I can see from here some of that blood's 
  been dryin' for a while. Kid's been beaten."

  The elder looked over the boy's face slowly. "I guess you're 
  right..." He let his voice trail off as he considered the drying 
  wounds. After a pause, he fell back to business, "Well, you quit 
  your laughin' and get some wits about you! Grab me the 
  disinfectant. I got to clean this wound. Then cut me some gauze 
  so we can cover it and move him. We can worry about them bruises 
  later." He bent to examine the boy more closely, checking for 
  other injuries. After a moment, he realized the blond was simply 
  staring at him.

  "Why're you just standin' there? Didn't you hear me? I said get 
  some disinfectant and cut some gauze!"

  "I, uh..." The blond shifted his weight nervously. Then sucking 
  confidence into his lungs, he said, "We ought to think about 
  this."

  "So while you're thinkin' give me some of that gauze!"

  "Now look here -- what might them ranchers do if we save the 
  boy?"

  "Why'd they do anything? It's our _job_."

  "You know what I mean! Them ranchers are tryin' to send a 
  message by this!" The blond waved his arm over the prostrate 
  form. "If we save him, we'd be interferin' with that."

  "This cut don't have nothin' to do with any message! Now stop 
  talking and get to work!"

  "Hold on, I tell ya! What if they do want him dead? When they 
  find out we saved the kid's life, they'll be comin' after us!"

  "No, they won't. We're just doin' our job."

  "But let's say we don't do it. We just stand by and -- "

  The elder man turned. "You're talking about murder."

  "Murder? Don't say that!" The blond replied with an audible 
  shake in his voice. "It'd be... it's just... well, nature takin' 
  it's course! I mean, look at him! He's probably gonna die 
  anyway."

  "I don't care, dammit! It ain't worth being guilty all my life 
  for! Just because some fat-assed ranchers can't graze cattle on 
  his daddy's land. It ain't worth it!"

  "Stop bein' an ol' fool. Look at the future, will ya? Look at 
  the consequences." The blond stepped back and put his hands in 
  his pockets.

  "I am lookin' at consequences! Right here on the ground!"

  "I mean to the ranchers. Ol' Dark Feather's just the first of 
  the trouble. Next thing you know they'll all be denyin' us the 
  land. Then them ranchers ain't gonna have no place to go. They 
  won't be able to support their families no more. Then what're 
  they supposed to do? Starve?"

  "That ain't our problem."

  "Why you..." Stress inflected in the blond's words. "You're an 
  ol' fool, aren't ya! How 'bout if I told them ranchers you said 
  that? How you said you don't care for 'em tryin' to raise their 
  families? How all you care about is your own self! And how all's 
  you want is a swig from that bottle you carry around!"

  The elder stiffened and the blond continued. "Didn't think I 
  knew 'bout that, did ya? You stink of it every day. I have to be 
  downright stupid not to notice."

  The elder stared silently, hands still clinging to the boy's 
  bloodied head.

  "Tell you what, ol' man," The blond said with a lilt. "I bet 
  that boy gonna die no matter what. If he don't, I might talk to 
  the hospital, too, tell 'em about some negligence here. How you 
  been so drunk you couldn't do first aid proper."

  Anger flashed from the old man, but the blond cut him short. 
  "That is, unless you go along with me. Just do like I said and 
  let nature take its course. Then you'll be home free."

  The elder's gaze passed back and forth across the space between 
  his assistant and the broken boy. He came to a decision. With an 
  effort in his garbled voice, he said, "If you got it all figured 
  out, what about her?" He lifted a reddened finger to point at 
  Lisa's prostrate form.

  "Her?" The blond retorted with a scornful glance at Lisa. "She's 
  just a Skin! What's she gonna say? And who's gonna believe her 
  anyway? It'd be her word 'gainst ours. And we're two law 
  abidin', moral, Church-goin' citizens. They'd just laugh an' 
  call her crazy."

  Silence bent through the darkness. The quiet gave Lisa back some 
  of the strength the vision had drained away. Without thinking 
  about the consequences, Lisa pushed her way up from the earth. 
  Though standing made her sway, she bent her head and charged at 
  the younger man. She caught him in the side, butting her head 
  into the soft part below his ribs. The air burst from the man's 
  lungs as her momentum knocked him to the ground. She sprawled 
  along side of him, briefly losing the strength that had 
  propelled her along.

  She stood up, and turned to face the elder man and the boy. But 
  before her eyes could focus, a bony fist hammered into her face. 
  She knew nothing for a moment, then looked up from the ground 
  yet again.

  "You bitch!" the blond screamed, kicking into Lisa's stomach.

  "Stop it, damn you!" the elder yelled. "How do you expect to 
  explain away two bodies? Now get a hold of yourself!"

  The blond stared down at Lisa with a black scowl and heavy 
  breath. He wiped spittle from the side of his mouth and turned 
  back toward the elder. "Yeah. All right. I'll leave the bitch 
  alone."

  When he turned his back, Lisa forced herself onto her feet. 
  Uphill into the darkness, she fled. With pain biting into her 
  stomach at each stride, she ran back to the top of the slope.



  Darkness shrouded Lisa's home -- covered from without, filled 
  from within.

  After forcing the door open, she could not bring herself to find 
  the light switch. It didn't matter, though. Her mind knew her 
  destination even through the lightless room.

  Lisa felt the closet air stale and cold upon her skin. It poured 
  over her as she reached into the stillness. Cold and stale again 
  the touch that came to her fingertips. But heavy the burden she 
  hefted from the must-laden shelves.

  Her hands trembled across its smoothness. Remembering the warmth 
  after her grandfather used it and laid it into her young arms; 
  the force as it pushed against her shoulder, threatening to 
  knock her to the ground with its power.

  She snapped the stock from the barrel and felt the two cylinders 
  which rested flush to the hollow.

  Her grandfather's voice returned to her. "Always keep it ready," 
  he had said.

  As she locked the pieces back together, she recalled the sun's 
  glint off her grandfather's eyes when he spoke those words. It 
  was a joyless sight.

  Stepping outside into the starless night to wait, her heart 
  weighed heavier than the metal she bore in her arms.



  Outside, the blackness of night laid upon her heart and drowned 
  everything around her. So dank her thoughts that upon hearing 
  the first steps of the men pulling their burden up the slope -- 
  they swayed under the mass of a portable litter -- she welcomed 
  their presence.

  Distance and stillness shrouded everything as light poured from 
  the rear ambulance doors. She held ground until the men pushed 
  the litter up and in -- held until she saw the soiled cloth 
  pulled up across the boy's body and over his head, hiding the 
  lifelessness within.

  Steeling herself like a stone upon a mountain top, she readied. 
  But before moving into the light she heard the two men speaking.

  "...and there ain't no reason not for us both to take credit. 
  Why probably them ranchers'd be downright pleased. I bet them 
  boys'd even give us some reward. Maybe a piece of the action we 
  could call our own." The words flooded from the blond to rush 
  over the elder. The only response was the occasional grunt of 
  mild agreement. "A piece of rez space to live on. Why, sure it'd 
  still _be_ rez land, but I could have a little cabin an' land to 
  graze on. The Skins'd think nothin' of it after this." He waved 
  one hand into the ambulance and over the mute body. "Yeah, a 
  piece of Skin land I could call my own! Might be theirs on 
  paper, but this'd make it mine. There ain't no way me or them 
  ranchers'd let them Skins take what's by rights mine."

  The words seared pain in Lisa's ears. Reluctance burned away and 
  she rushed forward into the light, hefting the gun toward the 
  two men. Her aim fell upon the younger and she began to squeeze 
  the trigger.

  The two saw her enter from the shadows. Both recognized the 
  threat she wielded. When the younger saw his fate pointing at 
  him in the double-barreled steel, he pushed out his arms as if 
  they would stop the gunshot.

  "No!" he said. "No, no. Don't. That's not... That's not a good 
  idea. Don't shoot I tell ya, don't shoot!"

  As his voice fluctuated, Lisa felt the bile rise from her 
  stomach once again. This time, though, she was ready; she would 
  not allow the vision to overwhelm. Recalling the rock upon the 
  mountain, her body solidified, her muscles became cast, and her 
  finger rigid upon the trigger.

  The young man's whimpering amplified in her ears. It began to 
  rumble, bending itself into a great beast shaped of sound. The 
  thunder had come again. It beat upon her heart like a hammer, 
  threatening to shatter her to dust.

  Through the roar, she pushed her mind into focus. Now! Now she 
  would act. Defying the solidity of her stance, she flexed her 
  finger. Force of will bent it back slowly against the rigidity 
  of her own form.

  The thunder reacted to her movement. As the trigger slid, the 
  sound pounded upon her harder and harder. But with the hammering 
  upon her flesh, she felt herself move more freely. Her joints 
  loosened in their action and the resistance of the firing pin 
  weakened.

  An instant before contact, she tasted the reek of medicine 
  stench upon her lips. It polluted her. It stripped her of 
  control. It unleashed the force of the vision to rush over and 
  carry her away.



  The vision took her again to a far-off place. A grave sight. She 
  stood upon the decayed body of a broken man. His arms were flung 
  wide, a black opening was torn through his ribcage, and patches 
  of blond hair clung to his skull. In the hollow sockets that 
  once were eyes, a bone-white glare flashed. They spoke a word 
  that Lisa heard with her soul. "Hatred," they said.

  While she studied it, the body began to take on life -- the 
  chest filled in, pieces of hair grew in from decayed patches. 
  Flesh sprung upon the skeletal cheeks, smoothing in their tanned 
  flush. The brow rose and the nose took form.

  Reborn. It had transformed itself in many ways. From blond 
  patches to black locks. From featureless to recognizable. From 
  man to woman. Yet as the life washed into the body, the eyes 
  remained hollow sockets.

  Lisa looked upon her own broken body lying in the grave. Tearing 
  her gaze aside, she caught sight of the shell casing, discharged 
  and smoking in the dust. A voice came to her as the shell 
  cooled. "Hatred," it said.

  The voice was her own.

  Unbidden, a tear formed in Lisa's eye. Like a stream through 
  stony banks it trickled down her cheek. At once the scene 
  collapsed about her; a silent rush of wind blew through her and 
  carried her back to the dim standoff.

  The rumbling returned, but now its voice was terrifying with a 
  song of victory.

  Her finger had slid too far to stop. With the final hammer beat, 
  she let herself fall to the dust of the earth. As she crumbled, 
  the gun roared and a flash blasted away the night for one brief 
  instant.



  Stillness met the three figures. Glass lay shattered around them 
  from the shotgun blast. The metal atop the ambulance was buckled 
  and pocked from the explosive force.

  It was the young blond who stirred first. Looking up he saw the 
  damage above his head. He turned to Lisa as she erected herself 
  again, and he met a blackened gaze which burned through his 
  heart. Averting his eyes, he realized the gun pointed at the 
  ground, one barrel spent and smoking. Awkwardly the blond man 
  questioned, "Why...?"

  Lisa answered with an unblinking stare.

  Again he questioned, "What do you want from me?"

  This time, Lisa gave her answer aloud. The gun remained steady 
  as she spoke, "I would ask the boy's life back."

  "I can't do that. Ain't mine to give."

  Lisa paused, fire leaping from her gaze like the flash of 
  shotgun. "It wasn't yours to take either."

  The man's lips tightened, as if laughter would never escape from 
  them again. Though Lisa raised the gun a second time, he didn't 
  protest -- he just let his head bow, his eyes cast to the 
  ground.

  "Know this," she said to the two. "The truth of the night is 
  etched upon the earth. As long as you two walk the land, it will 
  be the witness of your guilt."

  She waited a moment to see if they understood. "Leave this 
  place." She told them and turned away. With the lowered gun, she 
  stepped into the shroud of the night.

  Moments passed. She heard the engine howl to life, but refused 
  to watch them go. As their sound faded away, she bent the gun at 
  the center to break stock and barrel once more. She removed the 
  unexpelled cylinder. Twirling it in her hand, she weighed its 
  power and knew the one thing alone it could bring.

  Her fist tightened, then her arm cocked back and she cast it 
  over the hill. The shell vanished into the abysmal void. But 
  before it clattered upon the wreckage in the valley, she had 
  turned and strode away.


  M. Stanley Bubien (bubien@nope.ucsd.edu)
------------------------------------------

  M. Stanley bubien makes his home in Del Mar, California, with 
  his wife Kathy. He is currently woring on his first young adult 
  novel, a story about California Indians before the discovery of 
  America.



  The Spirits We Know   by William Trapman
==========================================
...................................................................
  Everyone has their personal demons, whether they begin life 
  among snow-capped mountains in the American west, the green 
  hills and fields of Ireland, or anywhere in between.
...................................................................

  He flickered on the edge of my vision as I picked up my bag and 
  walked into JFK. `You won't be able to keep up with a 747,' I 
  thought, and an hour later I was flying higher than he ever 
  could.

  I should have felt free. But what I really felt was lonesome.



  I got off at Shannon, where the immigration officer was a big 
  red face under untidy thinning hair. Friendly, easygoing, 
  professionally disarming.

  "Business or holidays, sir?" he asked. His hands, broad and 
  weathered, flicked through the pages of my passport. Maybe he 
  farmed in his spare time. Jenny's people had been farmers; mine 
  too.

  "Just a short holiday," I said.

  He stamped the document. "I hope you enjoy it, sir."

  The rental car was small, but I smelled the newness and thought 
  of an old truck with a sagging bumper, and of an old man and a 
  mixed-up young boy. I turned on the motor, shifted awkwardly 
  into gear with my left hand, and drove out of the parking lot. A 
  sticker on the windshield reminded me that here, they drive on 
  the left.

  Now and again, without thinking, I looked skyward.



  Green and rolling fields gave way to harsher land with rough 
  stone walls instead of hedge rows. It was an environment 
  different from both New York and Wyoming -- a place without the 
  noise of one or the dust of the other.

  It rained differently here, too -- sudden fine mists of wetness 
  catching windshield wipers unawares. In New York it rains acid 
  out of clouds invisible from the bottom of the skyscraper 
  canyons, and in Wyoming what rain there is tastes angry. I got 
  out of the car once and the Irish mist that trickled down my 
  face was sweet.

  I found the ocean, first in brief snatches beyond seafront 
  villages, then below high cliffs which marked the western edge 
  of the land. From that height the ocean seemed peaceful and 
  slow-moving, until I saw how fiercely it chewed at the base of 
  the cliff. I'd had to walk a path along the side of the 
  precipice, inside a fence of stone flags laid on their edges. 
  Beyond these were flat grassless areas of clifftop, some with 
  people lying down to look over the edge. At the top of the path 
  I sat out on one myself and looked across the ocean.

  Jenny's ocean. The other side of the ocean she'd walked into. 
  The only way she knew to go home. The sun came out suddenly, 
  gently warming my back, and then a voice intruded.

  "There's nothing to see out _there_."

  I turned to find backlit hair haloed red, and everything inside 
  me went wild until the sun hid itself again. Then her face came 
  out of shadow, I saw that she was someone _else_ with red hair 
  -- someone with smiling green eyes, wearing a bright rain 
  slicker. A small backpack hung from her shoulder. The sound of 
  the wind on the clifftop had prevented me from hearing her 
  coming.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you," she said, and waved 
  out over the sea. "You were looking the wrong way for the best 
  scenery."

  I shrugged, rather ungraciously; I didn't want distraction. "It 
  depends on how far you can see."

  "And how far can _you_ see?"

  "Wherever I've been." It wasn't my usual style, but my tone was 
  unmistakably dismissive.

  "Sorry," she said, and gave me a little wave before walking back 
  to the path, clambering easily over the stone flag fence, her 
  red hair floating against the sky.

  I turned back to the ocean. The crashing surf was soundless from 
  700 feet above it, but the keening and mewling of the seabirds 
  on the cliffs were the songs of the wake I'd come to keep.



  I came back down the pathway past a weathered man posing for 
  photographs with a donkey. On its back was a small dog wearing a 
  cap, with a pipe in its mouth. I guess it's easier to show 
  friends back home a picture of foolishness than to try and 
  understand and explain a different culture.

  I drove from the parking lot after a quick look at a map, turned 
  left and found myself on the wrong side of the road with an 
  approaching motorist panicking on his brakes. Swerving back, I 
  gave the guy a suitably chastened look; he muttered something I 
  couldn't hear and didn't need to. A bit further, a hitchhiker 
  stuck out a thumb, and, still a bit shaken, I pulled over.

  "Hi, going towards Galway?" she asked, bending to window level. 
  "Oh -- " green eyes grinned, " -- the man with the long-distance 
  vision."

  This time I smiled back, thinking absently about second chances. 
  "Sure. Get in."

  When she'd done so, she held out a hand. "I'm Finnoula. Finnoula 
  Regan."

  "Mike," I said, accepting a firm and friendly clasp. "Mike 
  Rainwater." I put the car in motion again. "Hey, I'm sorry I was 
  short with you on the clifftop."

  "That's OK. It was your space. I've used the cliffs to clear my 
  head too."

  I glanced over; she caught my look and smiled again, open and 
  incurious.

  "What's Galway like?" I asked.

  "It's nice. Lively.... It's a university town with lots of young 
  people. Great crack."

  I gaped at her and the car swerved slightly.

  She burst out laughing. "No, not what you think... `crack' means 
  fun, enjoying yourself, music and drinking." She paused and 
  looked thoughtful, and _there_ was the resemblance again. "If 
  you don't mind taking a small detour for lunch, I'll show you."



  She brought me to a little pierside pub, which was full, mostly 
  with foreigners enjoying the music and the food. We ordered 
  salmon on coarse Irish bread and Finnoula asked for a glass of 
  beer. I had a Coke.

  "I don't drink," I told her when she suggested I try a beer. 
  "It's a genetic thing. Low tolerance to alcohol."

  "Genetic?"

  "Native Americans and alcohol don't mix very well."

  She was puzzled. "Native Americans? Oh... Indians?"

  I nodded. "Yes, but we prefer `Native Americans.' "

  She looked at me, openly curious. "You're the first I've met," 
  she said, "as far as I know."

  "And how would you know?" I'd had this conversation once before.

  "I don't know. Your skin isn't really red, just... outdoorsy. 
  Your features, maybe -- they're not European." Her eyes glinted 
  mischievously. "Maybe you shouldn't have stopped wearing 
  feathers?"

  "Maybe you should still be riding donkeys," I retorted.

  She laughed. "Touche. Sorry."

  We let it go and listened to the music, but she was obviously 
  still thinking about it. "How does it work out in your job?" she 
  asked when the musicians took a break. "Is there prejudice, like 
  as if you were black?"

  I work on Wall Street, where a Sioux is unusual in an 
  environment of Jews and WASPs who tend to keep things in the 
  family. But I had made it my business to become very good at 
  what I did, and as long as I produced I was tolerated, I told 
  her. "I don't get invited to certain parties, but it's no big 
  deal."

  It had been at one time, when I'd scholarshipped my way through 
  a college too good for my breed; when hard work brought me high 
  grades, which disturbed some of my financially and racially 
  advantaged classmates. When comments about `good dead injuns' 
  held real malice and a couple of physical confrontations made me 
  wonder if they wanted to make it really happen. There were some 
  depressing times.

  The early times of the eagle.



  Back on the road she told me something about herself. She was 
  21, an only child, and worked as a computer programmer. And her 
  parents had split a month after her last birthday.

  "They had it so well organized. I realized they'd only been 
  waiting until I turned 21," she murmured. "They tried to be so 
  damned civilized about it, but I know now the marriage 
  probably ended years ago. They'd stayed together for my sake."

  "That's bad?"

  "Yes. They didn't think about how I'd feel, knowing I was the 
  only reason they'd stayed together living what must have been 
  empty lives."

  "And how _do_ you feel?"

  She looked at me and winced. "Mixed up. I was angry with them 
  and said things that maybe I shouldn't have. That's why I'm over 
  here, trying to clear my head."

  Two of us doing the same thing. "I'm sorry I didn't let you 
  share my space."

  She grinned at that, which was better. For both of us.



  We drove through layered hills of uncovered limestone, the color 
  of the clouds which sometimes came down over them. I'd not seen 
  anything like it.

  "There's plant life here that's not found anywhere else," she 
  told me, and brought me to a perfumery which concentrated the 
  scent of rare flowers. We went to a cave with bones of bears 
  ("There haven't been bears in Ireland for five thousand 
  years!"), and then she brought me to something which threw me 
  right back to home.

  "It's a _dolmen,_ a stone age burial site." Four large rocks sat 
  in a massive but delicate construction that looked poised to fly 
  from its rocky field. "There are lots of them in Ireland, and in 
  Britain. Some say they have magical properties."

  I put my hand against one of the upright stones. "We have 
  places which feel like this -- " I said quietly " -- they are 
  places of... communication."

  She didn't laugh. "Communication with what?"

  "Memories, and things beyond memory."

  I felt her green eyes scanning right through me. "You're a deep 
  one, Mike Rainwater," she said eventually.

  As we walked back to the car I thought once that a high shadow 
  flickered just beyond my vision. But I didn't look up.



  "I'm going to stay with a friend from college." She was poised 
  at the half-open door of the car.

  "Thanks for the company," I said, "and for the tour. Maybe we'll 
  see each other again sometime?"

  I didn't expect to. And then I did one of those impulsive things 
  which don't come from rational thinking.

  "Come with me tomorrow," I said.

  She nodded, and I was surprised.

  "Four in the morning," I warned, expecting a change of mind.

  "OK," she said, then smiled, touched my hand briefly, and got 
  out of the car into the bustle of the Galway evening.



  I sat on a limestone slab a little back from the dolmen and 
  waited for the sun. She was beside me, bundled in a warm jacket.

  "You're not going closer?"

  I shook my head. "It's not necessary."

  It was like a sound which kind of sneaked in and built slowly, 
  growing under the lightening sky, and when the sun slipped up 
  from behind the eastern hills and cast the shadow of the dolmen 
  around me, the stones relayed its song. The ancient music 
  enveloped me like the old robe of buffalo skins in which I had 
  taken my tribal initiation vows, bringing me away into the past. 
  It lasted until the sun cleared the stones, and it was long 
  enough for Jenny to tell me that she hadn't meant to do it, and 
  to properly say her goodbyes. And then she was gone.

  I looked at Finnoula.

  "Finished?" she asked quietly.

  I nodded. "Could you hear?"

  She shook her head.

  A pity. She would have liked Jenny.



  We had breakfast in a local hotel, the first customers of the 
  day. She waited until we were finished to tell me she was going 
  to Dublin on the afternoon train. To see her father. The 
  prospect was bothering her.

  "You don't know what to say to him?" I asked. "You're scared?"

  "It's difficult for me to talk to either of them just now. 
  Somehow..." she paused, searching. "Somehow I feel guilty."

  I looked at her for a few moments, then signalled the waitress 
  to bring the check. On the road I told her about my grandfather.

  "He raised me. My parents died when I was small, killed when 
  their old truck went off the road. He was the one who pushed me 
  into regular school, instead of the one for people like us. One 
  day I came back upset after somebody called me a no-good redskin 
  -- " It all welled up again. "Know what I was feeling? Guilty. 
  Guilty for _being_ an Indian. I was feeling ashamed because 
  history had written us as the bad guys."

  "That feeling wasn't rational," she murmured.

  I grinned at her. "No, it wasn't. Is yours?"

  Then she smiled too -- tentatively, but it was there. "No, it's 
  not." She reached across and squeezed my arm. "Thanks."

  "You're welcome. And remember, you still _have_ parents to talk 
  to."



  I don't like railway stations much; too often they're places of 
  saying goodbye. But we had time for coffee.

  "How did you handle the guilt problem?" she asked.

  I added sugar to my cup and stirred. "My grandfather took me on 
  a trip into the Tetons, high up until we could stand on a ledge 
  and see back down over Wyoming. Then he told me simple truths. 
  That my people had been there long before the people who taunted 
  me. That we had a civilization in this land much older than 
  theirs. That though the white men had taken the land, they 
  couldn't take our souls."

  "He sounds like a wise man," she said. "But it doesn't sound 
  like enough to solve all your problems."

  I nodded. "You're right. But he also gave me something else that 
  day."

  We were high, but he was higher still, circling in the air 
  currents around the peak. My mind's eye provided detail which 
  distance hid.... talons and beak razor sharp, eyes which could 
  find a mouse hundreds of feet below, a majesty befitting his 
  place in the kingdom of life.

  "That is your soul, Michael," my grandfather said softly. "That 
  eagle will always be near when you need him, when you have 
  difficulty finding yourself. Look up and you'll see him."

  The bird dropped a wing and came swooping down towards us. I 
  made ready to run but my grandfather held my arm firmly. "Do not 
  be afraid of your soul," he murmured.

  The eagle came so close that we could feel on our faces the wind 
  of his slowly beating wings, and I could see the beak and talons 
  and eyes which I'd only imagined before. He circled us once, 
  then gave a strident call and rose back up into the blue above 
  the Tetons.

  "I haven't felt guilty or afraid since then," I said when I'd 
  told her about him. "Call it superstition if you want, but I 
  believed in that eagle."

  "Have you seen him often?" she asked.

  I nodded. "Several times, in school and later in New York when I 
  needed sorting out. I'd look at the skyscrapers and see him 
  wheeling around the peaks of the city."

  Until he failed me: when Jenny went, I blamed him. I needed 
  something to blame, even though it had been inevitable. A 
  genetic thing, a low tolerance to life. And one night, when the 
  demons of fear had momentarily overcome her, she had gone to the 
  ocean and walked in until her red hair floated lifeless on the 
  waves.

  I had asked him to help her and he'd failed me, and afterwards I 
  wanted to be free of him to curse him. But there is no freedom 
  from the spirits we know.

  "There was a girl... Jenny, an Irish girl, in New York," I told 
  Finnoula. "Neither of us fitted perfectly in our lives. Both of 
  us were lonesome for our homes and our own people. But we had 
  also both said our goodbyes and we had to make good."

  I had my eagle, but Jenny had a different bird, a raven that sat 
  on her shoulder. That's what she called her depression.

  "She'd been dumped by a guy, her husband, in the small village 
  where she came from. She felt... ashamed. She became convinced 
  it was her fault, that she hadn't tried hard enough. She ran 
  away, from her village and her shame." I paused, remembering the 
  helplessness, hers and mine. "We became friends, and I was 
  trying to help her see that she couldn't hold herself 
  responsible for what happened, but one night when I wasn't 
  there, she drowned herself."

  I looked at Finnoula and saw the woman that Jenny could have 
  been. "I came here to be sure she got home."

  The public address system blared a call for the Dublin train and 
  she stood up. "I have to go, Mike." She came close and kissed me 
  on the cheek. "Thanks, again," she whispered, then she drew her 
  head back and looked at me. "Will you be coming to Dublin?"

  I shook my head. "I've only another couple of days, and there's 
  something I have to do before I go back. But I'll come here 
  again."

  "We don't have eagles in Ireland now," she said softly, a little 
  sadly. "We used to."

  I hugged her and she felt warm and soft and very close. "They're 
  inside of us, Finnoula," I whispered. "We just have to let them 
  fly."

  She waved to me until the train disappeared around the first 
  bend. And then there was only the locomotive's horn mourning me 
  a fading last goodbye.



  The village was tiny, a straggle of houses tight into a bay, 
  with a small finger of pier pointing toward America. When I 
  drove in, I knew every house and the hidden people behind each 
  window.

  There was no family to see; Jenny had told me her parents had 
  died some years before she left. And an only brother had gone to 
  Australia since then. When her crisis came, there was no one 
  close.

  I parked the car near the pier and walked slowly through the 
  main street, and it was as if Jenny was beside me pointing out 
  her happy times. I recognized the house she'd grown up in, now 
  closed and dilapidated, with a `For Sale' sign that also looked 
  tired. A school seemed too new to be the one she'd talked of, 
  and then I found the original one-room building was now a 
  library. A church at the end of a laneway stood guard on a 
  graveyard and I creaked open an iron gate which echoed the final 
  hopes of generations.

  I found her parents' grave and said goodbye for her.

  I met a few people as I walked back in a cool wind coming off 
  the sea, but none paid me much attention. Most seemed to be old. 
  It was like the tribal villages back home, where the young 
  people had left because there was nothing for them.

  On the pier I stood for a few minutes looking at the bay. Waves 
  staggered in from the ocean, falling exhausted onto a rocky 
  beach from which the child Jenny had paddled and swam, and on 
  which years later the woman Jenny had decided to run from her 
  raven. But it had followed her to the other side of the ocean.

  I went back to the car and took a small box from the trunk. When 
  I stood on the end of the pier and scattered her ashes into the 
  waves, the raven finally flew from her shoulder.



  The morning before I left, I waited on the clifftop. Soon I 
  heard the sun begin to rise behind me, and, as the music got 
  louder, a speck on the horizon grew.

  Eventually I could feel on my face the wind of his slowly 
  beating wings.



  William Trapman (brian@mariseo.internet-eireann.ie)
-----------------------------------------------------
 
  William Trapman is a journalist and broadcaster from County 
  Kildare, Ireland. He has been writing short stories and plays 
  since the mid-'80s. He is the author of the published short 
  story collection _Mariseo's House and Other Stories_, and is 
  currently working on a novel based on an Irish Celtic 
  background.



  Need to Know: From Paper to the Internet   by Jason Snell
===========================================================

  We live in a digital world overflowing with analog information. 
  For every e-mail message a person receives, there's usually a 
  corresponding voice mail item, a fax message, and probably a 
  large heap of "snail mail" or a package delivered to you 
  courtesy of your friendly postal employee.

  Quite an industry has sprung up around the need to convert that 
  analog information into digital. Optical Character Recognition 
  (OCR) systems transform faxes and paper messages into ASCII text 
  (or -- better yet -- styled text, complete with a font which 
  closely matches the original). Voice recognition systems 
  translate the human voice into a form more capable of being sent 
  over a slow modem link or placed in a searchable database.

  Though these tools can seem impressive, they're still not smart 
  enough to take human beings out of the process. Even the best 
  OCR packages still make enough mistakes to force someone to 
  check over the entire result for errors. And when it comes to 
  something as sensitive as converting works of _literature_ to 
  digital form, the time commitment required to make sure the work 
  is rendered faithfully begins to soar.

  Enter Michael Hart, who, in 1971, began a project to convert 
  public domain texts -- ones whose copyrights had expired -- to 
  digital form. While early attempts didn't bear very much fruit 
  (only a few small texts were converted back then), in 1991 his 
  project, named after the man who sparked the printing 
  revolution, finally took root.

  To date, Hart and his 500 Project Gutenberg volunteers have 
  converted almost 250 texts, ranging from the U.S. Declaration of 
  Independence to _Frankenstein_ to part of a turn-of-the-century 
  version of the _Encyclopaedia Brittanica_, into plain ASCII 
  text, readable by users of just about any computer on the 
  planet.

  Though at first converting a book from page to hard drive might 
  seem a simple matter of running it through an OCR package (or 
  typing it in by hand) and editing out typographical errors, 
  Project Gutenberg insists on a rigorous production process. 
  First, source material (chosen by the volunteers themselves; 
  Hart says he has his own favorites, but "I don't want _my_ 
  biases, much as I may love them, to effect things too much.") 
  must be old enough to be out of copyright -- Project Gutenberg 
  runs a copyright check on a work before volunteers even begin 
  work on creating an etext.

  Second, Gutenberg volunteers try to make their plain ASCII texts 
  as readable as possible. All Gutenberg texts are unformatted, 
  with carriage returns at the end of every line. While plain text 
  doesn't allow editors very many tricks -- no special characters, 
  no altering the spaces between letters, words, and lines -- 
  Gutenberg's guidelines do encourage editors to break their lines 
  at the ends of complete thoughts or with punctuation marks. For 
  example, take this passage from _Frankenstein:_

> How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and
> snow! Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise. I have
> hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those
> whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend
> and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.

  which might read better (and more poetically) as:

> How slowly the time passes here,
> encompassed as I am by frost and snow!
> Yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise.
> I have hired a vessel and am occupied in collecting my sailors;
> those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom
> I can depend and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage.

  After a while, it seems, one gets in the habit of thinking 
  carefully about how to break ASCII text at the end of lines. 
  Hart himself seems to take this habit to the extreme -- every 
  line of text he writes (except those at the end of a paragraph) 
  is exactly the same length. Some of us choose our words after 
  carefully weighing their meaning; Hart seems to weigh their 
  meaning _and_ their length.

  Finally, editions are reviewed by Hart himself, and then the 
  "Gutenberg etext" is released to the world as version 1.0. As 
  the work is disseminated and errors are discovered, volunteers 
  will release new versions of the texts every so often.

  While systems like the World Wide Web's HTML and Ian Feldman's 
  Setext (used by InterText and _TidBITS_) allow creators of 
  electronic texts to create texts without line breaks and add 
  attributes like italics and bolding, Gutenberg relies on plain 
  text. Hart's rationale is that while standards may come and go, 
  ASCII is forever.

  "Only two authors of hundreds I have spoken with actually say it 
  may make a difference whether their works were emphasized in a 
  particular way, so most of the time it wouldn't make any 
  difference," he says. But Hart indicates that Gutenberg would be 
  willing to post books in some mark-up format, as long as "Plain 
  Vanilla ASCII" editions always remain available.

  Of greater concern to Hart and Project Gutenberg are possible 
  changes in copyright laws. Currently, a copyright expires after 
  the creator of a work has been dead for 50 years. The more that 
  length extends, Hart says, the less information will be 
  available to "the Information Poor" -- people who don't have the 
  ability to pay for searching through or reading copyrighted 
  material. Right now any text created before 1920 is in the 
  public domain, and new works will begin coming into the public 
  domain this year. But the United States Congress is considering 
  legislation that would extend the copyright moratorium so that 
  post-1919 works wouldn't begin entering the public domain until 
  2015, and there's no guarantee that copyright protection will be 
  extended even further before 2015 comes along -- long after the 
  original creators of a work have profited off it, died, and left 
  their estates to others who have also profited. "Adding another 
  20 years to the copyright incarceration of information won't 
  help the Information Rich so much as it may move an Information 
  Poor person over twice as far into the Dark Ages, by making them 
  wait an additional 20 years for free access to information," 
  Hart says.

  The philosophy of making texts available to the information poor 
  is what drives Hart and Project Gutenberg, and that's why the 
  texts are available in ASCII. Essentially anyone with a computer 
  -- even if the computer is of the 15-year-old, garage-sale 
  variety -- can read Gutenberg etexts. If a computer has even the 
  most rudimentary searching ability, it can be used to search 
  Gutenberg etexts for relevant passages. In the end, an unlimited 
  number of people will be able to choose from a large electronic 
  library of texts while paying very little for the privilege. As 
  CD-ROM technology expands and decreases in price, whole 
  libraries of information will be available on just a few CD-ROMs 
  at low cost.

  For Hart, the birth of every new electronic text is cause for 
  celebration. "I feel as if I have discovered Archimedes' Lever," 
  he says, "and am jacking up a whole world just a little with 
  each book."



  FYI
=====

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      InterText's next issue will be released May 15, 1995.
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