textfiles/magazines/INTERTEXT/ITv5n3.etx

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=======================================
InterText Vol. 5, No. 3 / May-June 1995
=======================================

  Contents

    FirstText: The Digital Finish Line................Jason Snell

    Need to Know: The Electronic Lingua Franca......Adam C. Engst

  Short Fiction

    Shipping and Handling Extra_...................Laurence Simon_

    Game Over_...................................Christopher Hunt_

    The Rock_.......................................Edward Ashton_

    Genetic Moonshine_..................................Jim Cowan_

....................................................................
    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. 3. 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: The Digital Finish Line  by Jason Snell
====================================================

  While those of us here at InterText's virtual offices have been 
  accused of a lot of things, failing to be punctual has never 
  been one of them. One of the things I take great pride 
  in--especially when I'm being interviewed by journalism 
  students, which seems to be all the time these days--is the fact 
  that since our second issue, we've managed to appear every two 
  months, like clockwork. If it's the 15th of an odd-numbered 
  month, you can pretty much bet that an issue of InterText is 
  nearing completion. (You can also bet that I'll be chained to my 
  desk, stressed out, but that's a different topic for a different 
  time.)

  We set out to make sure that InterText came out on a regular 
  schedule because (as I've no doubt noted before), the world of 
  electronic magazines can often seem insubstantial. What are all 
  these electronic publications? Just little collections of bits 
  of information flitting around the Internet. There's no main 
  office you can point to, no 800 number to call for subscription 
  queries, and no stack of back issues to point to (unless you 
  print out every issue, as I do). And since so many on-line 
  publications are volunteer-driven, a lot of them tend to 
  disappear from the surface of the Net quite soon after they're 
  born.

  We intended that InterText would be different, and it has been. 
  But one way we were able to show people how serious we were was 
  by keeping a regular schedule, just as print publications do.

  This issue, due to all sorts of personal and professional issues 
  in both my life and Geoff Duncan's life, InterText's production 
  cycle has been a bit more of a sprint than a marathon. And as I 
  write this, I can see the finish line ahead. We could've used 
  some extra time to put out this issue and save our sanity, 
  but... the show must go on, and the issue must go out. So it 
  does, again and again.


  We're not the only ones serious about online publishing and 
  online fiction, of course. Lots of people are serious about this 
  field--editors, readers, and writers alike. One of them, Jeff 
  Carlson, has decided to put his time where his mouth is. In an 
  effort to increase awareness of the online publishing world, 
  Jeff has created eScene, a collection of the best online fiction 
  of 1994. Jeff hopes to publish this collection into the future, 
  giving online writers some well-deserved recognition.

  This year's eScene is being finished as I write this, and I'm 
  happy to say that several stories for InterText are being 
  considered, though I don't yet know the final results of the 
  eScene editorial board's decisions. But regardless of our level 
  of participation, I'm excited about eScene. It's a great way to 
  draw public attention to what we and so many other online 
  publishers do, and it also points out just how much good 
  material is out there. Just because it's not on paper doesn't 
  mean it doesn't have value. You and I know better.

  For more information on eScene, contact Jeff Carlson at 
  kepi@halcyon.com. When eScene is released, it will be found on 
  the World Wide Web at <http://www.etext.org/Zines/eScene/> and 
  via FTP at <ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/eScene/> .
  
  Thanks for reading InterText and supporting the concept of 
  online publishing. Until next time...



  Shipping and Handling Extra  Laurence Simon
=============================================
...................................................................
  Maybe it's a good thing that we usually draw a firm line between 
  our professional and personal lives; after all, a man's home is 
  his castle.
...................................................................

  Jerry's not much of a public speaker. He'd give everyone the 
  news from the inside of a cardboard box if he could, but the 
  company president doesn't allow cardboard boxes in the 
  conference room. So he's stuck up there at the podium going 
  through charts and figures as fast as he can. There's sweat on 
  his brow, his face, and his hands. He's just covered with sweat, 
  so much that you'd think that he had come out of a rainstorm, 
  but that's Jerry. He's biting his nails and drawing a little 
  blood, which isn't good for the charts. And when he's done, he 
  charges for the elevator and goes straight back to his office to 
  cower among his boxes.

  Sorry for not introducing myself earlier. I'm Hal. Jerry and I 
  work for Tarpley Publishing in Chicago and we have offices at 
  two ends of a very long hallway on one of Tarpley's three floors 
  in this building. Four floors, if you count the ground-level 
  shipping area. Both of us have been here a while, and we've 
  worked hard to get those two special letters -- VP -- in front 
  of our titles. I like to think that I didn't lose much in the 
  fight for those letters, but I think Jerry lost more than he 
  bargained for.

  Let me try to explain. Every copier, computer, and television 
  monitor comes in a large cardboard box. After the packing 
  peanuts are judiciously removed and taken to Steve's office, 
  every one of those boxes goes straight to Jerry's office. For a 
  while, Jerry would put the boxes through rigorous testing, to 
  see if they meet his high standards. About two months ago, he 
  stopped checking the boxes and took every single one of them. 
  Jerry takes the bus to work every morning, grumbling about the 
  bus schedules as he sprints for his office door, and he takes 
  the bus home every day. There are slips of cardboard in his 
  shoes, gloves, and glasses, so he has the feeling of being in a 
  box as he's in transit. Nobody's seen his home -- there've been 
  jokes about him living in a cardboard box, but Personnel says 
  he's got an apartment he shares with someone. Who is this 
  someone? we asked Personnel, but that's confidential 
  information.

  And then Jerry won the lottery. All six numbers on a slip of 
  paper, and he's fifty _million_ bucks richer. There's a picture 
  of him that shows him shaking a lottery official's hand, and 
  he's holding this huge check. If you look closely, you can see 
  the ragged nails on the tips of Jerry's fingers. After that, 
  he's gone for a few days, and there are rumblings by the water 
  cooler and in the bathrooms.

  But Jerry doesn't tell the boss to kiss his red-blooded American 
  ass and quit his job, no: he goes right back to work. But he 
  doesn't come in the way he always comes in, covered with 
  cardboard slips and grumbling about the bus. No, he's all smiles 
  and grins, skipping through the hall to his office door.

  The water cooler's buzzing with all sorts of strange news. 
  Jerry's been seen in the employee lounge getting a cup of 
  coffee. Jerry's pushing the copier buttons with his fingers 
  instead of using pencils. Jerry's going to other people's 
  offices without first spraying himself with insect repellent. 
  And what's with the skipping? someone asks. Did those fifty 
  million big ones turn him into some sort of fairy?

  I fix my tie and head back down the hall. I'm going to talk to 
  Jerry. I'm going to ask him what the hell is going on. I'm going 
  to...

  Oh my God! The cardboard boxes are gone!

  Jerry comes out to greet me, shakes my hand, and he offers me a 
  seat. I politely refuse a cup of coffee and I look around his 
  office. There are pictures on the walls. There are subdued 
  knickknacks on his desk in the place of all those nails that 
  were pounded into the wood surface. All the nail-holes are 
  covered up with putty -- you can barely tell where the holes 
  were. His telephone isn't foaming with Lysol anymore. And all 
  the chairs aren't covered with plastic and crazy-glued to the 
  carpet to keep them from rolling around.

  But strangest of all is that there are no boxes anywhere, not a 
  single cardboard box in sight. Even the refrigerator box, his 
  favorite, has been taken from the corner by the window.

  "Jerry," I say, "do you have the figures for next week's 
  presentation?"

  "Sure thing," he says, folding his hands behind his head and 
  leaning back in his chair. "I'm working up some charts and 
  graphs that should show where we're heading for the next five 
  quarters. Good times ahead." Then he pushes back from the desk 
  just a little and his chair rolls a few inches back.

  There are some charts on the spreadsheet program on his computer 
  screen. He's actually working up charts. Is this man -- who is a 
  solid week ahead of schedule on his presentation -- the same man 
  who would tear, rip, and maim his charts before a presentation 
  in order to avoid having to stand in front of others? He knows 
  I'm not asking about the presentation. He knows I'm looking 
  around for the boxes and the nails and the foaming phone, but he 
  isn't telling me anything.

  "Everything all right, then?" I ask, trying desperately to look 
  him straight in the eye.

  "Everything's perfect," he says, leaning back just a little 
  more. "Everything is just the way I always wanted. It's all so 
  perfectly perfect. There's nothing to worry about anymore, Hal." 
  And then he looks straight back at me and laughs.

  I don't remember anything more from the conversation. I just 
  couldn't get over that look in his eyes. It was something like a 
  blackboard or something, dead center in his pupils, and 
  something fierce and holy was written on it. Something that you 
  just knew you weren't supposed to ever know, but it's right 
  there in front of you and ready for the whole world to discover. 
  Call me crazy, but that's exactly what I felt trying to keep eye 
  contact with the New & Improved Jerry.

  When I get back to the water cooler, I'm surrounded. They're 
  asking me what's with the skipping. They're asking me about the 
  lottery check. And they keep asking about the boxes. I don't 
  have a single answer for any of them, any one of the secretaries 
  and managers and marketers drooling for gossip. And it's not 
  because I don't want to tell -- I want to tell them desperately 
  -- but it's just that after I got that look in Jerry's eyes I 
  couldn't remember a damn thing.

  They suggested that I go back and ask Jerry point-blank what's 
  going on, but I refuse. People keep asking me for days, and I 
  tell some of them to go do it themselves. And the ones that do, 
  well, from the way they walk and the way they're looking at 
  things and holding their coffee mugs, I just know that they got 
  that look from his eyes and they saw what I saw in them.

  Then a few days later, Ed from Accounting comes in and we're 
  going over figures for the last quarter. Nothing in the numbers 
  or columns has any whiff of Jerry's story, and Ed gets up and 
  closes the door.

  "He doesn't take the bus anymore, you know," he says, sitting 
  back down.

  "Who doesn't take the bus anymore?" I ask. "Jerry doesn't take 
  the bus anymore?"

  "You remember," he says, and he waves his hand around for no 
  reason. "I told you about the cardboard gloves and blinders for 
  his glasses and all that. Well, he stopped taking the bus to 
  work. And he doesn't take it home, either. Or a taxi. I haven't 
  seen him go out the door at all, now that I think about it."

  "Look, he probably just goes out the back door to the garage, 
  where he has his brand-new car just waiting for him to drive 
  home," I say. Ed waves again, and nearly knocks over his coffee. 
  "Ed, let me finish -- he could have a limo driver waiting on him 
  with what he's worth."

  "But he doesn't drive!" Now Ed waves hard enough to knock the 
  coffee over. He pulls away the charts and figures before the 
  stain reaches them. "I know, I know -- he could buy any car on 
  any lot. But he doesn't have a license and he doesn't know how 
  to drive. There's no limos in the lot, except for _El 
  Presidente's_, of course." Ed stands and salutes briefly before 
  sitting back down. "Honest Injun, Hal, I swear. Oh, sorry about 
  the coffee. I get carried away sometimes."

  "Duh," I reply, getting some paper towels out of a drawer in my 
  credenza. "Good investigative work, Secret Agent Ed. Now go play 
  actuary while I pretend to manage the publishing figures."

  We blot out the coffee spill together, and he leaves with his 
  folder in one hand and a bunch of dripping paper towels in the 
  other.

  After the weekend, I ask Gladys in Personnel if there's anything 
  different with Jerry, and the instant she opens her mouth I know 
  that she'd seen the look in Jerry's eyes, too. I swear, I don't 
  know how I know that everyone's seen it, but I just can tell and 
  I think that they can tell I've seen it, too.

  "Our Vice President of Marketing has been abducted by the 
  government," she says. "The only reason why I can't tell you is 
  because they brainwashed me, and they're drugging everyone 
  through the water bottle deliveries."

  "Seriously, Gladys. Please," I say. "I'm new at trying to play 
  detective."

  "I can't give away this information without a good reason, you 
  know," she says. She taps her pen against the blotter, and it 
  makes a rat-rat-rat sound like raindrops on a window.

  "OK, you win the free lunch. Where and when?"

  She looks back in her files again. "There's nothing to say. Same 
  old Jerrold Timothy Hardaway, same social security number, 
  unmarried -- what a shame on that. He did change over to direct 
  deposit, but I've been hounding him for over a year about that." 
  She went back to her files and brought out another. "And I've 
  been hounding you on that, too, it seems. Care to sign this 
  form?"

  "No, I don't," I say. "I know it's funny working with publishing 
  software and accounting software and using credit cards all the 
  time, but I just like the feel of having a check in my hands and 
  taking it down to the bank to deposit it."

  "You know," Gladys counters, "in the big picture of things a 
  check is just as hokey as an electronic transfer of funds. If 
  you and Jerry were serious about being paranoid about your 
  money, you should come in here and demand bags of cash to carry 
  home with you."

  "You know something, Gladys," I say, signing the forms, "you're 
  absolutely right."

  "I can't believe what I'm seeing," she said. "You're the last 
  one to give up control. I ought to buy you that lunch."

  "You're right," I say, and I can't stop grinning. "You're 
  abso-fucking-lutely right."

  "Go back to work, Hal. Unless you want to sign up for the 
  shipping position. You can work your way up from the bottom all 
  over again."

  "Same salary?" I ask.

  "No," she says. "Bye."

  So Jerry doesn't have his boxes anymore, he doesn't take the bus 
  anymore, he's having his checks deposited, and I owe Gladys 
  lunch. Time to check the mail and get ready for the presentation 
  tomorrow.

  And what a night it's going to be. While I was out playing 
  Sherlock Holmes, every one of my Technology minions decided to 
  empty out their filing cabinets, stick all their papers in 
  manila folders, time-stamp them, and stick them on my desk. I do 
  my best to sort through whatever falls in the category of Final 
  Draft or Summary Report before going home at midnight.

  I dream that I'm looking into his eyes.



  The next morning we're all in the board room. Everyone's in the 
  same chairs as the last presentation. Oliver something-or-other 
  nudges me.

  "Steve's got pretty big dandruff this morning," he says. He nods 
  towards Steve, whose suit jacket has a few packing peanuts 
  clinging to it. "I hear he's got the pile so deep that he can 
  dive into it from the top of his desk."

  "As long as he doesn't hang himself, it's fine by me," I say. 
  "Any news on when Jerry's going to show up?"

  "I don't know. Didn't you give him a radio collar or an 
  ear-tag?"

  "They're still in my briefcase. You want one?"

  Then the doors boom open. Jerry strolls in, goes to the podium, 
  and picks up the remote control.

  "He's going to use the automatic electronic overhead networked 
  computer display system. Nobody's used that thing ever," hisses 
  Jones, who smells something like burning leaves.

  "Why doesn't anyone use it?" I whisper back. The lights dim 
  slightly.

  "I don't know," says Oliver. Maybe he's the one who smelled like 
  burning leaves. "We bought it to keep up with ReMont and 
  Yellowjacket. Ours is better."

  "How can you tell?" I ask.

  "I don't know," says Oliver. "I hear they haven't used theirs 
  either. I think they're planning on buying a better system 
  first."

  "Nice cologne," I say. Something lowers itself from the ceiling 
  and the presentation begins.

  Next thing I know, he's shaking everyone's hand. He shakes them 
  a few more times, and holds up the remote. Everyone applauds, 
  and then he walks calmly to the elevator. I race up behind him 
  and stick my hand in at the last minute.

  "Great show, Jerry," I say.

  "What show?" he says, and he gives me that look again. He hands 
  me the remote. "Take a look inside."

  The door's about to close on us, but Joe from Advertising is 
  rushing to the door. "Hold it! Hold it!" I push the Open Door 
  button and Joe steps in. "Thanks, guys. You so sure that we're 
  ready to expand?"

  "I know we're ready," says Jerry, and then Joe suddenly jumps 
  out of the elevator.

  "I'll take the next one, guys," he says, and walks away from the 
  door.

  "Whatever," I say. I pop open the remote. There are no batteries 
  in it. "Needs batteries. Hey, Jerry -- want to hit somewhere for 
  dinner?"

  "Already got plans," he says, and he starts humming along with 
  the elevator music. "Hum with me, Hal. It's a good tune."

  So we hum along with the elevator music for a few seconds and 
  the door opens. Jerry heads off for his side of the hall, and I 
  start toward my office, but Jerry's talking loudly, so I turn 
  around.

  Jerry's shaking hands with this really big guy in work boots and 
  a jean jacket. They go into his office and Jerry closes the 
  door. I walk over to Janice, his secretary.

  "Who's the thug?" I ask her.

  "Hi, Hal," she says. "That guy's the new shipping clerk."

  "What does Jerry need with the shipping clerk?" I ask.

  "Maybe they're talking about those cardboard boxes without 
  homes," she says, giggling. "Although that's probably all in the 
  past now. I'm just worried that he's going to want someone else 
  to do the filing."

  I look at her perfectly manicured nails. "You file just fine, 
  Janice."

  "I'm used to it all," she says. "And sometimes it was fun, you 
  know? As long and he doesn't get funny on me and try to look up 
  my dress, everything's just fine. Besides, he was quite generous 
  with his first lottery check. Like my new scarf?"

  "Wonderful," I say.

  "I'll let you know if anything weirder happens, OK?"

  "Thanks," I say, and I go back to my office and answer my 
  messages. I go through the proposals and sign off on a 
  half-dozen projects and I'm reading through another when the 
  light goes out in Jerry's office. I check my watch and discover 
  it's 5:15. Damn, time flies fast some days. I look back out the 
  door -- Jerry's closing up shop. I drop the folder I'm holding 
  and run for the stairs. I'm no athlete, but I ran a good mile in 
  my high school days and weekend tennis and golf have kept away 
  the Beer-Gut Fairy. I run down the 16 flights fairly quickly, 
  and it takes me about half a minute to recover my breath while 
  the elevator arrives. Everyone files out of it, and I shut the 
  stairwell door while Jerry passes by. He turns around the hall 
  and I peer around the corner just in time to see him walk into 
  the shipping office.

  After waiting for a few seconds, I walk over to the shipping 
  office door... no, let me rephrase that. I _tiptoe_ over to the 
  shipping office door for a few feet, then I tell myself "Who am 
  I kidding?" and I walk the rest of the way. When I get to the 
  glass door, I look in. I gasp.

  It's his refrigerator box, reconditioned and reinforced at the 
  seams with light plywood, but it's the same old box nonetheless. 
  There's a noise coming from the inside, like a radio or a can 
  opener or something, but I can't tell through the door, and I 
  don't want to startle Jerry by opening it. He steps into it and 
  draws the flaps closed. There are a few clicks, then silence.

  Nobody's coming. I open the door and walk over to the box. Its 
  address is this one -- Tarpley Publishing, Chicago, Illinois. 
  Overnight delivery by 8:30 A.M. is checked, and it's insured for 
  fifty million dollars. Fifty million dollars worth of books.

  I hear someone coming and run back out the office door. I try to 
  close it as silently as possible and I duck under the glass 
  window in the door. After a few seconds, I peek through the 
  bottom of the window.

  The shipping guy comes in from the dock, checks the paperwork on 
  the side of the box, taps on it a few times, and tips the box 
  onto a dolly. I run for the stairs before he can see me, and I 
  make it to the third floor before I realize that it would've 
  been safe to take the elevator this time.



  I spend about two hours in my office trying to figure out what 
  the hell was going on, and how to confront Jerry. But I didn't 
  want to see those blackboard eyes of his, because they'd be 
  worse -- since that look had started popping up in other peoples 
  eyes. I pace the floor, think about calling the shippers, and 
  even walk down to Jerry's office to see if there's anything that 
  might give me ideas. In the end I just grab my briefcase and go 
  home. I even wrote "J ships himself in box every night" in my 
  planner, just in case I have a major attack of the crazies in my 
  sleep and lose my mind.

  Around ten the next morning, I decide to let the shipping clerk 
  know he's mailing a lunatic round-trip in an appliance box. His 
  name isn't on the phone list yet, but he probably has the same 
  extension as the old shipping clerk -- Walt, or something like 
  that.

  "What and where?" he says. Real charming.

  "How much does it cost to ship a Vice President to New York?

  "You're that Hal guy, right?"

  "Yes, this is the Hal guy," I say. "Do you know you're sending 
  one of our top executives overnight delivery with a round-trip 
  ticket?"

  "Back off," he says.

  "Excuse me?" I say.

  "Back off."

  I'm ready to ask him again, this time from the position of a 
  Vice President ready to take his job away. But not over the 
  phone. So I slam down the phone and head for the elevator. I've 
  still got my coffee mug in my hand, so I drink the rest of it 
  and throw the mug in the corner of the elevator. I don't know 
  why I threw it, and I pick it up again. The handle's got a 
  little chip in it, and the door opens. I walk over to the 
  shipping area, and he's wearing the same work boots and jacket. 
  I try to get one word out but he's got the Jerry-look in his 
  eyes, and that look still outranks me, like some sort of magic 
  trump card everybody's got in this building. Without a word, I'm 
  back in the elevator and rubbing the chip in the mug's handle.

  I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, but I don't see a 
  damned thing in my eyes.



  The next day, I go into my office and the door closes shut 
  behind me.

  "I'm Ray," the shipping clerk says. He puts out his hand. We 
  shake. "So you want me as your travel agent? Pretty soon 
  everyone's gonna be lining up at my door. How much you weigh?"

  "Why?" I ask him. "Why do let him do it?"

  "Why not? He pays the shipping bills, and he gives me a little 
  on the side. Just leave it be, OK?"

  "It's wrong!" I yell. "There's just something wrong about it!"

  "He isn't hurting anyone," Ray says. He lights a cigarette, 
  throws the match on the carpet. "I hear through the rumor mill 
  that before I started mailing him every night, he was a pretty 
  bad wreck. As long as nobody gets hurt and he keeps paying the 
  bills, it's fine by me. You done yet?"

  "Well, where the hell does he ship himself over the weekends, 
  then?" I ask him. "He doesn't just sit in the loading dock from 
  Saturday to Monday, does he?"

  "I don't know."

  "Really," I say. "Is he paying you to keep quiet on that one, 
  too?"

  "No, really," he says. "Look, I'm saying more than I should, but 
  you're his friend, so I can tell you this much. But it never 
  gets beyond us two, or there's going to be trouble, OK?"

  "OK," I say. "Or are you looking for more money than you're 
  already getting?"

  He looks out at the loading dock entry and then closes the door 
  to the hallway. "Look," he says, "no money on this one. The box 
  gets shipped out on Friday evening without any special 
  instructions for Saturday or Sunday delivery. So it goes out on 
  Friday and it must come back Monday."

  "So where does he eat?" I shout. "Where does he sleep? Where 
  does he go to the bathroom, for Christ's sake?"

  "I don't know," Ray says, "and I don't _want_ to know. This 
  stuff is crazy -- a guy shipping himself to his own office every 
  day, never going home.... I told you enough already, so just 
  leave me alone and go ask _him_ if you want any more answers, 
  OK?"

  "How does he do it?" I ask, grabbing his shoulders. "_How?_"

  "He's got this yoga thing he does," Ray looks me straight in the 
  eyes. "Like those channelers and crystal-sniffing weirdos. After 
  he seals himself up, he just goes into a trance and waits to 
  come back. I use this special knock to let him know he's back -- 
  it's what breaks him out of the trance, OK? That's it for the 
  headlines, pal."

  The eyes! That's where he got the eyes!

  Ray pushes me out of the way, opens the door, and walks out.



  For a few weeks, everything was fine. I didn't go by shipping at 
  all, and I even took a few days off to see my kids in Florida. 
  They were doing just great, and I came back to work better than 
  ever.

  "Well, he didn't come in yesterday. either," Janice says, filing 
  her nails. "I tried his cel phone, but he didn't answer. I even 
  tried his home number, but he must have had it changed after he 
  won the lottery because it isn't listed. I wonder where he is."

  "Can I borrow your phone?" I ask.

  "Sure. I wasn't using it or anything."

  I call Gladys to check up on Jerry's home number and address. No 
  changes.

  "Oh, and thanks for that lunch," she adds. "We've got to do it 
  again sometime, OK?"

  I write down the address and thank her before hanging up. I turn 
  to Janice. "Keep me informed, OK?"

  "Aye aye, captain."

  I go back to my office, and once again, I am greeted by my good 
  friend Ray. My floor is littered with spent matches.

  "OK, man." Ray stands up. "What are you trying to pull?"

  "What is who trying to pull?" I ask. Ray looks me straight in 
  the eye, and for the first time since God knows when, someone in 
  this place doesn't have those Jerry-eyes.

  "He's gone, man," says Ray, stabbing out his barely-smoked 
  cigarette. He lights another.

  "What do you mean, gone?" I ask.

  "I mean gone," he says. "Totally gone. The box didn't show up 
  yesterday. He's gone."

  "So he decided to open up his box and get out somewhere."

  "He can't get out of that box by himself," says Ray. "I seal the 
  edges before it goes out. And the special knock."

  "All right," I say. "Maybe he decided to put a stack of books in 
  there, and then he took a slow taxi home to think things over 
  for a few days."

  "Nope," Ray says. "I watched him go in."

  "Maybe he had someone let him out at the distribution office. 
  I'd certainly let someone out if they were shouting for help 
  from inside a giant package."

  "No way. There's a few guys down there who know about it -- so 
  that they don't drop him or nothin'. They'd tell me if he was 
  planning anything weird or ran into any problems."

  "Weird? You mean like shipping himself in a box every night?" I 
  ask.

  "Aw, just shut up, man!" he yells. "What the hell we do now? The 
  guy's been stuck in a box for three days now!"

  "What about the weekends, Ray?" I asked. "He lasts three days 
  over the weekends."

  Ray looks down, takes a breath. "I lied about that. I show up 
  Saturday and Sunday to re-ship him. He hangs out in the shipping 
  room, reading the paper until they pick him up. Sometimes, he 
  sends me out to get him a burger or something."

  "Great," I say. "Well, what do we do now?"

  "I asked _you_ that, man," Ray says. "We can't call the cops or 
  nothin' like that -- how the hell you explain shipping a guy 
  every night?"

  "Well, let's go down the shipping dock and check the paperwork. 
  Maybe you put the wrong label on him or something."

  After going down to shipping , we check the labels and the 
  forms. Everything was signed and labeled properly.

  "They even check the labels on the boxes," Ray's going through 
  another cigarette. He doesn't leave the matches lying about in 
  his own office, however. "They always check it because the 
  weight was so much, and they wanted to get the billing right. 
  Oh, man! We're screwed!" I pick up them phone, and Ray slams it 
  down. "You can't call the cops!"

  "I'm calling the shipping company. What's his account number?"

  I try to tell the person on the line that we were missing a 
  package, and they have a good chuckle at the size of the 
  package. "We don't lose many that big, but there's nothing in 
  the system under that number. What was in it?"

  "A person," I say, "registered as books, but it was a person."

  "Very funny," she laughs. "No really, what was in it? Was it 
  insured?"

  I ask her to check again, and she still doesn't find Jerry. I 
  ask for a supervisor.

  "We're screwed," Ray moans. "I don't know nothin'."

  The supervisor picks up, and I told her as much as I could: the 
  account number, the package number, the billing date, the 
  delivery address and the return address.

  "Did you know that your return address is the same as your 
  shipping address?" she asked.

  "Yes," I said. "But he's still missing and we need to find him."

  "Oh, a body. Our policy is not to ship human remains under any 
  circumstances," says the person at the delivery service. "If you 
  want, I can give you the numbers of some shipping companies that 
  perform those services quite adequately."

  Then, for whatever reason -- I have no idea, I break. I'm 
  screaming into the telephone. "Track him, track him for God's 
  sake!" But they can't find Jerry in their system anywhere. Their 
  computer says that they picked up three packages two nights ago, 
  two letter-sized envelopes and a 20-pound parcel going to our 
  New York branch, but there's no sign of a 300-pound reinforced 
  cardboard box bound for a round-trip back to our own offices. 
  They ask me if it wasn't sent the day before, and I tell them it 
  was, the day before and every day before that.

  Ray's sweating bullets, even worse than the old Jerry used to do 
  at staff meetings. He's smoking cigarette after cigarette, and 
  he's putting them out on the top of his desk nowhere near his 
  cracked Chicago Cubs ashtray. He's mumbling something to himself 
  with "Jerry" in it, over and over, but I can't make out the rest 
  of what he's saying. I shake him a little, and he shrugs me off.

  "Well," I say, sweeping cigarette butts into a wastepaper 
  basket, "game's over. How do we explain this one?"

  Ray explodes, spit flying everywhere. "We ain't explainin' 
  nothin! Nothin! We ain't explaining nothin' because there wasn't 
  nothin' that ever happened! I didn't do nothin' and I don't know 
  nothin' and you don't know nothin' and that's the truth!"

  Over the next few days, there's no word from Jerry. Ray comes by 
  the office almost every hour, and he just paces the floor 
  spitting, smoking, and mumbling that same whatever he mumbles 
  with "Jerry" in it. Then, a week after Jerry's disappearance, 
  Ray doesn't show up for work. I ask Personnel about him a few 
  days later, but they just say that Ray called in on Monday to 
  tell them that he was quitting and moving out of state, and he'd 
  call them about getting his last paycheck.

  He hasn't claimed it for over a year now.

  Jerry never showed up at the shipping dock, or gave anybody a 
  word to say that he was all right and happy to be where he was. 
  Once, when I couldn't stand that message in his eyes going 
  through my head over and over, I went to the regional office of 
  the shipping company and tried to take one of their managers 
  into confidence with the whole story, but they thought I was 
  kidding and nothing I said could convince them a real live human 
  being vanished from the face of the earth in one of their vans, 
  trucks, or planes.

  I like to imagine Jerry decided to change the destination 
  address on his package from Tarpley Publishing to Anywhere, 
  Tahiti and he's living the rest of his life on the beaches, 
  sipping drink after drink and watching the sun go up and down. I 
  also have these images in my head of a delivery error, or a 
  distribution office accident as Jerry's fate, leaving him as a 
  corpse rotting in his box in some dusty warehouse, cradling a 
  space-heater and a radio to his chest.

  Jerry's old position went to Steve, and the movers spent an 
  entire afternoon carting bag after bag of packing peanuts up two 
  floors of stairs, because Steve wouldn't let them use the 
  elevators with his furniture. Steve handles the presentations 
  just fine, with no sweating or nail biting at all. I look for 
  signs of nervousness and a compulsion to return to the 
  packing-peanut world of his office, but he gets through the 
  meetings and takes his time getting back. There's no talk about 
  Jerry at the water cooler or in the bathrooms any more, and 
  there's no talk about Steve and his packing peanuts either. I 
  think people are starting to talk about me, though, so I stay 
  around the bathrooms and coffee machine and the water cooler and 
  any other place that people stand around and talk.

  I pray to God that Steve doesn't win the lottery, because I 
  don't think I could stand to see what weird fate would befall 
  him.

  It's only five more years to the earliest I can take retirement, 
  and I'm going to take it as fast as I can. I'm getting out of 
  here.


  Laurence Simon (lsimon@phoenix.net)
-------------------------------------

  Laurence Simon is an HTML developer for Nettech and a Research 
  Producer for CTN in Houston. Nearly every Thursday night he can 
  be found in a local pub battling his arch-rival at Scabble. He 
  is known for traveling everywhere with his lucky Slinky in his 
  pocket, and will hastily produce this object if challenged or 
  threatened.


  Game Over  by Christopher Hunt
================================
...................................................................
  In one way or another, we all try to fit in somewhere we don't 
  belong: Maybe it's a city, a group of people, a job... or an 
  escape.
...................................................................

  One.
------

  Ramon downshifted as he came into the curve, eyes flicking 
  across the display panel. He still had 15 seconds on Mansell and 
  only three laps to go. He grinned, swinging smoothly into the 
  curve, hugging the inside wall like a surfer in a tube.

  He'd been running the Grand Prix every day for two weeks, and 
  this was the first time he'd ever been out in front. It was the 
  first time he'd lasted this far into the race.

  Normally, Ramon stayed away from arcades. Once you found your 
  game, it put a hook in you every bit as sharp and unshakable as 
  synthetic cocaine. Just another way to escape the grind. Another 
  way to kill time while you waited for death to catch up with 
  you.

  Ramon preferred to keep moving. Besides, he didn't have that 
  kind of disposable income.

  But Grand Prix was different. It was more than a game. It was 
  real. More real than the twilit world of concrete, glass, and 
  hurtling machinery outside the cubicle, the gray half-life that 
  haunted him like the fading memory of a bad dream.

  Grand Prix wasn't an escape into fantasy. It was an escape into 
  reality of a higher order. A world where the sun still shone and 
  being alive was the biggest thrill of all.

  He'd been introduced by a skinny Japanese biker boy with long 
  orange hair and amphetamine eyes. He sold the drugs Ramon 
  brought him to bike gangs up in Kawasaki. "Magic," the kid had 
  said. "Pure magic, you gotta try it."

  It didn't look like much. A black plastic injection-molded 
  cubicle with a flex-chair, steering wheel, floor pedals, and a 
  stick shift. There was a thin white jump suit hanging on a hook. 
  It was sour and sticky with the sweat of a hundred drivers and 
  disinfectant. An equally foul-smelling full- face headset was 
  clamped to the console with a pair of data gloves. Bundles of 
  fiber-optic ribbons were attached to everything. The clothing 
  was lined with electrodes.

  The kid grinned, giving Ramon the thumbs-up. "Go ahead," he said 
  in English. "It's oh-my-god totally fucking brilliant."

  Ramon was unsure. A half-gram of _synth_ -- synthetic cocaine -- 
  cost less than a ride in this machine. And Ramon had tried VR 
  games before -- a kick at first, but the thrill wore thin. It 
  was like swimming through a computer-generated swamp. Moving was 
  awkward and touching something just gave a mild electric shock, 
  no real sense of touch.

  He told the kid no, it was too expensive.

  But the kid was eager. The absolute latest in VR technology. 
  Real drivers used it for training. He started reading off the 
  tech talk on the hype sheet taped to the side of the cubicle, 
  rattling it off like it meant something. Explaining how 
  newly-developed ultra-precise synchrotron rings had made it 
  possible to pack billions of transistors onto microscopic 
  protein chips capable of cruising along at something like a 
  trillion instructions per second. How comprehensive 
  brain-mapping allowed new micro-accurate electrodes to stimulate 
  appropriate neural receptors and delude your brain into 
  believing the simulation was real. How the latest sensory 
  recording devices had been used to capture vast quantities of 
  actual visual, aural, and sensory data that was then used to 
  generate complex, interactive sensory fields so true-to-life you 
  could feel the wind on your cheek and the grit in your eye.

  "No way," said Ramon.

  He offered to lend Ramon the money. If Ramon liked it, he could 
  pay him back. If not, no problem.

  And Ramon decided to give it a spin.

  He was hooked immediately. Hooked so deep he was soon 
  "borrowing" a little money from his employer -- not a smart idea 
  since he worked for the Kotobuki branch of the Yamaguchi-gumi. 
  But, then again, nobody ever said Ramon was smart.

  All he wanted was to win. Just once. Then he'd stop. He would 
  return the Yakuza's money before they'd even noticed it was 
  gone.



  He saw the plume of smoke as the voice crackled in his headset. 
  "Crash on the inside corner at K 2.3! Watch out, Ramon -- 
  Andretti's gone down."

  "Shit!" He was all the way around the curve now and Andretti's 
  Ferrari was right there in front of him, sheets of orange flame 
  and oily black smoke rising from the wreckage. He saw Andretti 
  somehow pulling himself from the twisted metal, thin tongues of 
  flame licking at his crash suit.

  Ramon slammed down another gear and swerved hard to the right. 
  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Andretti scramble to the 
  embankment, rolling in the grass, slapping at the flames on his 
  suit. Somewhere in the back of his mind he could hear a siren, a 
  mournful wail like the plaintive lament of some sad, wandering 
  spirit.

  He realized he'd over-steered too late. His British-built 
  Fondmetal X6 spun wildly in a double 360 and slammed rear-end 
  first into the crash wall on the other side of the track. The 
  engine gave a desperate gasp and stalled. He quickly restarted 
  it, watching as the other cars flew by, waiting for a chance to 
  slide back into the slipstream. The warning display was blinking 
  wildly. The tire indicators flashing red. The crankshaft an 
  ominous yellow. He'd have to pit now.

  He punched the display, calling up the lap times. He still had 
  seven seconds on Mansell. If he moved now.... He flattened his 
  foot on the gas pedal and popped the clutch, squealing back onto 
  the track. Two cars were coming up fast. He flipped into third 
  and peeled down the straightaway, waiting for the tach to hit 
  12,000 before shifting into fourth. He was doing 120 now. Maybe 
  fast enough to stay out of trouble. The two cars roared past 
  him.

  He checked the lap times again. Now he only had two seconds lead 
  on Mansell. That wouldn't be enough if he had to pit. He had to 
  figure seven to ten seconds just to change the tires. And if the 
  crankshaft went, he'd be out of the race.

  He had about a kilometer of straightaway. A few seconds to think 
  before he came around the final turn and to the pit-stop 
  pullover. What to do?

  He had to go for it, that's all. If he pitted, he was finished 
  anyway. He just had to pray to God that his tires could hold on 
  for the last two laps.

  "Ramon, your tires are torn up," came the voice on his headset. 
  "Your shocks are practically gone and your crank's looking iffy. 
  You're gonna have to come in."

  "Forget it," said Ramon. He glanced at the lap time readout. He 
  was still holding his two-second edge on Mansell. But Yoshida 
  was coming up fast behind them. Barely a second between him and 
  Mansell. "I can still win this thing. The tires'll hold up. It's 
  only two more laps."

  He was turning now and sailing past the pits. His crew were 
  flagging him. Fuck them, he thought. It's me who's gonna win or 
  lose this thing, not them.

  He careened into the hard right just past the pits and headed 
  into the penultimate lap. He could feel the adrenaline juicing 
  through his veins, steeling his nerves, stoking his will. 260 
  KPH. Pure speed. The purest rush imaginable. A flood of 
  endorphins washed through his body. Goddamn but he felt good. 
  Nothing could beat this sensation. Not even sex.

  Two seventy-five now. The track was just a crazy gray blur 
  sliding beneath his eyes. The people in the stands lost their 
  individuality, blending into an amorphous multicolored mass. He 
  glanced at the readout. He'd picked up half a second on Mansell. 
  Yoshida was starting to fall further back.

  He thought about that movie _The Right Stuff_. He and Jinky had 
  rented it from the disc shop the other day, watched it on 
  Jinky's big- screen. The picture was a little shaky; she'd 
  scavenged the TV and it must have been 20 years old. It couldn't 
  pick up satellite broadcasts. But that didn't matter -- it still 
  beat the hell out of anything the other Kaitai-boys had. It was 
  big and bright and it took the edge off those cold, homesick 
  nights in their one-room mansion down in Kotobuki.

  He remembered how the test pilots in the movie talked about a 
  demon that lived beyond the sound barrier, inhabiting some kind 
  of magical hyper-dimension where speed and time fused, a place 
  just a step beyond human comprehension. He felt like he was 
  heading for that place now, that if he just went a little 
  faster, he would break through that barrier and speed 
  effortlessly to the finish line, flying on some kind of 
  spiritual automatic pilot.

  He was coming into the triple hairpin now. He'd have to take 
  them pretty fast if he wanted to keep his edge on Mansell and 
  Yoshida. Both of them were old pros, much smoother on tight 
  corners than Ramon. The acrid smell of burnt rubber was sharp in 
  his nostrils.

  The voice in the headset was shouting urgently, telling him to 
  slow down, telling him his tires would vaporize if he didn't 
  drop down to at least 180.

  He shook his head, licked his lips, leather-gloved hands wrapped 
  tight around the wheel, roaring into the first turn, easing off 
  slightly on the accelerator, slowing to 220. The car's composite 
  plastic frame shrieked under the strain. He breathed slowly, 
  deeply. In. Out. In. Out.

  He came out of the first turn, breathing hard. The linings of 
  his gloves were slick with sweat. His heart was pounding so hard 
  against his ribs it felt as if it were trying to smash its way 
  through.

  Second hairpin. Everything running in slow motion now. His 
  concentration narrowed to a pinpoint, focusing on the thin line 
  of probability that would take him safely through the turn. The 
  smell of burnt rubber was overpowering now. It seeped in through 
  the air vents in his helmet, stinging his eyes. Trails of black 
  sooty smoke streamed over the chassis. The engine's whine had 
  reached fever pitch.

  "Slow down! Slow down!" screamed the voice in his headset.

  He twisted the wheel to the right. The car shuddered, bucked 
  violently, and flung itself forward. Metal ripped into the 
  blacktop. He felt himself rolling, the car spinning around him. 
  The warning display was an angry mass of flashing red 
  indicators.

  Finally the spinning stopped. The car creaked gently, leaning 
  slowly into the embankment. Ramon cursed, blinking through 
  tears, watching helplessly as Mansell sailed by, a chrome-edged 
  streak of blue and white light.

  Then everything went black. Red letters flashed in the darkness.

  GAME OVER. GAME OVER.



  Ramon pushed up the lcd visor and pulled off the headset, 
  careful not to get entangled in the bundle of ribbons connecting 
  it to the console. He hooked the helmet onto the clamp next to 
  the console and stood up, unzipping the electrode jump suit and 
  carefully sliding out of it. The display monitor blinked harshly 
  at him. "No. 18 R. Ventura. Disqualified." Then it ran through 
  the top ten finishers. Yoshida had won it. By a fraction of a 
  second. It took a little of the edge off his disappointment -- 
  at least it hadn't been Mansell.

  Ramon stepped out of the cubicle and lit a cigarette, still 
  trembling. It was the best race he'd ever run and he hadn't even 
  placed. Next time. For sure next time.

  A swarm of tiny silver spacecraft from the Earth Defense Force 
  holo game buzzed past his head, laser cannons shooting 
  needle-thin beams of light at an approaching Death Star the size 
  of a baseball. He blinked, startled. A couple of Japanese kids 
  in tight black shorts and thigh-high socks giggled, jerking 
  their joysticks frenetically.

  Ramon put on his sunglasses, muting the blaze of flashing neon, 
  and walked unsteadily past the holos, legs like jelly, weaving a 
  circuitous path through the dim, smoky arcade. A big-breasted, 
  life-sized blonde woman in a bikini floated in the air just 
  above him, arching her back like a cat. A gang of blue-suited 
  _sararimen _were gathered around _Desert Storm! The Holo Game,_ 
  shouting loudly as wave after wave of sleek attack planes dove 
  down on Iraqi positions.

  Ramon didn't think much of these holo games. Just gimmicky 
  versions of old video games. If anything, the added dimension 
  merely emphasized the fakery. Cheap, dime store illusions with 
  no style, no grace.

  VR, on the other hand....

  Ramon wondered what would happen when they down-sized the 
  high-end VR sets for the mass market. How would they keep the 
  economy going? How would they get people to leave their homes? 
  With the option of tuning into a private reality at the touch of 
  a button, living a life on the edge without ever leaving your 
  sofa, why would anyone spend time in the "real" world?

  Ramon supposed they'd figure something out. They always did.



  Outside, a cold drizzle fell on the litter-strewn sidewalk. the 
  smoky smell of meat on charcoal braziers filled the air. Ramon 
  winced with hunger, but he wasn't in the mood for yakitori.

  He hurried down the narrow sidewalk, deflecting the bristling 
  arrays of out-thrust umbrellas with a practiced arm. Several 
  wizened Japanese day laborers clustered on a blue plastic tarp 
  near the yakitori stand, half-pint glasses of _sake_ in their 
  hands, giving up their day's wages to a hemiplegic Yakuza who 
  waited there every day with his loaded dice and plastic cup 
  stuffed with crumpled yen notes and black market cashcards. The 
  Yakuza's paralysis made him look curiously unfinished, one side 
  of his body hanging loosely from his skeleton like wet clothes, 
  his face twisted in a perpetual sneer. He looked evil, 
  fraudulent, deceptive. As if his character flaws had somehow 
  been imprinted in his physical appearance.

  Ramon stepped out onto the road, giving the group a wide berth. 
  With his long straight hair, sunglasses, and all-black Japanese 
  designer knock-offs, most Japanese didn't peg Ramon for a 
  Filipino -- not at a glance anyway -- but these ones knew him 
  and today of all days he didn't need the aggro. A smoke-belching 
  delivery truck that must have been doing twice the speed of 
  light screamed angrily at him with its horn, slapping him with a 
  wave of muddy water as it sped by. The Yakuza laughed shrilly, 
  calling him a _Firupinjin baka_ -- Filipino idiot. The words 
  were distorted, spat half- formed from one side of his mouth, 
  inflections lost in a bubbly gurgle of saliva.

  Ramon ignored him. He hurried on down the street, pushing his 
  way through a raging tide of amplified noise and flashing 
  lights. Blood-spattered fish mongers chanted out the day's 
  catch, fierce-faced nationalist storm troopers screamed out for 
  the return of the Northern Territories, elderly sweet potato 
  sellers wailed discordantly about the deliciousness of their 
  wares, whispering Iranian cashcard dealers offered discounts on 
  stolen cards, and leering teenage touts in tuxedos jumped out in 
  front of him singing the praises of the weary, soft-bellied 
  women who stared mournfully from the dimly-lit windows above. 
  And, through it all, the searing beat of some old hard-core 
  metal rap blasted from 200-watt speakers hanging outside a disc 
  shop, imposing a harsh rhythm on the swirling cacophony.

  Ramon ducked down a side alley and cut through the grounds of an 
  abandoned shrine. The silence was so sudden and the darkness so 
  complete it was as if a soundproof door had slammed shut behind 
  him.

  He slowed down, breathing easier now. Rain splattered like a 
  spray of spittle on his face. In the distance, the edge of the 
  darkening sky began to glow orange with the city's lights.



  He was soaked through by the time he got back to his apartment 
  building, a gray and unwelcoming, six-story terraced concrete 
  block. The foyer was covered in strips of wet cardboard and 
  smelled faintly of mildew and cat piss.

  A sheet of paper covered in scrawled Japanese characters was 
  taped to the elevator door. He couldn't read it but he knew what 
  it meant. Out of order.

  He took the stairs, loping up them two at a time, pulling 
  himself along the handrail. A wide crack -- a relic of the big 
  quake last summer -- meandered up the side of the pitted 
  concrete steps like a dried-up creek bed. The ammonia reek of 
  cats was sharper here, stinging his nostrils. Fading 
  scatological or sexual slogans in Japanese, English, Farsi, and 
  Tagalog were scrawled on the walls.

  He was panting lightly when he reached the fifth floor. A 
  miniature crone, barely up to his waist, her head wrapped in a 
  stained blue scarf, was pushing a stringy gray mop across the 
  concrete floor. Her watery eyes flickered with animosity as he 
  walked across the wet concrete. She grunted sourly when he 
  greeted her.

  Ramon shrugged and slid his card-key into the slot by the door 
  to his apartment. The thick gray metal door wheezed heavily and 
  clicked open.

  Some Russian blues singer was on the mini-disc player. A hoarse 
  rasping voice as cool and barren as the tundra. Arkady 
  Somebody-or-other. Jinky's latest fave. She played it over and 
  over again. Discs weren't supposed to wear out but Jinky's did.

  Jinky was in the bathroom, doing her hair. Rainbow-streaked 
  blond waves coiled high on her head, a few twisting strands 
  artfully curled against her cheeks. The place reeked of hair 
  spray. It made him sneeze. The bathroom floor was so coated with 
  the stuff it was like some new high-tech glaze, slippery and 
  indestructible.

  Jinky was Israeli. A hostess, a hooker, and occasional performer 
  in low-budget video porn. Her white skin and blonde hair assured 
  her a remarkably high status -- where Japanese women were 
  madonnas and Filipinas were whores, Western women were both. The 
  fact that Ramon both slept with this woman and lived with her 
  elicited respect and resentment from his fellow Filipinos. It 
  also made him an outsider. And Ramon liked that just fine.

  Jinky wasn't the only thing separating Ramon from the close-knit 
  Filipino migrants. His discreet appearance, the easy way he 
  blended with the Japanese crowds, and his near-flawless command 
  of the language freed him from the hide-and-seek life of his 
  compadres. He was taller than average and lacked the half-grown, 
  underfed look of other illegals. His smooth, square-jawed face 
  exuded an openness, a confidence that was almost American in its 
  assuredness. It had none of the fatigue and bitterness so deeply 
  etched in the harsh, hollow-eyed faces of the men who unloaded 
  the freighters or carted away rubble from the construction 
  sites.

  Ramon never dirtied his hands at the docks or the construction 
  sites. His conveniently illegal status and suave anonymity had 
  caught the eye of a local crime boss; now he ran numbers and 
  synth-cocaine for a local syndicate. The work was easy and the 
  money was decent, but he knew it couldn't last. His value to the 
  Yakuza rested solely in his expendability.

  And if they found out he was stealing from them....

  Jinky had told him if he wanted to live a life of crime, he 
  should hook up with the Russians and Israelis in Shinjuku. The 
  Russian mob was easily the world's most powerful crime 
  syndicate. An international conglomerate headquartered in New 
  York, it was everywhere -- Tel Aviv, Moscow, Berlin, Montreal, 
  Ho Chi Minh City, Tokyo... the exuberant Russians showed an 
  acumen and flair that made the more insular and 
  tradition-steeped Italian, Chinese, and Japanese mobs look like 
  small-time hoods. Join up with the Russians, Jinky said, and you 
  can travel the world, go where the action is, see real glamour. 
  You don't want to stay in Tokyo; it'll just suck you dry. Sure, 
  it'll dazzle you with glitz and hyper-tech, spin you around so 
  fast that you'll never see that the whole city's just an endless 
  hall of mirrors.

  Reflections of reflections of reflections.

  Truth was, Ramon didn't want to live a life of crime. He didn't 
  know what he wanted. In Manila, he'd been part of that city's 
  tiny but tenacious avant-garde. A DJ and sometime band manager, 
  he'd come to Japan out of an urge to get closer to the heartbeat 
  of the modern world, a world that in Manila could only be 
  experienced secondhand via bootleg discs and high- priced 
  foreign magazines. Listening to the music, watching the videos, 
  or reading the magazines stirred a lonely excitement in him, a 
  wistfulness like a rummy standing outside an art gallery window, 
  staring into the warm brightness where the rich and beautiful 
  gathered, sipping champagne and popping designer drugs. People 
  whose lives were so far removed from his they seemed to be in 
  another dimension, glassed off and boxed in by reinforced steel 
  and molded concrete.

  Coming to Japan had been Ramon's way of stepping through the 
  door. He was inside now, though still unsure of his welcome. 
  Hugging the shadows along the walls, trying not to be noticed, 
  reveling in the heat and scent of the bright and beautiful, 
  admiring their easy elegance and polished pretentiousness, 
  waiting for a word, a sign. Just a casual nod or a passing 
  smile, anything acknowledging his existence, validating his 
  reality.

  The TV was on, the sound turned down, showing footage from the 
  latest war in the Gulf. Part 4 or 5, he didn't know anymore. It 
  went on and on. A big-budget spectacular for the jaded masses of 
  North America and Europe.

  The picture was grainy, unreal, wobbling. A target grid was 
  superimposed over shadowy outlines of buildings. Petals of light 
  blossomed in the night sky. Searchlight beams swung 
  choreographed arcs through the darkness.

  Arkady played the blues.

  Jinky came out of the bathroom, her small body wrapped in a thin 
  beige towel, made-up eyes bright and startled in her delicate 
  oval face.

  "Did you bring cigarettes?" she asked. "I'm out."

  Ramon fumbled in his pocket, staring at the faraway explosions 
  on the TV. He found a crumpled pack of cigarettes and gave them 
  to Jinky.

  "I might not be home tonight," she said, lighting a cigarette. 
  "Sato-san's booked in."

  "He the Mitsubishi one?" said Ramon distractedly, still staring 
  at the TV.

  "Yeah," she nodded, sucking in a lungful of smoke. "Big tipper."

  Ramon picked up the remote control and turned off the war. 
  "We've gotta upgrade," he said.

  "What? The TV? What's wrong with it?"

  He turned to face her, looking into the startled eyes. "No. Not 
  the TV. Us. You and me. We gotta upgrade."

  "Don't start pulling any macho possessiveness trip on me. What 
  you do is just as sleazy as what I do." She ground out the 
  cigarette in an empty sardine tin. "I gotta get ready."

  He followed her into the bathroom, watched as she built her 
  face, layer upon layer, with delicate pencil lines and sweeping 
  brush strokes. She pursed her lips, studying herself carefully. 
  The raw-boned Slavic prettiness had disappeared. In its place 
  was an older, more elegant face. High- contrast cheekbones had 
  magically arisen. Pale, colorless lips now bloomed red and 
  seductive. "How do I look?" she asked.

  "Beautiful," he said, putting his arms around her, feeling the 
  radiant heat of the flesh beneath the towel. He buried his nose 
  in her neck, breathing in the mingled scents of lavender soap, 
  talcum powder, and tobacco.

  She pushed him away. "I'm late."

  He watched as she slid into black fishnet stockings, standing 
  poised, one foot on the lip of the toilet, as she attached the 
  garters. The classic movie pose. It was the first time he'd ever 
  seen anyone actually do it.

  She put on a black lace bra that hooked up in the front. It 
  pushed her small breasts up, squeezing them together. She dusted 
  them with powder.

  "There's some egg salad in the fridge," she said. "You could 
  make a sandwich if you're hungry."

  "Why don't you call in sick?"

  She frowned, stuffing herself into a tight black leather 
  miniskirt. "I don't get paid if I'm sick."



  After she left, Ramon rummaged through her red cardboard 
  dresser, looking for money. He'd dropped his last twenty on 
  Grand Prix and he wasn't due for another handout from his 
  _oyabun_ -- the local gang boss -- for another week. And he 
  couldn't risk stealing more from them. Not for the time being.

  He felt a vague sense of guilt. Jinky was saving for a holograph 
  recorder -- an expensive piece of hardware, but worth it if she 
  could come up with some marketable programs. Once, in an 
  Akihabara electronics shop, she'd shown him a program she'd done 
  at college in Tel Aviv -- a very high-resolution, diamond-scaled 
  dragon that coiled long and serpentine on the shop floor, ruby 
  eyes fierce and glittering, spitting out flickering flashes of 
  blue-white flame. The salesclerk hadn't seen her stick the 
  program chip in the player and it scared the hell out of him. 
  Red-faced and furious, he had chased them out of the shop. 
  Obviously, Ramon had thought, not an art lover.

  His hands were moving through densely-packed piles of underwear. 
  Lacy and insubstantial, they didn't seem like real clothes at 
  all. The bottom of the second drawer was layered with newsfax. 
  He pulled out the drawer and lifted the edge of the newsfax. 
  Dozens of 10- and 20-thousand yen cashcards were spread thickly 
  underneath. There was even some paper currency. He caught his 
  breath, exclaiming aloud. "Jesus, there must be over a million 
  yen here."

  A couple more nights with Mr. Sato and she'd have enough for her 
  recorder.

  She'd be ready to upgrade.

  He grabbed a handful of cards, brushing aside the nagging 
  reproaches that buzzed through his brain.

  She was probably going to dump him anyway. Trade up for a new 
  model.



  He ran the Formula One Grand Prix twice that night. Once in 
  Monaco and once in Montreal. He made it all the way through both 
  races, placing 13th in Monaco and seventh in Montreal. Not bad 
  considering the smash-up he'd had that afternoon.

  Sooner or later, he was going to win. He could see himself up on 
  the podium, cradling the trophy in his arms, the crowd roaring 
  his name, a couple of surgically-enhanced Eurogirls in bikinis 
  clinging to his elbows while he grinned through a cascade of 
  champagne. It was only a matter of time.

  Still hyped on adrenaline, he hurried past the pachinko parlors 
  and yakitori bars, heading for Imelda's Revenge. The place was 
  always packed with _pinoys_ -- short-fused country boys from 
  Luzon and Bataan stoked on cough syrup and San Miguel, flashing 
  butterfly knives and skeletal grins.

  The _pinoys_ didn't like Ramon. They didn't like his city 
  manners and Japanese clothes. They didn't like his white 
  girlfriend and his cushy job. Most of all, they didn't like his 
  arrogance.

  Usually, apart from a few sneering insults and muttered 
  comments, they left him alone. He was a friend of Juan's and 
  that made him inviolate. Juan had been here so long that the 
  Japanese had made him a _sacho_, a kind of low-level foreman. 
  And that made Juan a powerful guy. He could pick and choose his 
  crews on a daily basis. It was simple, really. You mess with 
  Juan tonight, you don't work tomorrow.

  The only reason Ramon was going to Imelda's was because he owed 
  Juan 60,000 yen. He could use what he had left from Jinky's 
  stash to pay back the debt.



  Ramon stared at the blurred holo dancing on the bar. It was Tiny 
  Christina doing her hit "Make Me, Make Me, Make Me" -- a chart- 
  topper in the Philippines the year before. The _pinoys_ were 
  gathered around her, cheering and singing along. Someone asked 
  if her clothes could be removed. The bartender, a long-jawed 
  old-timer with a Japanese wife and a spouse visa, said no, the 
  projector was just a player. It didn't do special effects.

  Everybody laughed.

  Ramon sipped his San Miguel, wondering if Juan would turn up.

  A couple of Japanese sat in the corner with three Filipinas. The 
  two men looked like Yakuza. Ramon thought he recognized one of 
  them. Both men were red-faced and drunk, shouting slurred 
  insults at the holo, calling her an ugly Filipina whore. The 
  Filipinas sat quietly, absently stroking the men's crotches, 
  smiling nervously and smoking cigarettes.

  One of the Japanese, a thick, burly man with a short bristling 
  haircut, shoved the girl sitting next to him. "Why don't you go 
  dance for us?" he shouted.

  She stood up languidly, her smile bored, her eyes somewhere 
  else. She started rolling her shoulders and shimmying her hips.

  "No, no," shouted the man. "Strip tease. Take your clothes off. 
  Come on."

  "Hey, why don't you fuck her?" shouted his companion, a thin, 
  ratty little man with a punch-perm and a neon-green polyester 
  suit. He flashed a gold cashcard. "Live sex show. I'll pay."

  The Filipinos at the bar were quiet, watching the Japanese 
  through hooded eyes. Though most of them didn't understand much 
  Japanese, they knew an insult when they heard one. In the 
  Philippines, such flagrant disrespect could be justification for 
  murder. Imelda's Revenge was considered de facto Philippines 
  territory.

  Ramon eased slowly along the wall, moving closer to the door.

  Tiny Christina dissipated into the smoky haze as the final bars 
  of her song faded into silence.

  "Come on! Fuck her!" yelled the skinny Yakuza, his voice too 
  loud in the sudden quiet.

  Ramon saw a glint of steel. A short cadaverous man with a 
  squashed nose named Bino stepped forward, shrugging off 
  halfhearted attempts to restrain him. He bared his teeth. They 
  glowed like old ivory in the dim light. His baggy suit ballooned 
  around his bony frame. His narrow ugly face was blank and grim 
  behind dark glasses. He held the knife behind his back, cupped 
  in the palm of his hand. The steel glittered cool and precise.

  Bino ran long, thick-knuckled fingers along the edge of the 
  blade, as if confirming its sharpness, then strode rapidly 
  towards the Japanese. He pushed the girl out of the way, 
  approaching the larger of the two men.

  The Japanese struggled to his feet, still cursing. Bino put his 
  arms around him. The Japanese swayed, pulling at Bino's arms.

  For a long moment they stood like that. Frozen. Two old friends 
  embracing.

  Then, suddenly, movement. Bino seemed to climb up the big man's 
  chest, left arm wrapped tight around the thick neck, right arm 
  swinging in flashing strobe-like arcs, the knife burying itself 
  repeatedly in the man's upper back.

  The Japanese bucked beneath him like a wild bull.

  The girls screamed.

  Bino released his grip on the Japanese, stepping back. The big 
  man crumpled, slamming into the table. Blood spurted in 
  torrents.

  The other Japanese stared curiously at his companion for a 
  moment, eyes wide. Then he looked at Bino.

  Bino stepped forward, grabbing the man's hair and forcing his 
  head back. He drove the knife into the jugular. Blood sprayed 
  Bino's suit. The Japanese watched Bino through rolling eyes, 
  hands fluttering weakly at his neck. This his head fell forward, 
  lolling limply on his chest.

  Ramon slipped through the door and ran out onto the street.

  The air was cool and crisp. Drunks staggered along the sidewalk. 
  Puddles of neon twinkled on the rain-slick street.

  Ramon ran.


  Two.
------

  "There's gonna be a pogrom," Jinky said. she was lying on the 
  futon, wearing a threadbare blue and white _yukata_, smoking a 
  THC-laced cigarette and holding a wet towel to her left eye. 
  Around the towel, Ramon could see the flesh was swollen purple 
  and yellow, vein-streaked and tender like the egg of some 
  strange amphibious creature.

  Sato-san had been especially vigorous last night.

  "What's a pogrom?" asked Ramon.

  "It's what they used to do to the Jews in Europe. Everybody gets 
  together whenever they're pissed off and they go and kill all 
  the Jews they can find."

  "So?" Ramon stared out the window, eyes wandering across the 
  shambling blocks of concrete that stretched from here to Chiba 
  and beyond. He felt like a rat caught in the middle of a 
  gigantic maze. A maze with no exit.

  "So," she sucked noisily on her cigarette, then exhaled. "So 
  that's what the Yakuza are going to do to you Filipinos."

  Ramon shrugged. "I didn't have nothing to do with it. I wasn't 
  even there."

  "You were so. You told me."

  "Shut up," he said, eyes following the meandering path of an old 
  Japanese woman on the street below. She hobbled past every day, 
  punctual to the second, bent over double, a huge mysterious 
  bundle strapped to her back. Her cane tapped out a solemn rhythm 
  on the pavement.

  "I wasn't there. You understand? I was never there."

  "Your Yakuza friends are going to want to know who did it."

  "Shut up," he said again, still watching the woman below, 
  crawling along the street like a crippled ant. In a few hours, 
  she would make her slow way back through these same streets, her 
  mysterious bundle still on her back, her cane tapping out the 
  same faltering beat.



  The Yakuza headquarters in kotobuki was a triangular slab of 
  black reflective glass wedged into the corner of a three-point 
  intersection in the heart of the entertainment district. A line 
  of gleaming black Mercedes and Lincoln Continentals were parked 
  illegally in front of it.

  The _oyabun_ had sent for Ramon as soon as he got the word.

  "I wasn't there," Ramon told him.

  The _oyabun_ was a small, birdlike man with a shaven skull and a 
  sharp, beaky nose. He suffered from Graves' disease and his eyes 
  bulged out of their sockets like light bulbs. He was as lean and 
  tough as a turkey. He kept cracking his knuckles. They went off 
  like gunshots.

  "This is a problem of international communication," said the 
  _oyabun_. He was wearing an expensive-looking charcoal gray suit 
  and a blue- speckled burgundy tie. He picked up a peanut and 
  cracked the shell between his thumb and forefinger. "I shall try 
  to clarify the situation for you."

  Posters advertising golf resorts in Hawaii hung on the wall 
  behind the _oyabun_. Ramon assumed the resorts were owned by the 
  gang.

  "I did not ask," the _oyabun_ continued, "whether or not you 
  were present at last night's incident. This fact is not of 
  interest to me. What I want to know is very simple: who did it?"

  "I am very sorry," said Ramon, head bowed in deference. "I do 
  not know."

  The _oyabun_ sucked air in through his teeth. He groaned, as if 
  faced with a very difficult and unpleasant task. "You do not 
  know," he said. He pronounced the words stiffly, carefully, as 
  if trying to assess their meaning.

  "I do not know," agreed Ramon.

  The _oyabun_ groaned again. "You are confused, I think. Unsure 
  of your loyalties." He paused and lit a cigarette, a 
  foul-smelling filterless brand called Hope. "Let me clarify the 
  situation for you. You are loyal to me. You work for me. You are 
  under my protection. There is no question here of national pride 
  or ethnic loyalty. Your people are not your people. You are one 
  of us."

  "Yes, your honor, I understand. But they would kill me if they 
  thought -- "

  "You are afraid of your people?" interrupted the _oyabun_. He 
  stood up, his fierce little face thrust forward, eyes bulging, 
  lips quivering. "They are _not_ the ones you should fear." He 
  slammed his fist down on his desk, knocking over a thimble-sized 
  cup of _sake_.

  Ramon flinched. The histrionics were overdone, but there was no 
  doubting the man's seriousness. Ramon was, after all, 
  expendable. He could be snuffed without a thought. Since, 
  officially, he did not exist, it followed that it was impossible 
  for him to cease to exist. Which meant that his death or 
  disappearance would never be investigated. Just another nameless 
  migrant found washed up in a sewage canal. They would bury him 
  and bury his file. He wouldn't even be a statistic.

  Ramon looked away. "I'll find out, sir."

  The _oyabun_ sat down again, his expression suddenly sad. "There 
  is... another problem."


  Later, Ramon sat at a white plastic table in Mos Burger, his 
  head cupped in his hands. A sharp, throbbing pain resonated over 
  his left eye. The cold draft from the air conditioner chilled 
  his spine. He kept reading the little poem printed on the coffee 
  cup. It was in English, expounding on the joys of sharing a 
  burger with someone you love. Beneath the poem there was a 
  Jack-and-Jill-type picture of a boy and girl holding hands. In 
  their free hands, each held a basket of burgers.

  The last line read: "Beautiful Friend. Beautiful Burger."

  The burgers were sloppy, thick with mayonnaise and chili sauce. 
  Ramon wondered if young lovers were supposed to lick each 
  other's hands afterward.

  The automated table-clearing servo kept trying to snatch his cup 
  away. He slapped at the machine distractedly. It whined 
  metallically, spraying him with liquid soap, then jerked away, 
  rolling towards another table, ungreased wheels squealing on the 
  ceramic tile.

  The boy and girl gazed at him from the cup, smiling cheerfully.

  Ramon suspected happiness was a marketing ploy, a clever sales 
  strategy conceived in some overlit conference room by glib 
  executives looking for something people wanted so desperately 
  its promise alone would compel them to buy, yet so intangible 
  that its failure to materialize would only prompt them to buy 
  again.

  Happiness was hope.

  And Ramon's hope had suddenly evaporated.



  He edged along the sidewalk, trying to lose himself in the 
  deepening shadows. His hands were cold and sticky with sweat. 
  Maybe he should just hop the mag-lev to Tokyo. Go to Shinjuku. 
  Talk to the Russians.

  Talk about what? What did he have to offer them? More to the 
  point, what did they have to offer him?

  He should have stayed in Manila. Maybe he'd be running his own 
  club by now.

  He should have stayed home last night.

  A fat pigeon waddled out his way, puffing out its chest and 
  fluttering its feathers, squawking with annoyance.

  He figured Jinky would have taken in at least five hundred 
  thousand for her night with Sato. Put that together with what 
  she already had stashed and there was easily enough for an 
  airbus ticket to New York or St. Petersburg or somewhere. Plus 
  enough left over to cover expenses for a few weeks. Long enough 
  to get settled.

  "Hey Mister Fashion Model!" somebody shouted in English.

  He looked up, face taut, skin stretched tight like plastic wrap 
  over clenched muscles. It was Bino. He was standing with three 
  other _pinoys_, leaning against the streaked glass window of a 
  pachinko parlor. Strident marching music warbled through a 
  loudspeaker above the door. Inside, dozens of Japanese sat 
  enthralled, staring at the tumbling ball bearings. Bells and 
  whistles chimed. Cascades of metal balls flooded into plastic 
  receptacles.

  "Hey Mister Fashion Model," Bino said again, rolling his 
  dentures inside his mouth. A thin sheen of sweat coated his 
  pockmarked face. His dark glasses gazed emptily at Ramon.

  Bino's hands were behind his back. Ramon thought about the 
  butterfly knife, remembered how it flickered in Bino's cupped 
  palm, how it flashed as it drove into the Japanese man's back. 
  Again and again.

  He nodded uncertainly at Bino. "Hey Bino. How are you?"

  Bino grinned, clicking his teeth into place. "How I am is not 
  the point. The point is how are you?" The three men with him 
  shifted against the window, straightening their shoulders, 
  pushing out their chests, watching Ramon through cold lunar 
  eyes.

  "I'm OK," nodded Ramon. "Yeah, I'm OK."

  "And your Japanese friends?" Bino asked. "How are they?" He was 
  still grinning, the lips pulled back in a rictus.

  "Hey listen, don't worry. Everything's under control. You can 
  count on me." He glanced along the street. The hemiplegic Yakuza 
  squatted on his blue tarp, rolling the dice in his cup.

  "You bet," said Bino. He hawked, spitting out a stringy mess of 
  greenish-yellow phlegm. It was flecked with blood.

  Ramon started to walk away.

  "Hey," Bino called after him. "Don't bother going to Imelda's 
  tonight. Did you hear? Some lousy gangsters got killed there 
  last night. The cops have closed it down."



  The money was gone.

  Ramon emptied the contents of the drawer on the floor, pawing 
  frantically through delicate lingerie and thick wool socks.

  The jagged pain above his eye throbbed more fiercely now. 
  Colored underwear slid through his hands.

  "Bitch, bitch, bitch," he repeated loudly, obsessively, like a 
  mantra. He sat back on his haunches, staring at the piled 
  clothing, the empty drawers jumbled beside him like discarded 
  Christmas presents.

  He had maybe fifty thousand left. Enough for a mag-lev into 
  Tokyo. A night in a capsule motel. He'd go see the Russians. 
  Offer his services. He spoke Japanese. He had an inside line on 
  the Yamaguchi-gumi. He didn't stand out in the crowds like the 
  big pale Russians and their leathery Israeli enforcers. Maybe 
  they could use him.

  Anyway, what choice did he have?

  He heard the door close behind him.

  "Bastard," she said, her voice flat. "You cheap, lousy, thieving 
  bastard." She delivered the words without emotion, enunciating 
  them with care like a language teacher.

  He twisted around to face her. "I'm sorry, Jinky. Really, I am. 
  I'm in deep shit. You've gotta help me."

  "Deep shit is right." Her eyes were hard, locking him out like 
  closed metal shutters. He thought he saw someone move in the 
  shadows behind her.

  Ramon stood. He put on his best hangdog expression, gazing 
  pleadingly at her. She was so small and soft. "You've gotta help 
  me, Jinky. I need the money."

  "Take a hike, Ramon. You're outta here."

  "I'm stuck, Jinky. The _pinoys_'ll kill me if I talk. The 
  Yakuza'll kill me if I don't."

  "Sorry," she said.

  "You've got to give it to me." He stepped closer, clenching his 
  fists.

  She smiled sadly, shaking her head. "I really thought you were 
  different, Ramon. But you're not. You're worse. At least the 
  others don't pretend to be what they aren't."

  His face tightened. A muscle in his cheek started twitching. 
  "Bitch," he hissed. "Give me the money."

  "Sorry," she said, stepping away from the door as Ramon 
  advanced.

  A man stepped in through the open door. Tall and dark, dressed 
  in a biker jacket and black jeans. His faded blue eyes were as 
  hard and pitiless as the desert sky. He held a short-barreled 
  automatic pistol leveled at Ramon's midsection.

  "You are to return this lady's money," he said. His English was 
  clipped, precise.

  "This is Benjamin," said Jinky. "He used to be with the Israeli 
  Special Forces. He doesn't believe in peaceful negotiations."

  Ramon swallowed, stepping back. "I've only got fifty thousand," 
  he said, the words catching in his throat.

  The Israeli moved towards him, raising the pistol. "Don't kill 
  him," he heard Jinky say as the handle of the gun collided with 
  his face. He felt the cold grinding clash of metal against 
  cheekbone, felt his face fragmenting, shivering apart in a 
  thousand tiny shards.

  A streak of white light seared his brain as darkness closed in.



  He clawed back to consciousness through a haze of pain and 
  pulsing light. The naked fluorescent bulb on the ceiling glared 
  down at him, bright and unforgiving.

  His face was screaming. He touched it gingerly. It felt huge, 
  swollen and tender as an overripe melon. His left eye wouldn't 
  open, soldered closed with dried blood.

  He staggered to his feet, went to the mirror. He looked like 
  some mutant from a horror holo. The left side of his face had 
  swelled to the size of a hydroponic tomato. A crushed one. Pulp 
  leaked all over his face and the collar of his jacket.

  He checked his pockets. Nothing. Not even his wallet.

  Bitch.

  Heartless fucking whore.

  He saw his hands around her neck. Crushing her windpipe. Her 
  eyes even brighter and more startled than usual.

  Maybe Juan could help him. Hide him from the Yakuza. Keep the 
  _pinoys_ at bay.

  He washed his face carefully, wincing. The pain was 
  excruciating.

  Afterward, he headed out into the night, not bothering to close 
  the door behind him.



  They were waiting for him in the foyer. Two of the _oyabun_'s 
  enforcers. Oversized slabs of meat and gristle in Indonesian 
  silk suits and cheap plastic sandals. They leaned against a wall 
  of gaping mailboxes, grinding their cigarettes into the green 
  linoleum floor.

  Ramon followed them out to their hydrocar, a fat black Mercedes, 
  bulging with armor plating, tinted windows as thick as aquarium 
  glass.

  One of the men opened the back door and shoved Ramon inside. 
  Juan and two other _pinoys_ were already sitting on the lacy 
  white seat covers that protected the expensive leather 
  upholstery. They squeezed over to make room for Ramon, glancing 
  briefly at him, then looking away.

  The car smelled of pine freshener and sweat.

  "Hey Juan," whispered Ramon. "What's going on?"

  Juan stared at him glassily. There was no sign of friendship 
  there. No sign that there ever had been. Juan shrugged, 
  narrowing his eyes.

  One of the Yakuza closed the door behind Ramon.

  "It's not what you're thinking, Juan," Ramon said urgently as 
  the car sped off down the narrow street.

  "What I am thinking," said Juan coldly, "is that you are a piece 
  of shit."

  "You're wrong," said Ramon. "You're all wrong."

  The other two _pinoys_ sat with arms folded, staring blankly at 
  the headrests in front of them.

  Ramon sighed and sat back in the seat.



  They drove down to the waterfront and pulled up on a deserted 
  quay. Ramon shivered in the cold.

  So this is it, he thought. What a fucking waste.

  The gangsters ordered the four men out of the car and marched 
  them over to a stack of container boxes.

  There was a flash of color at the base of one of the containers. 
  Cloth flapping in the wind.

  The Yakuza urged them forward, barking harshly, slapping the 
  backs of their heads to encourage them.

  It was Bino. He was lying on his back, sightless eyes staring at 
  the murky ultraviolet sky. A round hole in his forehead 
  glistened darkly. His broken dentures lay on the ground beside 
  him, gleaming like a handful of dice.

  The _pinoys_ were quiet, hugging themselves against the cold. 
  Water lapped softly against the side of the quay.

  One of the Yakuza clapped Ramon on the back, slipping a cashcard 
  into his pocket.

  "Severance pay," grunted the Yakuza, then walked away, leaving 
  Ramon alone with his countrymen.

  Juan turned his head. They started moving towards him.

  "It's a setup," Ramon said. "They set me up because I wouldn't 
  tell them."

  Knives flashed in the darkness.

  "You gotta believe me," Ramon whispered hoarsely.



  He ran. It seemed like he had been running for hours. His throat 
  and lungs were raw. He gulped for air, his breath getting 
  shorter and shorter. His legs were leaden, his shoes clung to 
  the ground, refusing to move.

  He could still hear them. The shouting had stopped but their 
  heavy footsteps echoed relentlessly off the concrete. Their 
  laboring breath scorched his neck like a volcanic wind.

  Ahead the lights of the arcade beckoned. Bright and vibrant, 
  pulsing with life. He focused his gaze on the sparkling holo 
  that danced above the entranceway, trying to push everything 
  else out of his mind, to ignore the sharp stabbing pains in his 
  chest, the hammering of his skull.

  Just keep moving.

  Just keep moving.

  Finally, he was there. He pushed through the door, panting 
  hoarsely, his head reeling.

  The cashcard the Yakuza had given him was worth twenty thousand. 
  Not enough for his life. Just enough for one more run at the 
  Grand Prix.

  He stumbled down the aisle, pushing past startled game players, 
  wading through shoals of bright holo space ships.

  The Grand Prix cubicle was empty. He shoved the card into the 
  slot, hearing a wash of street noise flooding the arcade as the 
  doors crashed open and a gang of shouting Filipinos forced their 
  way in.

  He climbed into the cubicle and closed the door behind him. He 
  quickly pulled on the jump suit and the data gloves then sat 
  down, jamming the headset hurriedly on. He pressed the start 
  button, letting all his breath out in one big huge sigh of 
  relief.

  He punched through the options and course selection, pausing 
  only to enter his name. He'd take whatever the machine decided 
  to throw at him.

  The car took shape around him. The instrument panel glowed. The 
  day was clear. The sun warm. The air was thick with the smells 
  of motor oil and adrenaline. Colorful crowds lined the slopes 
  above the track. He heard people chanting his name.

  "Ramon! Ramon!"

  He checked the starting grid. He was in the Number Six spot. 
  That would give him a real shot at winning this time.

  Then the call came. Loud and clear through his headphones. 
  Echoing through the stands. A hush fell over the crowd. 
  "Gentlemen, start your engines."

  He turned on the ignition. The engine growled confidently. Its 
  vibrations calmed him, smoothing the edges of his shattered 
  nerves, dulling the pain in his face.

  He slowly began to accelerate, starting to roll around the track 
  with the other cars. Keeping pace with them. Waiting.

  The flag came down.

  Ramon yanked his foot off the clutch, simultaneously smashing 
  the gas pedal into the floor. The car surged forward eagerly. 
  People were shouting his name.

  The car roared out of its starting lane and began moving through 
  the cars ahead.

  Ramon laughed out loud. This time there was no question. He knew 
  it, sure as he knew his name.

  This time he was going to win.


  Christopher Hunt (chrish@wimsey.com)
--------------------------------------

  Christopher Hunt did the usual mishmash of menial jobs after 
  graduating from college -- encyclopedia salesman, waiter, cook, 
  clerk in a porno bookstore, factory laborer -- before ending up 
  in Japan, where he taught English and worked as a copywriter 
  with a Japanese ad agency. He has also appeared in the Canadian 
  magazine Exile. In order to avoid what he's supposed to be 
  doing, he's now working on his own Internet magazine, 
  tentatively called Circuit Traces.


  The Rock  by Edward Ashton
============================
...................................................................
  In the story of the tortoise and the hare, you really don't 
  notice when the tortoise goes into the lead for good. But 
  sometimes in life, that moment can be locked in your memory 
  forever.
...................................................................


  Ten miles east of Middleburg, West Virginia , State Route 36 
  began to climb. It rose over a thousand feet in just under five 
  miles, a slope steep enough to make my father's Volkswagen bus 
  strain and lug until he cursed and downshifted to third. It was 
  my 16th birthday, and we were going to Wilder's Rock, as we had 
  on every birthday I could recall. I was sitting on the back 
  bench trying to concentrate on _The Catcher in the Rye_, but 
  mostly listening to my father and brother talk basketball. Keith 
  was 14 and already six feet tall. He was on the middle bench, 
  leaning forward between the two front seats and saying something 
  about Jerry West while my father nodded and scratched his belly. 
  My mother hated basketball. She was staring out the window and 
  doing something to her fingernails with an emery board. Coach 
  Bailey watched Keith play at the East Marion Big Man's Camp that 
  summer and told him he'd probably start at center for the 
  freshman team the next year. I lettered in track that spring, 
  but you can't really talk track.

  As we crossed the Preston County line, my father took one hand 
  off the wheel and turned half around to tell Keith about Hot Rod 
  Hundley's game-winning jumper in the fifty-something NCAAs. It 
  made me nervous when he did that, but Dad hated back-seat 
  drivers, so I said nothing as the bus began to drift to the 
  left. We were straddling the yellow line when the hard blare of 
  an 18-wheeler's horn pulled my father's head around. The truck 
  was in the west-bound lane, still a few hundred yards away. Dad 
  cursed and jerked the wheel hard to the right. I fell half over, 
  and when I caught myself on the back of Keith's bench my book 
  dropped to the floor and snapped shut.

  "Asshole!" yelled my father as the truck roared past in a rush 
  of air. "Christ, did you see how fast he was going? I hope he 
  burns his breaks."

  "Bill! That's horrible." My mother hated it when he said things 
  like that. He was right, though. The truck was going too fast. 
  That slope was too steep and long for a loaded rig's breaks to 
  handle without help from the transmission, and the only escape 
  ramp wasn't long enough to stop a truck with a real head of 
  steam. The ramp wasn't fixed until the summer after I graduated, 
  when a trucker from Cumberland named Scott Simpson hit it at 95 
  miles an hour, pitched off the end, rig and all, and fell 70 
  feet into the forest above the North Fork River.

  I was wondering what it would be like coming down off Booker's 
  Ridge with no brakes, flying around the curves and waiting to 
  crash, when Keith turned half around and asked me if I thought a 
  player like Jerry West could still make it in the NBA.

  "Sure, I guess so.... I mean, he was a great player, wasn't he?"

  Keith laughed and shook his head.

  "He was a great player in the '50s and '60s, but that was before 
  the fast break and all. I don't think he'd be quick enough to 
  play pro ball today."

  "Maybe you're right. I don't really know that much about it." 
  Neither did he, of course. Neither of us had ever seen Jerry 
  West play. All he knew were Dad's stories and what they told him 
  at the camps he went to every summer. Keith stared at me for a 
  moment, then turned away and said something. I couldn't quite 
  make out the words. Dad laughed and started in again about Hot 
  Rod Hundley, over his shoulder this time and with both hands on 
  the wheel.

  I picked up _The Catcher in the Rye_ and thumbed through it, 
  trying to find my place. The last thing I remembered before Dad 
  made me drop the book was Holden sitting in a hotel room talking 
  to a whore named Sunny, telling her he'd just had an operation 
  so he wouldn't have to have sex with her.

  I guess most people would say Holden was pretty stupid to hire a 
  whore and then not even use her, but I knew how he felt. My prom 
  date that spring had been Jody Pritchard, the daughter of my 
  father's best friend. She drove, and when the dance was over she 
  took me down past the Motor Lodge and out to the end of Goose 
  Run Road, almost as far as the Meadowdale Dairy Farm. Woods ran 
  along both sides of the road, and I'd heard that a crazy old man 
  sometimes came down out of the hills with a shotgun and stalked 
  Goose Run, looking for young fornicators.

  I guess Jody never heard that story, though, because she turned 
  around in the farm entrance, drove a few hundred feet back 
  toward the lodge and pulled halfway off the road.

  "Have you ever been here before?" she asked. I shook my head. 
  Clouds had covered the half-moon and the windows were like black 
  ice, already beginning to mist over. She laughed, leaned toward 
  me and started to say something else, but I knew she was waiting 
  for me to kiss her, so I did. It was dark and I closed my eyes 
  and I sort of missed her mouth at first, but she slid across the 
  bench seat and pressed herself up against me anyway. I knew she 
  wanted me to try something, but I couldn't. If you don't try 
  anything you can at least pretend you're a gentleman, but if you 
  try something and screw it up you're scarred for life.

  The bus slowed as my father eased onto exit 12-B. At the end of 
  the ramp was a narrow mountain road with a brown Park Services 
  sign along side it that said WILDER'S ROCK STATE FOREST 7 in 
  letters six inches high. Dad slowed a little, then gunned the 
  engine and screeched into the south-bound lane. There was no 
  traffic. Dad just liked to pretend he was driving a Ferrari 
  instead of a Volkswagen bus sometimes.

  We'd turned onto Route 27, which rides the crest of the 
  Alleghenies north into Pennsylvania and south as far as White 
  Sulphur Springs. If you go north you run into farm country 
  pretty quickly, but south of 36 the road cuts through the forest 
  like a fire break, and you can go 20 or 30 miles between side 
  roads. When I was a kid Dad took me hunting in those woods a 
  couple of times. He bought me a .22 and a blaze orange vest, but 
  I didn't have much enthusiasm for shooting things and he gave up 
  on me when I was 14. I haven't once touched a rifle in all the 
  years since then, but Keith was a better study. He used to get 
  out of school to hunt, and as far as I know he still comes home 
  for a week each November to drink beer and shoot at shadows with 
  our father in the Preston County uplands.

  Five miles south of 36 we passed another Park Services sign. 
  WILDER'S ROCK STATE FOREST, it said, and below that in bright 
  silver letters, NEXT LEFT. My father slowed and stopped, waited 
  for a coal truck to rumble past in the northbound lane, and made 
  the turn. We were on a Park Services road then, patchily paved 
  and just a little wider than the bus. My father slowed and 
  honked his horn at every turn, and it took us almost 20 minutes 
  to cover the five miles from 27 to Wilder's Rock. Every 
  half-mile or so an even smaller road branched off to one side or 
  the other, each with a wooden, arrow-shaped sign identifying it 
  by its destination. We passed them all: RANGER STATION, PICNIC 
  AREA, TOURIST INFORMATION, even WILDER'S LODGE.

  Then the pavement ended, and we were riding on gravel. The trees 
  drew back and the road widened into a parking lot. There were no 
  lines or spaces. You just left your car wherever you could find 
  a spot and tried not to block anyone in. It wasn't very crowded, 
  but my father parked at the high end of the lot anyway, 30 yards 
  from the nearest car. Keith opened the sliding door and climbed 
  out. I marked my place in _The Catcher in the Rye_, dropped the 
  book onto the bench and followed him, pulling the door closed 
  behind me.

  Outside, the sun was almost directly overhead in a perfect, 
  powder-blue sky. The air was cool and dry and the sun felt good 
  on my bare arms. My father opened the back hatch and pulled out 
  our ice chest, a metal and plastic monstrosity almost three feet 
  long. Loaded it weighed 60 or 70 pounds. Dad couldn't carry it 
  by himself anymore. I expected him to ask me to help him, but 
  instead he motioned to Keith, and together they lifted the 
  cooler and headed toward the picnic tables, stiff-legged and 
  waddling like ducks. My mother locked the doors and handed me 
  the basket of bread and paper plates. I tried to glare at her as 
  she dropped the keys into her purse and started after my father, 
  but she was already looking away and I don't think she noticed.

  By the time I got to the picnic table the cheese and soda were 
  already out. Keith was sitting backward on the bench, leaning 
  with both elbows on the table and working on at least three 
  sticks of Juicy Fruit. Dad sat beside him with his hands clasped 
  and his elbows on his knees. They looked like Andy and Opie 
  Taylor. I dropped my basket onto the table and walked away.

  "Honey? Where are you going?"

  It was my mother. I'd hoped Dad would ask.

  "I'm just going to see the Rock, Mom," I said without turning. 
  "I'll be back in a while."

  "Be careful," she called after me. "And stay off the rails!"

  I didn't look back.

  A hundred yards from the picnic area was a worn flagstone path. 
  It wound down through a stand of pines and ended at a pinewood 
  footbridge across a chasm 30 feet wide and maybe twice as deep. 
  On the other side was the Rock, a flat, slightly tilted slab of 
  stone overlooking a thousand-foot drop to the North Fork River.

  When I turned 18 I came to this place with Ben Thompson. He and 
  I climbed down under the bridge, followed a ledge around to the 
  south face and tried to climb up to the overlook. He went first, 
  and 50 feet from the top he slipped, tumbled past me and fell 
  another 200 feet before wrapping himself around the trunk of a 
  pine. I hugged the face and watched him sail past, and all I 
  could think was that I'd seen him fall before, in a dream. When 
  I was older, though, I realized I hadn't -- not Ben, anyway.

  But on my 16th birthday, I just leaned against the heavy wooden 
  rails above the south face and watched the hawks wheeling in the 
  middle air below. There were a half-dozen coin-operated 
  telescopes spaced around the rim of the Rock, but I never used 
  them. The view from there didn't need amplification. From that 
  height, the North Fork was just a stream of silver trailing back 
  into the hills, and the mountain opposite was laid out like a 
  salt map, huge and rough-textured and decorated in late-summer 
  browns and greens. The hawks followed one another from updraft 
  to updraft, spiralling as high as each one would take them 
  before gliding downwind to the next. I thought at first that 
  they might be hunting, but in twenty minutes not one of them 
  dropped into the treetops. They weren't hunting. They were 
  flying for the sheer joy of flying.

  I was about to turn away when a hand pressed against my shoulder 
  and bent me half over the rail. My feet lifted off the Rock. My 
  hands groped blindly for the top rail, and I couldn't breathe 
  until Keith's forearm wrapped around my throat and pulled me 
  back to safety.

  "Saved your life!" he crowed, then pushed me back and danced 
  away like a ballerina. I staggered a half step backwards, then 
  caught myself against the rails. My ears were ringing and I 
  could feel my pulse pounding in my fingertips. Keith was 
  laughing so hard he could barely stand.

  "God, Phil, if you could see the look on your face!" He bent 
  double and pounded his fist against his thigh. He was trying to 
  say something more, but he was laughing too hard to get it out. 
  I drew a deep, slow breath and shook my head. My hands were 
  trembling. Keith stopped laughing and slowly straightened. I 
  could feel my face twisting into a snarl. As I started toward 
  him Keith backed a half step, raised his fists and bared his 
  teeth like an animal. I hesitated another moment, then lowered 
  my head and charged.

  I still don't know anything at all about fighting. When we were 
  younger I didn't need to, but that day Keith avoided me easily. 
  He skipped away, tagged me twice with his left fist and then 
  stepped in and put his weight behind his right. The sun flashed 
  in my eyes and my hands and feet tingled, then went numb. When I 
  raised my head I was lying face down on the Rock, just a few 
  feet from the edge. Keith was standing over by the tourist 
  scopes. His fists were still clenched and his eyes were leaking 
  tears.

  "You can't do that anymore!" he shouted. The corners of his 
  mouth twisted down and he had trouble getting the words out. 
  "You're not bigger than me any more, Phil. You can't do that to 
  me."

  I pulled myself to my feet and imagined hurling myself over the 
  top guard rail and flying, soaring after the hawks, chasing the 
  next updraft while Keith stood at the edge begging me to come 
  back. I put my hand to my face. It was a little swollen, but at 
  least there was no blood. Keith was still standing with his 
  fists at his waist. He thought I was going to come after him 
  again. Instead, I turned my back on him without a word and 
  walked back across the bridge to solid earth.



  My mother found me sitting on a stone bench a little off the 
  flagstone path. I'd been there for most of an hour.

  "Phil? Honey? What are you doing here?"

  I looked up. She winced when she saw my face.

  "I fell down," I said, before she could even ask.

  "You gave yourself quite a bump. Where is your brother?"

  "He's still out on the Rock." I looked away. I was sure she knew 
  what had happened.

  "Your father's ready to go home. Let's go find Keith."

  She held out her hand to me. I shook my head.

  "You go ahead, Mom. I'll go help Dad pack up the stuff."

  "Your father doesn't need any help. Now come on."

  I hated doing this to Mom. She couldn't understand why Keith and 
  I fought. Once when I bloodied his nose she cried for almost an 
  hour, until I went to her and promised it would never happen 
  again. She laughed then, and told me never to make promises I 
  couldn't keep.

  I pulled up short as we stepped out onto the Rock. Keith was 
  sitting on the top rail, facing outward over the south face with 
  just his hands on the wood beside him to keep his balance. My 
  mother gasped, took two steps forward and stopped.

  "Keith! Have you lost your mind? Get down from there!"

  Keith's head snapped around. His face was wide-eyed and startled 
  as a spotlighted doe's. He sat frozen for a moment, then began 
  waving his arms and tottering back and forth on the rail.

  "Keith!" My mother was almost screaming, and there was a twinge 
  of real fear in her voice. "That's not funny. Get off that 
  railing before I come pull you off."

  But Keith wasn't listening. He waved his arms more and more 
  wildly and moaned in mock terror. And then...

  And then he was gone.

  There was the barest moment of silence before my mother's scream 
  filled the dry summer air, echoing off the bedrock and coming 
  back to us sharper and more frightened than before. She dropped 
  to her knees and slapped both hands over her mouth. I looked to 
  her, then turned and ran to the edge, threw myself against the 
  rails and leaned over.

  And there was Keith, crouching on a ledge three feet below the 
  bottom rail, two knuckles shoved into his mouth to stifle his 
  laughter.



  That night I had a dream, the one that made me think for a while 
  that I'd dreamed Ben's fall. I was standing on the Rock a little 
  before sunset. A hard, cold wind was blowing from the north and 
  little white clouds were racing across the sky, like a fast- 
  motion film of a building storm. At first I was alone and I felt 
  like the last person on Earth, but then there was someone with 
  me -- a tall, thin boy in a long black overcoat. He was walking 
  around the edge of the Rock on the top rail with his arms spread 
  like a tightrope walker, tottering back and forth and leaning 
  against the wind. I tried to yell to him, to tell him to get off 
  the rail before he fell, but the wind was so strong by then that 
  it carried my voice away and I was sure he couldn't hear me. So 
  I chased after him, grabbed him by the coattails and tried to 
  pull him to safety.

  But instead of pulling I pushed, and without a sound he toppled 
  off the rail and fell. He pinwheeled and shrank as he dropped, 
  until he was just another tiny black shape far down among the 
  hawks.

  And I wasn't sure, but then I thought I saw him catch an updraft 
  and spiral upward, chasing a robin into the teeth of the wind.

  
  Edward Ashton (ashton@ee.rochester.edu)
-----------------------------------------

  Edward Ashton grew up in the coal country of north-central West 
  Virginia, and currently lives and works in Rochester, New York. 
  His fiction has appeared in a number of literary magazines, 
  including The Lowell Review, Painted Hills Review, and Parting 
  Gifts. His most recent work will appear in the Spring 1995 issue 
  of The Lowell Pearl. "The Rock" originally appeared in the Fall 
  1992 issue of Louisiana Literature.



  Genetic Moonshine  by Jim Cowan
=================================
...................................................................
  Watson and Crick are separated from Thelonious Monk and Charlie 
  Parker by an ocean of water and a gulf of culture. Or are they?
...................................................................

  One.
------

  The ringing of the phone was a harsh electronic jangle. Stupid 
  with sleep, Inspector Scopes, Pasteur Police Class of 2214, 
  rolled over in the dark and mumbled "Scopes here."

  "So sorry to wake you." Even at four in the morning, 
  Commissioner Bolt's voice was smooth and cultured. "We have a 
  First Law problem, Scopes. Two suspects and the usual stuff: 
  illegal use of alien genes, reverse engineering of the human 
  genome. But their excuse is quite novel: enhanced creativity. 
  Whatever that means."

  "Uh huh." Why the hell had Bolt woken him up? This was one more 
  crackpot scheme to improve humanity, another bad joke that could 
  wait until morning.

  "Scopes, these people are experts. They are transbiologists 
  working for General Genes on a planet called Meadow."

  "Meadow. That's a _Bioworld_," said Scopes, exhaling gently as 
  if to blow alien microbes from his lips, germs that kindled 
  hectic fevers, bone-rattling chills, green choking phlegm and 
  bloody vomit, germs that killed people in a few hours on the 
  Bioworlds.

  "I'll brief you in my office. Get down here now. And pack some 
  clothes. I'm sending you to Meadow." Bolt hung up.

  Scopes clambered out of his single bed and padded to the 
  bathroom. He felt nauseated from fear? Or was it disgust? 
  Standing at the sink, blinking at his bleary face in the mirror, 
  he could not tell. He studied the reflection of his scrawny 
  body, his sand-colored hair, his thin Celtic features, and 
  finally he looked at his left cheek. It was crumpled by an old 
  battle scar that never faded. Inexorably, he stroked the scar 
  with a slow wiping motion even though he despised the habit. His 
  day-old beard rasped under his fingertips. He would not shave 
  this morning. Not shaving was an old PP superstition before 
  Section Six jobs, and this would be one for sure.

  At the back of his closet he found his last clean shirt. He was 
  fumbling with the buttons when he saw his old white cadet cap, 
  dusty, forgotten, lying on the shelf. How many years ago? 
  Fifteen? He held the cap between his fingertips and blew away 
  the dust. The silver PP badge was badly tarnished: Salvare per 
  Sterilus -- Salvation through Sterility. He tossed the cap back 
  on the shelf. Only death could release him from his oath.

  The hallway was dark. He wheeled his rusty bicycle into the 
  alley and screwed his eyes half-shut against the swirling eddies 
  of trash that floated on Hermes' endless Coriolis winds. The 
  streets of the cylindrical life-island curved four miles above 
  his head, a quilt of darkness stitched with tiny lights. Scopes 
  pedaled doggedly into the wind and his solitary hunched figure 
  passed slowly through the yellow pools of light under the city's 
  street-lamps. Hermes' artificial dawn was breaking when he 
  arrived at the headquarters of the Pasteur Police.

  Bolt's penthouse office was a quiet cocoon of dark wood and 
  wrinkled faux leather. French windows opened onto a bright 
  rooftop garden furnished with wrought-iron chairs and a pretty 
  white table. The Commissioner, tall, thin and stooped, was 
  standing in the gloom behind his desk prodding a robotic insect 
  that lay on his glass desktop. When he picked up this metal 
  scarab, gold cufflinks flashed at his wrist. They were made from 
  _Krugerrands_, he had once told Scopes. Gold coins from an 
  ancient country he admired.

  "Ah, Scopes, glad you came so quickly. No time to shave, I see. 
  That's good."

  Bolt waved an arm in invitation and said, "Let's step outside. 
  It's a beautiful morning." They walked side-by side in the 
  penthouse garden, crunching gravel beneath their feet. Bolt bent 
  down and set the scarab free in the flower bed. The little robot 
  scurried out of sight.

  "Did you know that model can track individual mammals by scent 
  alone?"

  "Yes," said Scopes. He had worked on many Bioworlds. Scarabs 
  were essential for the exploration of those hostile biospheres.

  "Everyone well at home, I trust?"

  "Yes, quite fine, thank you," said Scopes, thinking of the 
  unmade single bed that would greet him on his return. His 
  loneliness made him glance up at the curving cityscape four 
  miles above his head and search for the small splash of green 
  that was the Academy Pasteur. On those smooth lawns, 15 years 
  ago, he and Blue and the rest of their class, shoulders back and 
  heads held high, had sworn to enforce the Human Gene Laws, and 
  when they were dismissed they had cheered hoarsely and thrown 
  their white caps high into the air.

  Bolt dragged two chairs to the little white table. Scopes sat 
  down. There were violets and roses, honeysuckle and nightshade 
  in Bolt's garden, all grown from the gene banks of old Earth. 
  But these flowers bloomed year round, their endless blossoms and 
  heavy fragrances made by alien genes culled from the plants of a 
  hundred Bioworlds. Scopes breathed deeply, relishing the 
  fantastic scents. This was transbiology at its best.

  Bolt was pacing back and forth. "What do you know of a man 
  called Foster? A transbiologist, a black man, but I'm told he 
  did good work when he was younger."

  Scopes stirred impatiently. "Foster discovered the N-fix genes 
  in rare alien plants that fixed free nitrogen from the 
  atmosphere. He added those alien genes to plants from Earth and 
  invented modern hydroponics. He's why we eat so well in the 
  life-islands."

  "Ah, yes. I remember reading something about nitrogen. You've 
  such a good memory for these scientific details, Scopes, I quite 
  envy you. It's a good thing you're the field man and I'm the 
  mandarin."

  "Foster was working in Lumena when I was there, but I never met 
  him."

  "You were assigned to Lumena? I'd forgotten."

  "Undercover. I taught Bio Law for two semesters. It was a waste 
  of time."

  "Well, Foster's broken the Gene Laws. He says he's trying to 
  make the human mind more inventive, more creative with an alien 
  gene that codes for new pathways in the brain." Bolt shook his 
  head. "That's a clear violation of the First Law. You know, 
  Scopes, I never trusted those people in Lumena with their 
  organic government. Rubbish! That whole life-island lacked 
  discipline, authority, structure. But things do work out for the 
  best. After what they did to you, you must agree." Bolt was 
  looking at Scopes' scar and Scopes felt his cheek burn as it had 
  burned ten years ago when the laser scorched his face.

  That was ten years ago, outside Lumena, The Island of Light. Two 
  million people had bled to death in a week. The official story 
  was that carelessness and poor technique had let in an alien 
  plague from a Bioworld. But there other rumors. Bolt had sent 
  hundreds of PP's. As always, Scopes and Blue worked in the same 
  team. Bolt told them their task was quarantine and sanitation. A 
  few months later he had called it a success.

  Bolt turned and gazed through the dawn mists at the distant 
  spires of Hermes. Scopes touched his scar briefly, then quickly 
  clasped his hands on his knees and fought to refocus his mind on 
  Foster's crime. "Enhanced creativity sounds like an intriguing 
  idea. Maybe Foster's trying to bootstrap his own mind?"

  "That's a Faustian scenario, Scopes, but an incorrect one, I'm 
  afraid. Foster's not tinkering with himself. He's altered the 
  neural circuits of the other transbiologist on Meadow -- a young 
  woman called Maria Mataya."

  Maria Mataya. Instantly he found her face in the graveyard of 
  his memory: high cheekbones, and eyes that were luminous pools 
  of brown across the table during earnest conversations in 
  Lumena's campus bars. But that Maria was one of the two million. 
  Bolt must be talking about someone else.

  A scrabbling amongst the flowers made him turn and look over his 
  shoulder. Bolt's scarab scuttled across the gravel, grasping a 
  weakly struggling mouse between its claws. Bolt pulled a remote 
  from his pocket and pressed a button. The scarab tightened its 
  grip. There was a popping squelching noise. Blood and brains 
  squirted from the mouse's eyesockets.

  "Amazing," said Bolt, but Scopes had turned away, angry and 
  disgusted.

  The scarab carefully buried the mouse in the mulch. Bolt picked 
  up the mechanical insect and removed its mind module. "Can't be 
  too careful," he said. Scopes followed him inside.

  Bolt collected papers from his desk. He looked up at Scopes. "I 
  have a breakfast meeting at General Genes about this Meadow 
  business. A drone-freighter's leaving for Meadow at ten. Ride 
  cargo and you'll be there by tonight. I'll follow you tonight."

  Scopes nodded glumly. "Section Six?"

  Bolt handed him a data disc labelled with General Genes 
  corporate logo: double G's and double helix, red on white. 
  Underneath, Bolt had written "Personnel Data: Foster and 
  Mataya."

  "Yes. Section Six. Foster's a criminal, Mataya has a 
  contaminated genome. There is no other way."



  While scopes was riding the elevator down to the subway, he 
  thought of the mouse and wondered if Bolt was born like that, or 
  if he had spent too long in the Pasteur Police. Yet Bolt was 
  right. _Salvare per Sterilus._ There was no other way. Homo 
  Sapiens was the most successful species in the known universe; 
  attempts at improvement had a way of turning sour. The Gene Laws 
  stopped transbiologists like Foster from messing with the human 
  genome. The Police enforced the Laws, operating under the 
  authority of a secret codicil -- Section Six: Summary Execution.

  After the Academy his second case was a Section Six, two failed 
  grad students and their pathetic black lab. That's when he began 
  to see Police work for what it was: brutal and disgusting. He 
  should have quit years ago. But he'd sworn an oath and if he 
  quit the Police would make sure he never worked again.

  The subway stank of urine and the floor was gummy underfoot, 
  like walking on velcro. Far down the platform, hidden by the 
  sullen crowd of workers in GG overalls, someone was playing the 
  saxophone.

  Morosely, Scopes pushed his way towards the music. A ragged boy 
  was blowing hard on the sax, watched by an emaciated man in a 
  white T-shirt. The man was nodding, smiling, sometimes frowning 
  at the boy. The man was often here. Scopes knew him well. His 
  name was Blumenthal. When they were plebes together, Scopes had 
  laughingly called him Captain Blue. Blue was from Lumena; he was 
  a little older, and married with a child. Captain Blue. The name 
  had stuck. Scopes thought of their white caps thrown in the air, 
  like a rising flock of doves, and how quickly the caps fell and 
  lay scattered in the dirt.

  The boy finished and the crowd threw a sprinkle of coins. Blue 
  bent down, whispered something in the boy's ear that made him 
  smile, took the sax and blew a phrase or two, showing him how to 
  do it better. Scopes watched quietly, wishing he was a father.

  Then Blue saw him and began to play. The crystalline music cut 
  through the hollow subway air and rose like a bird into the 
  vaulted ceiling, a glorious celebration of life. The gray faced 
  crowd was suddenly silent, attentive, as if they had been 
  offered hope. The ragged boy stood spellbound. Scopes smiled 
  because Blue had chosen well: a little scherzo written by Bach, 
  defiantly, on a Sunday morning when his favorite daughter died 
  from scarlet fever.

  Two minutes and it was over. Blue ignored the rain of money. He 
  looked hard at Scopes and waved slowly. It was an enigmatic 
  gesture, part wave and part salute.

  Yes, Blue had done it right. He had done his duty to the end, 
  even when they'd asked him to do the worst thing anyone could 
  do. Then he had quit and walked away with his head held high, 
  shoulders back, and chosen a different way to live.

  Scopes rode the train to the northern space-dock, staring at his 
  reflection in the window. Maybe he should make this his last 
  mission. He'd do the work he'd sworn to do, no matter what 
  waited for him on Meadow, but this would be the last time. He'd 
  quit when he got home. He'd make a living somehow.


  Two.
------

  Onboard the freighter, he took his gear down to the cargo hold 
  and hung a free-fall hammock from the tie-down rings. He slept 
  through hyperspace. When the freighter was decelerating into 
  Meadow orbit, his hammock swung against a bulkhead and he woke 
  up feeling refreshed and calm.

  He climbed to the bridge. The freighter was docking with an 
  orbital shuttle. On the shuttle's wings and fin the GG logos 
  were bright in the alien sunlight. Below, Meadow was a 
  blue-green globe streaked with white clouds. All the Bioworlds 
  looked like this, and they teemed with carbon-based life: alien 
  animals, plants and deadly microbes.

  The commlink chimed. Bolt's hawkish face appeared on the screen 
  and his panelled office filled the background. "Scopes, your 
  mission is more important than I thought. General Genes will pay 
  you a bonus for a speedy resolution." He named a figure. "Enough 
  for you to retire, I'd say. Good luck. I'll be there late 
  tonight." And he was gone in a burst of static.

  Decisively, Scopes pulled the personnel data disc from his gear 
  bag and slotted it into the bridge computer. He would confront 
  Foster and Mataya and Section Six them right away. With luck 
  he'd even have the paperwork finished before Bolt arrived 
  tonight. He tapped a few keys to select Mataya's data. He looked 
  up at the screen and was stunned. He was staring at her familiar 
  face, her high cheekbones and brown eyes, the quizzical 
  expression she'd used when asking questions in his class. Scopes 
  sat before the screen for a long time. There was no way out. He 
  stroked his scar.

  An hour later the shuttle crossed a coastline where whitecaps 
  marched towards a curving beach and a vast savannah. In the far 
  west a fiery sun hung low over a range of snow-peaks; on the 
  savannah a cluster of domes shone in the fading light, their 
  shadows long ellipses on the plain.

  Telemetry was coming from the domes. One inhabitant: Foster. 
  Temperature 98.8, white cell count and differential normal, 
  T-cells nominal, blood cultures times three negative, probes for 
  alien DNA all negative. OK. So Foster was free of alien 
  infection. But where was Maria?

  The shuttle taxied to a halt outside the largest dome. Scopes 
  pulled on a clumsy yellow E-suit, lowered his helmet over his 
  head and snapped the seals. Rows of lights glowed at the edges 
  of his vision. Steady greens shone on the left: seals and 
  pressure intact. Blue and yellow telltales blinked on the right: 
  life-support and recycling systems nominal.

  He walked into the smooth whiteness of the shuttle's airlock. 
  The inner door closed behind him with a sucking thud of black 
  trans-rubber on chrome. Pumps rumbled under the floor, misting 
  him with fresh dioxychlor to kill the microbes riding on his 
  suit. Contamination of the Bioworlds was always strictly 
  forbidden. Massive bolts in the outer door slid back, newly 
  sterile air hissed out and the hatch opened. Scopes stepped onto 
  the dangerous savannah of Meadow. He tramped through waist-high 
  grass that swished against his suit. The evening sky was filled 
  with alien constellations.

  Inside the airlock of the dome, fine sprays of dioxychlor washed 
  his suit again. When the pumps shut down he shucked the clumsy 
  yellow thing and waited for the door to open. Soon he would 
  Section Six a crazy old man who had once been a genius, and do 
  the same to a girl he'd known and liked, and maybe, if his work 
  had not crippled him he could have learned to love. The smell of 
  dioxychlor hung faintly in the air; it was an acrid, 
  bactericidal smell that brought tears to his eyes.

  He heard faint music in the air, like the perfume of a woman who 
  has gone. He listened carefully, picked out a trumpet driving 
  hard above a band, a New Orleans jazz band. The 12-bar chorus 
  ended and the next chorus was subtly different, marvelously 
  innovative. This was Blue's kind of music.

  The music got louder as the airlock's inner door swung open. 
  Foster was waiting for him: a black man, thin, shorter than 
  Scopes, with eyeballs that were yellow with age. The hair at his 
  temples was white and trimmed very short. On his bald head there 
  were patches of paler skin that looked like alien continents.

  "Inspector Scopes, Pasteur Police." Scopes waited for shocked 
  horror to show on Foster's face, but Foster merely held out his 
  hand and said "Come in. I'm glad you came so quickly."

  Slack-jawed, Scopes stepped into the smooth white hallways of 
  Meadow Base. "You were expecting me?"

  "Well, not you exactly, but someone from the Police. We've asked 
  for a scientific review. We want an official exemption from the 
  Gene Laws."

  They walked to Foster's quarters. There was a neatly- made 
  single bed, a sofa, several chairs, and clean shirts were 
  hanging in a row in the closet. The galley was immaculate. This 
  was the home of a self-sufficient man.

  Foster waved him to the sofa. "What do you think of our 
  project?"

  "Well, I'm not sure I really understand your work," said Scopes 
  cautiously.

  "We've made the ultimate discovery: we've discovered the secret 
  of discovery itself. We've found a way to make the human mind 
  more inventive, to help people think in ways they never thought 
  before. But we've been careful not to break the Gene Laws and we 
  need an exemption if we're to move ahead."

  Foster was looking at him carefully, perhaps trying to judge his 
  reaction. Scopes remained impassive and merely said "What 
  exactly do you want from the Pasteur Police?"

  "We should wait until Maria gets back," said Foster. "The 
  story's more hers than mine. She's at an outstation in the 
  south, but she'll be back tonight. She took the hovercraft." He 
  looked down at his watch. "About an hour."

  Get them both at the same time, thought Scopes, lying to 
  himself, thinking of Maria driving across Meadow's dark and 
  dangerous sea of grass. She would be peering through the 
  windshield, like the pilot of some antique bomber with the faint 
  glow of instruments shining on her face.

  "Whiskey OK?" Foster was asking him if he wanted a drink. Scopes 
  nodded. Foster went into the kitchen. Scopes heard ice-cubes 
  clinking in glasses. Foster came back carrying two drinks. 
  "Wanna listen to some jazz?" he said.

  "Sure. Back at the Academy a friend of mine played the sax."

  "Great. I've been to New Orleans you know, after the floods went 
  down." He had taken a starship to old Earth, ridden down the 
  Orbital Elevator to Porto Santana, taken a flight to Denver, 
  high in the Rockies, and made a tedious four-day train journey 
  to New Orleans. "Just a few people left there now, scratching in 
  the ruins like chickens. The old city's buried under ten feet of 
  silt. I took a scarab with me, programmed to dig through mud and 
  hunt for shellac. Under the silt, in a basement on Ursulines 
  Street -- the old French Quarter, you know -- that scarab found 
  gold. Hundreds of forgotten 78's. Must have been a collector's 
  place. They were all broken, there were thousands of pieces."

  He had brought back the pie-shaped wedges of shellac, and he 
  showed Scopes how he had made digitized images, painstakingly 
  fitted the wedges together, made complete discs on his computer 
  screen.

  "Now watch," he said, and a red dot traced the groove in the 
  image of the 78. Thin scratchy music started to play. "That's 
  what I started with." He had used artificial intelligence 
  techniques to remove the hiss, add missing harmonics, even fill 
  in sections where a wedge was lost. "You know, people thought 
  this stuff was all gone and lost for ever in the flooding."

  They listened sitting side-by-side on the sofa. Scopes sipped 
  his whiskey, sat back and closed his eyes. He was in New Orleans 
  in a small courtyard with a fanlight that was a graceful 
  half-ellipse and where the flagstones were wet with rain. His 
  hand rested on the banister of a curving stairway and while he 
  waited for someone to come down the steps, he glanced through 
  the courtyard's arched carriageway with its wrought-iron gates. 
  A jazz band was marching down the street outside. A crowd was 
  dancing on the wet cobblestones. The funeral was over, they were 
  all coming back from the graveyard. The music was triumphant.

  "Great stuff," said Scopes, thinking of the music, but Foster 
  was looking at his empty glass and asked him to have another.

  "Sure," said Scopes.

  "It packs a punch."

  "I make it in the lab. They used to call it moonshine." Foster 
  refilled their glasses. Maria would be there soon. Scopes 
  realized he was happy.

  "New connections, that's the secret of creativity," said Foster. 
  "Jazz is a good example: European melodies and complex African 
  rhythms. New ideas always come from new connections."

  Scopes swirled the whiskey in his glass and sipped carefully. 
  "Creativity is new connections?"

  "Yes. The connections that really matter are those in the human 
  brain. Those are the physical basis for new ideas. I'm talking 
  about dendrites, Scopes, the tiny filaments that grow between 
  the neurons. New dendrites mean new ideas." He was looking at 
  Scopes intently. Scopes sipped his moonshine slowly and nodded 
  to show he understood.

  "Maria and I have a protein that stimulates the growth of 
  dendrites a thousandfold: Dendritic Growth Factor, DGF for 
  short. We've got the gene to synthesize it too."

  "You found this protein on Meadow?"

  "No. I traded with a friend, a man called Sour Belly, a maverick 
  transbiologist if ever there was one. Legal though. Years ago 
  Sour Belly made big money, patented a gene. He bought himself a 
  ship, installed the best shipboard lab I've ever seen. For years 
  he's roamed the edge of the known universe, prospecting on 
  Bioworlds beyond the reach of General Genes.

  "He wanted some early Satchmo, the Hot Five cuts from 1927. He 
  knew I'd found them in New Orleans. I traded them for DGF. 
  They're classics, you know." After a moment Foster added 
  thoughtfully, "Years ago, Sour Belly wanted me to join him, 
  offered to let me buy a small share in his ship. If I'd been 
  smart I'd have done it too."

  Scopes swirled the whiskey in his glass and said "I like that 
  idea, being your own boss out there on the frontier." He looked 
  straight into Foster's eyes. "Believe me, there are worse ways a 
  man can make a living."

  The radio crackled and it was Maria's voice, scratchy in the 
  narrow bandwidth, saying "ETA in five minutes." He felt 
  impatient, eager, hungry.

  "We can wait on the loading dock," said Foster. Scopes forced 
  himself to walk slowly. The music faded away behind them.

  They waited on the observation deck behind a thick glass wall 
  and stared across the loading dock into the night, Scopes 
  strained to see the white dot that would be his first glimpse of 
  the returning hovercraft. Behind him a circuit breaker closed 
  with a crash; harsh light flooded the dock and its dusty freight 
  compound. The hovercraft, brilliant white with red GG logos on 
  its side, swept in from the night trailing clouds of rolling 
  dust. The craft swirled across the compound and nudged against 
  the dock before settling on its billowing skirt.

  The cabin door opened and a figure in a clumsy yellow E-suit 
  jumped down onto the dock and walked towards the airlock. 
  Despite the suit Scopes recognized her. She walked proudly, like 
  a tired ballerina walking home after class. She was still so 
  graceful, as graceful as she was when he was young.

  He waited impatiently beside the airlock until the whining pumps 
  were silent. The inner door opened, she stepped through and he 
  saw once again her high cheekbones, her jet black hair and her 
  deep brown eyes.

  "Scopes!" she cried, laughing with surprise and maybe joy. "Of 
  all people, they sent you!" She hugged him and he wiped tears 
  from his eyes.

  "It's that damn dioxychlor," he said sheepishly.

  She hugged him again and laughed and said to Foster "Scopes is 
  more sensitive than he thinks. He always was."

  He held her tightly. Her blue denim shirt was so soft to touch 
  and she was beautiful and he had sworn to kill her.

  "Hey, Scopes, don't look so sad," she said, holding him at arm's 
  length to see him better. "But what the hell happened to your 
  cheek?"

  He touched his scar. "It's nothing, just a flesh wound," he 
  said. "It happened at work."

  "You should get a better job."

  How cruelly right she was. But Bolt would kill her anyway, and 
  so he said defensively, "PP stuff is all I know. Besides, I took 
  an oath. Remember?"

  She smiled at him and shook her head. He struggled to think of 
  something to say to recapture the brightness of their meeting. 
  She turned away to get her gear bag.

  "So what have you been doing in the lab?" he asked.

  "We'll show you," said Foster, and led the way through smooth 
  white passages to Maria's lab. It was a jumble of equipment, 
  mainly DNA sequencers and gene function analyzers. Scopes was 
  familiar with the craft of transbiology; it was a tedious 
  comparison of thousands of base pairs, a search for 
  similarities, fits, possible ways of using a gene from one world 
  to modify the function of a gene from another. The work required 
  an encyclopedic knowledge of the biology of many worlds. It 
  needed the mind of a chess-master to see combinations, chances, 
  opportunities. The work was extraordinarily tiresome. But in the 
  center of Maria's lab was a music synthesizer and four speakers.

  "What's that for?" he asked, pointing at the synthesizer. "I'll 
  show you." She sat down at the keyboard and he stood behind her, 
  looking over her shoulder, smelling the fresh scent of her hair. 
  A silver bracelet hung at her wrist, many heavy links, an 
  articulated snake that tinkled when she slotted a data disc and 
  tapped a key.

  Mournful hollow whistling music filled the lab, interwoven 
  melodies in a minor key, poignant harmonies leading to a last 
  sad chord. Loneliness lingered in the silent lab and Maria sat 
  at the keyboard, head bowed, hands resting simply on her lap. 
  The life support system whirred. She nodded to herself and 
  looked up at Scopes with her head tipped at a quizzical angle. 
  "That's music from the genes of a whale that used to live on 
  Earth."

  "Beautiful," said Scopes.

  "Maria's discovery," said Foster. "DNA into music. The human 
  ear's a great tool for pattern recognition, far better than the 
  human intellect. She programmed a neuro-analog processor to 
  modulate the output from the DNA sequencer with musical 
  paradigms."

  She picked up a disc and read the label, "Human neurons/growth 
  phase." This music was a plainsong -- boy sopranos singing in 
  unison, slow and beautiful, echoes in a vast cathedral. "That's 
  us humans, thinking," she said. "Laying down new dendrites, one 
  by one."

  She slotted another disc. "DGF." Pure timpani, driving drums, 
  multiple rhythms weaving in and out, coming together and 
  diverging, always fascinating.

  Foster handed her a final disc and she silently showed Scopes 
  the handwritten label: Human Neurons plus DGF. She slotted it.

  A wave of sound washed over him. The music was a riot of harmony 
  and rhythm, a blast of noise, a huge pulsing fugue in eight, 16, 
  32 voices -- he lost count. The fugue drove towards harmonic 
  resolution but always modulated to another key in a wonderful 
  combination of control and invention.

  Maria stopped the music. Her bracelet tinkled in the silence. 
  She said "DGF will make people think better, think differently."

  Now he knew why Bolt and General Genes wanted a Section Six job. 
  Maria and Foster were not genetic criminals, they were living 
  vessels that carried a dangerous idea. Scopes felt a cold, damp, 
  hopelessness seep into his brain. He could never persuade Bolt 
  to let them go and if he broke his oath and helped them escape 
  the PP would hunt them down like animals.

  "I synthesized the DGF protein," said Foster, "and injected it 
  into Maria's bloodstream. The half-life of the protein is short 
  in human blood, only a few minutes, but that was all it took for 
  Maria to write the program that transforms DNA structures into 
  musical paradigms."

  "What you've just heard," she said, "is the first product of 
  DGF. I sent Sour Belly a copy of my DNA-to-music software so he 
  could see what we had done with the gene he found."

  "So you two haven't broken the Gene Laws?" said Scopes.

  "No way," said Maria. "We know all about Section Six."

  Scopes ignored her. "You've injected the protein for a brief 
  test, but you haven't inserted the DGF gene into your own 
  chromosomes?"

  "Right," said Foster.

  "I need to file a report with Hermes." Maybe he could persuade 
  Bolt. "I can't do anything until the morning."

  "In that case, I'm going to bed." Foster yawned and smiled. 
  "It's late for an old man." He left.

  Suddenly, Scopes was very aware that he was alone with Maria in 
  the silent lab, but before he could speak she reached up and 
  touched his scar. "Please tell me what happened to you."

  "Lumena. The hemorrhagic plague, back in 2219, Remember, people 
  bleeding from everywhere, exsanguinating, dead in minutes?"

  She nodded. "I remember."

  "I was stationed in Hermes. They sent a whole detachment of 
  PP's, said it was a quarantine job. I worked with my buddy, his 
  name was Blumenthal but we called him Captain Blue. We had a 
  salvage tug and they told us to weld the airlocks shut. There 
  were two million people inside the life island and we welded the 
  airlocks shut." He was watching her face, searching for disgust, 
  but she was impassive.

  "While we were working some men broke out through a small 
  maintenance lock. I remember one of them coughed when he got 
  close to me and the blood poured down the inside of his 
  faceplate. They were desperate, trying to steal our ship, trying 
  to escape. One of them got me with a laser. The scar's nothing, 
  but an inch closer to my eye...." He shrugged. "Blue was looking 
  out for me, killed them with the Bofors cannon, saved my life."

  "You were lucky he was your friend," she said.

  "We were at the Academy together. He was my buddy. He was 
  watching out for me, even though his wife and child were there. 
  They were inside Lumena, that's what I mean." Scopes stroked his 
  scar and watched her like a caged animal, searching for her 
  condemnation, but she just shook her head.

  "Go on."

  "We spent another week inside that stinking tug, shouting above 
  the roar of the engines until we had slowed Lumena down. They 
  were all dead by then, all two million of them. Lumena was a 
  hulk, a coffin. We sent it spiralling into the sun and we went 
  home. But nothing was the same. Blue quit the day we got back to 
  Hermes. He's done nothing since, gets by somehow, busking in the 
  subway."

  "Nothing is the same," she said and spun her chair around to 
  work at her terminal. She pulled up a picture of a frail 
  dark-haired girl standing in the doorway of a reed hut. Inside, 
  in the shadows, there was a small color TV on a cheap plastic 
  table. Behind the hut white Mayan ruins rose above the green 
  jungle. "That's me, when I was ten years old. They'd just called 
  from Lumena, told my parents I'd won a scholarship.

  "My parents went with me to Lumena because I was so young. My 
  father got a job there, the first real job he ever had. We lived 
  in Lumena and we loved it, but in the summers I went back to the 
  Yucatan and stayed with my grandparents. That's where I was in 
  the summer of '19, in the Yucatan. But my parents stayed in 
  Lumena, just two people inside, when you welded the airlocks 
  shut."

  Scopes held his face in his hands. He could not look at her. He 
  felt he should cry, but he couldn't. He felt blighted, unable to 
  escape his depraved career. Finally he looked up at her and said 
  what was true. "I didn't know."

  "You did what had to be done. It wasn't your fault. When it was 
  over, in honor of my parents' memory, I vowed to do my best to 
  free people from this constant horrible threat of alien 
  infection. DGF is my best chance. Listen."

  She pulled out another disc. Human immune system: modified. This 
  gene music was like jazz, raucous, carefree, a bright march 
  played by a band that might once have strutted down a wet street 
  in New Orleans.

  She let the music play for a minute or two. "I did that with the 
  DGF protein in my bloodstream. I can see how to modify the human 
  immune system, speed up its responses, make it improvise and 
  handle anything the Bioworlds have in store for us." She looked 
  at him earnestly. "I want to free people from the life islands, 
  I want people to walk on these beautiful Bioworlds and let the 
  sun shine on their faces and the wind blow in their hair."

  And suddenly he knew what he would do. "I'm going to help you. I 
  was sent here to Section Six you, and Foster too. But I'm not 
  going to do it. I'm going to break my oath."

  "Scopes, we know you were sent here under Section Six. We knew 
  they would send someone, but I didn't expect you. But that 
  doesn't matter. You must do what you have sworn to do."

  "I can't," he said. "I can't do it any more." He buried his face 
  in his hands as if to hide his shame.

  "Then you'll ruin everything," she said relentlessly. "You must 
  be true to your oath, you must carry out your orders. That's 
  what we're counting on. Only that way can you make my dreams 
  real." She took his hand. "They are your dreams too, Scopes. 
  Remember?"

  He remembered their earnest conversations in the student center 
  and he smiled and squeezed her hand and said "Yes, I do 
  remember. That's why you must let me save you."

  "No, Scopes. We are bound by different oaths. Yours -- Salvare 
  per Sterilus -- leads to death. Mine brings forth life. Salvare 
  per Sacrificius: Salvation through Sacrifice."

  She reached up and touched his scar again. "We must both be true 
  to ourselves. Truth is the only foundation for the future that 
  we want." She ran her finger down the length of his scar and 
  across his lips. Her touch was so light he barely felt the 
  warmth of her fingertip. She kissed him, surprising him when she 
  ran her tongue along the inside of his lip, letting her passion 
  flow into him like a powerful electric current.

  Later, while the alien stars spun slowly above her bed, she 
  slept in his arms, her breath warm on his skin and her dark hair 
  tangled on his shoulder.

  He lay there, confused and angry, thinking of the old PP rumors 
  about Lumena: that the alien plague was deliberate, that 
  Lumena's Constitution of Freedom was a great threat to General 
  Genes, that the corporation had deliberately seeded the life 
  island with an alien disease.

  He thought of the part he had played in the murder of her 
  parents, of Blue's wife and child too. He thought of Hermes, the 
  stinking subway, the crowds of drudges in their GG uniforms, and 
  Bolt in his pompous office high above, ignorantly dismissing 
  Foster's brilliance. He thought of the wasted promise of Blue's 
  life, and Maria with her secret vow to her dead parents and her 
  talk of sacrifice. At last he leaned over and gently kissed her 
  sleeping face. He did not know what else to do.

  Overhead a double sonic boom split the night sky. The shuttle 
  banked and turned into its final approach. Bolt stirred in his 
  seat and peered down at the sleeping domes. He reached into the 
  pocket of his suit and lovingly fondled the mind-module of the 
  scarab.


  Bolt stepped out of the airlock and straightened his cuffs while 
  listening to Scopes' report. When Scopes had finished Bolt said, 
  "So this DGF protein enhances dendritic growth. When the protein 
  was injected into Mataya she had a few new ideas. Now they want 
  to insert the DGF gene into her genome so she can modify the 
  human immune system. Then everyone lives happily ever after on 
  the Bioworlds. Of course, I'm just hitting the highlights."

  "Yes. She and Foster have not broken the Gene Laws."

  "And Section Six does not apply. Is that your point? Is that why 
  they're still alive?"

  "Yes. I had no authority."

  "You're right. You're a good field man, Scopes. You had no 
  authority under Section Six. But we're left with a difficult 
  problem."

  Scopes felt the muscles of his face tighten, felt his mouth set 
  firm and unyielding.

  "Let me explain, Scopes. Our society is pure and stable, the 
  pointless conflicts of the past are gone for ever. Politics is 
  dead, economics rules. We live in a world of interstellar 
  commerce that is smooth, stable, and homogeneous. Even our homes 
  in the life islands are engineered to optimize the health of our 
  species."

  This was standard PP propaganda. But Bolt's voice was losing its 
  cultured sheen. "Hyperimmunity!" He spat out the word. "What 
  does that mean for the future of our species?" His speech had 
  become harsh and guttural. "It means humans living freely on all 
  the Bioworlds, and there are millions of these planets in the 
  galaxy. It means human language, culture, and certainly human 
  Biology diverging endlessly, the very thing, Scopes, that we in 
  the Pasteur Police are sworn to prevent." He jabbed his finger 
  at Scopes' chest. "Control of biology means control of society. 
  You are a tool, Scopes, merely a tool, crafted to control 
  Biology, crafted to preserve the purity of our species. Salvare 
  per Sterilus."

  He caught his breath and said smoothly "We face a serious and 
  highly unusual threat. But my job, as a mandarin, is finding 
  elegant solutions to unusual problems. Legal but effective 
  solutions. For example, I have brought some new equipment for a 
  field test."


  Three.
--------

  An hour later, at dawn, scopes stood in the coolness of the 
  airlock, his helmet cradled in his arm, and peered through the 
  porthole in the massive door. Outside, Meadow's vast savannah 
  was gray and dim. A herd of para-deer had moved in through the 
  early morning mist to graze around the domes. He avoided the 
  reflection of his own scarred, unshaven face.

  Behind him, Bolt zipped his E-suit from toe to chin with a 
  single pull and sealed his helmet. The bright displays of the 
  control panel were reflected in Bolt's faceplate; the colors hid 
  his face like the crude mask of a tribal priest. Bolt lifted, 
  one by one from their dull-gray alloy racks, four Webley SC-4 
  electric guns. Scopes was glad to see he left the flamethrower 
  hanging there, a metal tank glinting between jumbled tubes.

  Foster was sitting in a corner carefully rechecking his 
  equipment. Tiny beads of sweat covered his black scalp as if a 
  mist had settled on the wet pavements of some ancient 
  river-city. Mutely, he took a Webley from Bolt and sealed his 
  suit.

  Maria stood beside the lockers, tying her hair back with a thin 
  white ribbon. She wore the same faded denim shirt that was so 
  soft to touch. The button on its pocket hung by a thin white 
  thread. She stuffed a blister pak into the pocket and tucked the 
  flap inside. Before she sealed her suit she blew Scopes a tiny 
  secret kiss. She took down the black scarab case from the top of 
  the lockers.

  They cycled the lock and stepped out onto the savannah. 
  Startled, the para-deer walked away, insolently flicking their 
  tails.

  The rising sun had washed away the alien stars and bleached the 
  sky until it was the palest blue, the color of Maria's shirt. 
  The air was still and the insects were silent, sluggish, waiting 
  for Meadow's white sun to catalyze their chemistry. Each blade 
  of waist-high grass was bent in prayer, its head bowed by a tiny 
  globe of dew, and every dewdrop was a prism touched by the sun. 
  A zephyr stroked the grass and the vast savannah shimmered and 
  sparkled -- brilliant, chromatic, alive. Scopes bent to pick a 
  small blue flower, tearing the fleshy stalk with his gloved 
  hand. He wanted to give it to Maria. She was walking up ahead, 
  swinging the black scarab case, jaunty, graceful, she looked 
  happy. The flower wilted before his eyes and he threw it down 
  into the tangled grass.

  After half an hour they were climbing up a bluff. The sun was 
  warm on their backs and the para-crickets were tuning-up, thin 
  wind-chimes tinkling urgently before a storm.

  Scopes had set his suit's thermostat too high and he was 
  sweating. He could feel it running down under his armpits and 
  there was no way to get rid of the irritating trickle. He reset 
  the thermostat: blue and yellow LED's flickered in his 
  faceplate, accepting the command.

  In front of him Bolt held his gun at the ready, arms rigid in 
  the awkward position approved by the trainers back in Hermes 
  while Foster and Maria slouched along with their guns held 
  loosely by their sides.

  From the top of the bluff they looked down on the broad oxbow of 
  the river. The smooth brown water slid by fast on their side but 
  looped in slow eddies on the other bank where mammals and 
  reptiles were drinking side-by-side, standing in the shallows 
  with rows of birds sitting on their backs. A thick cloud of 
  insects hung over the herds and shifted like smoke.

  The herds scattered; a plume of dust ploughed through the haze 
  and stopped abruptly. A para-deer lay on its side, kicking 
  feebly while a trans-tiger tore into its belly. Huge winged 
  vulture-ants spiralled down from the sky, beating the air with 
  their iridescent chitin wings. Bolt watched carefully. Scopes 
  slipped the safety off his Webley and felt a thousand amps surge 
  through the barrel. The laser sight glowed red even in the 
  bright sunlight, but the para-tiger paid no attention while it 
  gnawed at the bloody carcass of the deer.

  "We'll do the test here," said Bolt.

  Maria opened her case and took out the scarab. She switched the 
  little machine on; it whirred and briefly jerked its legs. 
  Holding it like a child holding a turtle she walked to the edge 
  of the bluff. The E-suit couldn't hide her straight back or the 
  curve of her haunches; she was still as graceful as that tired 
  ballerina.

  She set the scarab down. Across the river the trans- tiger 
  raised its bloody head and looked up at her. Scopes gripped his 
  gun.

  Maria turned away from the scarab and started to walk back. Her 
  gait was loose-limbed and carefree and she was smiling. Scopes 
  heard a whirr, a scrabbling of metal legs, saw Maria's smile 
  change to terror. She ran toward him, screaming "Get it off my 
  back!"

  She stopped and turned around. The scarab had cut her suit from 
  heel to collar. The edges of the suit's proto- cotton were 
  fraying in the breeze. The scarab ran down Maria's back and 
  scuttled away.

  Like an ancient clockwork machine jerking into motion Foster 
  swung his Webley and blasted the rogue scarab with a single 
  shot. Scopes ran to Maria and took her in his arms. The bright 
  red dot of a laser sight flickered across his suit, a warning 
  from Bolt. Scopes turned, still holding her, and saw Bolt 
  disarming Foster.

  Bolt said "Foster! Scarab maintenance, testing -- whose job is 
  that?"

  "Mine," said Foster.

  "We've had a fatal scarab malfunction. I'm charging you with 
  gross negligence. It's a pity you destroyed the evidence; you'll 
  have no defense when you go before the board. I'm sealing your 
  lab. You're confined to quarters. Tomorrow I'm taking you to 
  Hermes, for interrogation."

  "You'll burn in hell," said Foster.

  Maria lifted her useless helmet from her head, pulled at the 
  thin white ribbon in her hair and shook her hair free in the 
  wind. "You scum," she said to Bolt. "Scum that killed my 
  parents, Lumena, scum that would kill everything that's human, 
  if you could. You'll never win."

  She turned to Foster, gave a thumbs-up sign, both hands. "We did 
  our best. We came real close."

  "Closer than they think," said Foster. He waved, almost a 
  salute. "You're the best."

  He turned away and headed back to the dome. There was no need 
  for a guard, there was nowhere to go, but Bolt followed close 
  behind with his Webley in the crook of his arm as if he were 
  shooting grouse on a Scottish moor.

  "Scopes, you finish up," he shouted as he left. Maria shook her 
  head in disgust. She shucked off her flapping, torn suit and 
  stepped out of its empty neon-yellow shell. "I think I'll go 
  down to the river. Come with me, Scopes." And they set off down 
  the bluff, holding hands, her small slender fingers lost in his 
  clumsy glove. Digging their heels in they slid down the sandy 
  slope and rivulets of sand ran before them down to the water's 
  edge.

  At the bottom she stopped and inhaled deeply. "These worlds are 
  new Gardens of Eden," she said. She picked a flower, smelled it, 
  smiled. "Believe me, it smells good."

  "I did what you asked," he said, hopelessly. "We could have 
  stolen the shuttle. Got away. If you'd let me."

  "And gone where? I'm too much of a threat to them. Bolt would 
  hunt me down, kill me, even if it took him years. No. This was 
  the only way."

  "To die without a struggle?"

  "Death without a struggle, that's what sacrifice is all about. 
  To choose death to make way for something new, something better, 
  the very thing Bolt can't do, can't even understand."

  "Make way for what? For this?" Scopes laughed sarcastically.

  "Come on," she said, taking his gloved hand and they waded out 
  into the river, the smooth, brown water sliding round their 
  thighs, and sat side by side on a flat rock, Maria in her faded 
  shirt, her jeans dark and wet, squinting into the dancing 
  sunlight coming off the water, Scopes clumsy in his yellow suit.

  She stripped off and dived into the river, freestyling upstream, 
  drifting back to Scopes with the current, laughing, splashing 
  water on his faceplate.

  Later she got her clothes and they sat on the beach. He lit a 
  driftwood fire because she was starting to chill. He put his arm 
  around her and wished he had a blanket for her.

  She had another chill, then a massive rigor and her breathing 
  quickened, some kind of rapid pneumonia, he thought. Her 
  fingertips and lips were tinged with blue. Her breath came in 
  grunts.

  "In my pocket," she gasped. "My pill's in there." In his hurry 
  he tore the loose button from its thread, but he found the 
  blister-pack. Hyper-cyanide. He cradled her head in his arms.

  "Daddy, take care of me," she whispered.

  "I will," he said, ignoring her delirium.

  "Thank you." She smiled and closed her eyes. He slipped the 
  capsule under her tongue and she was dead in twenty seconds. He 
  laid her down on the sand and closed her delicate mouth with his 
  gloved hand.

  Something was climbing down the bluff behind him. A robot, sent 
  from the domes, was carrying some kind of tool, he couldn't see 
  what. Overhead there was the throbbing of chitin wings and a 
  brief darkening of the sky.

  The robot arrived. Bolt had sent it with the flamethrower, a 
  reminder that contamination of the Bioworlds is forbidden.

  When Scopes had finished there was only a smoking patch of 
  earth. When he stepped back he saw the charred cracked button 
  and ground it angrily into the dirt. In his rage he swung the 
  flamethrower at the sky in a great arc and caught one of the 
  vulture ants in its yellow flame. The creature screamed in 
  terror and fell to the ground, a smoking pile of flesh and 
  feathers.

  He trudged back to the dome with only his lonely shadow for 
  company. He went through the acrid decontamination procedures 
  mindlessly but dry-eyed.

  Bolt was waiting for him in the command module. "I've sealed 
  Foster's lab. None of his equipment, none of his data leaves 
  this planet. Nothing. Ever."

  Foster was signing a report.

  "You should read it before you sign," said Bolt, ever the 
  bureaucrat.

  "Why bother? You gonna change it if I don't like it?" Bolt took 
  the paper from him, studied his signature, folded the sheet and 
  tucked it in a pocket of his suit.

  "OK if I go to my room?" said Foster. "I got a lot of moonshine 
  I don't wanna waste. Maybe you should try some, Commissioner? Do 
  you good to loosen up a little."

  "Er, no thank you, not quite my kind of drink," said Bolt 
  smoothly.

  "How about you, Scopes?"



  An hour later, after finishing the paperwork, Scopes, grieving, 
  walked down the passage to Foster's room where the music was 
  loud and fast, the trumpet driving hard above the band, chorus 
  after chorus, endlessly inventive, bold, triumphant. He pushed 
  open the door. Foster met him with a broad smile and grabbed a 
  disc from the table.

  "Here's something for you. A gift," he said. "Not jazz, but I 
  think you'll like it. Moonshine music. Bootlegged. The best 
  stuff in the known universe." He slotted the disc. The music was 
  loose-limbed, sometimes jaunty, sometimes graceful -- like a 
  tired ballerina walking home after class -- and once there was a 
  high-pitched tinkling that made Scopes think of a bracelet of 
  beaten silver. "The original was great," said Foster, "but 
  forgive me, I've added a few bars." A few bars of pure timpani 
  was what he had added. Then the magnificent endless fugue of 
  invention began.

  Maria's genome, DGF added.

  He tossed the disc to Scopes. "Take it to Sour Belly. He'll know 
  what to with it. Music into DNA."

  Scopes stared dumbly at the disc he held in his hand. Smiling, 
  Foster said "It's against the Gene Laws, you know. Alien genes, 
  cloning, all that stuff."

  "Screw the Gene Laws."

  Foster re-slotted his jazz disc and the rough music filled 
  Scopes' mind with that wet courtyard in New Orleans, the 
  graceful fanlight and the curving stair. This time a little girl 
  skipped down the steps and took his hand and her palm was soft 
  and warm in his. They walked across the shining flagstones 
  together and out through the wrought-iron gates into the street. 
  They held hands and watched the carefree band march by. A white 
  cap, lost, lay on the cobblestones. It was smeared with dirt. 
  Little Maria picked it up and handed it to him. He wiped away 
  the dirt, turned the cap over in his gentle hands and looked 
  inside. The name written there was Blumenthal. He bent over and 
  lifted the child in his arms. She hugged him and pressed her 
  warm face against his left cheek. His cheek was smooth.


  Jim Cowan (jcowan@ns.fast.net)
--------------------------------
 
  Jim Cowan is a graduate of the 1993 Clarion SF workshop. He has 
  published other stories in InterText and in Century, a new print 
  magazine of speculative fiction.



  Need to Know: The Electronic Lingua Franca  by Adam C. Engst
==============================================================

  I'm all for progress, but let's face it: sometimes it's simply 
  inappropriate. I could give oodles of examples if pressed, but 
  right now I want to focus on formats used in electronic 
  publishing.

  You're familiar with many of them: things like Adobe Acrobat, 
  Common Ground, DOCmaker, and even HTML, the tag-cluttered 
  language of the World-Wide Web. This is progress, right? Nothing 
  beats fonts, styles, graphics, sounds, movies, and the promise 
  of teledildonics, right?

  Not so fast. In my (admittedly humble) opinion, the ideal format 
  for electronic publishing is text: straight text, plain text, 
  ASCII -- call it what you want.

  I can hear gasps of horror from those interested in "progress," 
  especially those heavily into graphic design, electronic audio, 
  or desktop video. I don't dispute that graphics may be lovely, 
  audio stentorian, and video breathtaking. But those aren't what 
  electronic publishing is all about.

  So what _is_ it about, then?

  _Readers_. The conveyance of information from a publisher to a 
  reader.

  The goal, in my eyes, is to make it as easy as possible for as 
  many people as possible to read, hear, view, or otherwise 
  experience my information.


  Point #1: ASCII text is universal.

  The lower 128 characters of ASCII text can be read on basically 
  _any_ machine. Just try playing a QuickTime movie from a Unix 
  shell account, or reading a DOCmaker document on a Windows-based 
  PC. It just doesn't work, and frankly, it's going to be years 
  before data formats for graphics, audio, and video -- 
  particularly when mixed with text -- will be ubiquitously 
  cross-platform between a Mac and a PC, let alone across the 
  range of all computers everywhere. I don't want to limit my 
  readership to the people with the "right" sort of computer -- I 
  want to be able to reach everyone.


  Point #2: ASCII text can convey information without design or 
  graphics.

  The howls of protest grow stronger. "But ASCII is so... plain 
  and boring!" I guess that's why no one has ever read Herodotus 
  or Dante or Hemingway or Steinbeck or even Stephen King's fluff.

  Words both convey information and inspire the imagination. I can 
  imagine and describe a scene far faster and cheaper than effects 
  wizards in Hollywood can create it, and I'll bet I can do it 
  faster than those spiffy new 3-D rendering and video editing 
  packages too.

  But hey, I'm not even talking about literature here, I'm talking 
  about more prosaic publications. Consider this: take a 
  publication and eliminate every design element, but leave all 
  the text intact. The result might be pretty ugly, but I'm 
  willing to bet that almost all of the information in that 
  publication has been accurately conveyed.

  Conversely, if you rip all the text out of a publication and 
  leave all the design elements intact, you won't even be able to 
  determine the name of the publication, much less what's in it. 
  The point is that the text of a publication is of paramount 
  importance.


  Point #3: ASCII text will survive the passage of time.

  I'm not saying layout and design are bad, or that all 
  publications should resort to straight ASCII. That's silly. I 
  _am_ pointing out that although good design can enhance the 
  information conveyed in the text, the text is preeminent. In 
  most cases, if you have no text, you have no content.

  One problem in the electronic world is that our various types of 
  computers don't understand the same file formats. But, they _do_ 
  understand ASCII, and since it's so universal now it's likely to 
  be supported for years to come. Perhaps you don't care whether 
  your publication is totally unreadable in ten years, but if 
  you're related to an archivist like I am, you _do_ care about 
  the future.


  Point #4: ASCII text is reusable.

  The universality of ASCII text has another benefit: it works 
  wonderfully as a base from which to expand. A simple macro in my 
  word processor can take an existing ASCII publication like 
  InterText or TidBITS and transform it into HTML for the World 
  Wide Web. No fuss, no muss. Similarly, I could dump an ASCII 
  version of InterText into Acrobat format -- or any other format 
  I want -- using whatever tools I want on whatever computer I 
  want, all starting from the primal ASCII text. And, I can do 
  this at the time of publication, after the fact, or whenever I 
  choose.


  Point #5: ASCII text is flexible and puts power in the hands of 
  the reader.

  Consider what I said about tools. I was talking about using them 
  as a publisher, but what about tools for readers? What if a 
  reader wants to search through an issue of a publication? What 
  if a reader wants to search through several _years_ of issues? 
  Few of specialized electronic formats lend themselves to a 
  simple task like a full-text search, but as a reader I can use 
  any number of tools to search through an ASCII publication.

  But let's not stop there: some people are color blind, and 
  others simply don't see small text well. With an ASCII 
  publication, readers can easily adjust the display to match 
  viewing preferences. Some designers absolutely hate to give 
  readers this power, and although I won't argue that good design 
  can improve readability, to the naysayers I have but one word: 
  _Wired_. I just _love_ reading yellow text reversed out of a 
  picture.

  One final example. ASCII text can be turned into Braille or read 
  out loud by a speech synthesizer like the Macintosh PlainTalk 
  technology. Just try _that_ with 95 percent of the specialized 
  formats out there!


  Point #6: ASCII text is small and compresses well.

  How fast is your connection to the net? If you rely on a 
  commercial service like America Online or a bulletin board 
  system, I'm confident that your connection speed isn't faster 
  than 28,800 bits per second. Internet connections can be much 
  faster, but the majority of individuals now connect at those 
  same slow modem speeds. Text is small and compresses well, 
  whereas graphics, sound, and video (and thus all the specialized 
  file formats that use them) are bit-bulky.

  File size doesn't much matter in a world of fast connections, 
  but in the real world, people think twice about downloading a 
  600K file that contains the same amount of text (but additional 
  graphics and layout) as a 30K text file. The goal in publishing 
  is to disseminate information, not to restrict it to those with 
  fast connections or patience.

  In the end, friends, I come not to bury these specialized 
  formats, these over-evolved and inflexible residents of the 
  electronic plains, but to praise the grande dame of information 
  communication: the humble word, as represented in the least 
  common denominator of ASCII text. No one should pretend that a 
  world without color, sound, and pictures would be a good thing, 
  but in the world of electronic publishing those things often do 
  little more than enhance the text, often at what I consider too 
  great a cost. If what you have to say is important, people will 
  listen -- will _read_ -- without the trappings.


  Adam C. Engst (ace@tidbits.com)
---------------------------------

  Is the editor of TidBITS, a free, ASCII-based weekly newsletter 
  focusing on the Macintosh and electronic communications. He 
  lives in Renton, Washington, with his wife Tonya and cats Tasha 
  and Cubbins. Not content to be mildly busy, he writes books 
  about the Internet (including the best-selling Internet Starter 
  Kit books from Hayden), takes care of his cacti and ceaselessly 
  pesters InterText's assistant editor for not owning a VCR.


  FYI
=====

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


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