Life On Planet Earth
        Harlan Joe was driving a truck from Chicago through to Denver the day the aliens arrived. Listening to the Big Event on radio, he was puzzled.
        "Papua New Guinea? Where the hell is Papua New Guinea?"
        Then he saw, up ahead, the woman in the red dress who was standing by the bright red sports car. She was trying to flag him down. For the sake of the red dress, Harlan Joe obliged. When he pulled up alongside of the red sports car, he saw one of the tires had blown out. He also saw that the woman had red, red lipstick. And that she was smiling at him.
        That was how Harlan Joe came to meet Avaltreen Blue.


*

        Why Papua New Guinea? That was never explained. Landing at Fort Moresby, the capital of PNG, was the first totally inexplicable and utterly alien thing which the aliens did.
        Everyone on the planet had been conditioned to expect the arrival of aliens. But the conventions of Hollywood had always called for aliens to show up in Washington DC or New York - or maybe Los Angeles. Not in some place in the tropical nowhere north of Australia.
         The aliens arrived in ships which were the color of aubergines, a shining purple fat with the potency of knowledge. They chose, for reasons which they did not choose to reveal, to call themselves the Polysynthacella. They had decided (rightly or wrongly) that they had made themselves into experts on the languages of planet Earth, and that they could legitimately name themselves.
        "We will unite you in knowledge," they said.
        What did this mean?
        Nobody knew. Hypothesis was protean, but all conclusions tentative. And, when asked to explain themselves, the Polysynthacella merely repeated their original statement, as if it was self-evident.
        "I don't think they're so bright," said Avaltreen Blue.
        It was the first original thought of her life. She might (conceivably) have had a second, except that, at that point, the police kicked in the door of the motel where Avaltreen Blue was shacked up with Harlan Joe, and arrested her for grand auto theft, possession of marijuana and the counterfeiting of United States currency.
        "I thought the Secret Service took care of the counterfeiting thing," said Harlan Joe, visiting her in jail.
        "Yeah," said Avaltreen Blue, looking tired, "but maybe they were busy or something."


*

        After six months in Papua New Guinea, the Polysynthacella moved to Chile, where they established a big base in the desert.
        "Yeah, Chile," said Harlan Joe, meeting Avaltreen Blue outside of the jail.
        "Where's that?" said Avaltreen.
        "Down south," said Harlan Joe, who had seen it on TV - the maps, the explanations and all. "You know. Way down south. Where they speak Spanish and all."
        "So maybe the big guys want to learn Spanish," said Avaltreen.
        Then she gave way to emotion, suddenly, unexpectedly, and wept. Harlan Joe took her in his arms and she wept all the more. She had not really believed that he would wait for her. She had not really believed that he cared.


*

        Down in Chile, the Polysynthacella covered a good half of one of the driest deserts in the world with a gritty substance which they claimed was powdered chimpanzee fur. Nobody knew why they did this, or where they got the fur from.
        The Polysynthacella were big, lumbering amphibians which looked like queen-size mattresses covered on both sides with short but powerful tentacles. The tentacles were a rubbery green and yellow tentacles and looked unconvincing, as if the Polysynthacella were not authentic creatures, but, rather, the flawed products of a second-rate plastic toy factory.
        "What are you here for?" asked Ispat Bean, winner of the "Meet the Aliens" contest.
        "We are here to unite you in knowledge," said one of the Polysynthacella, the one which called itself Medellin Spalding.
        "So how come that Papua place?" said Ispat Bean. "You like the coffee, or what?"
        "It is part of your planet," said Medellin Spalding. "You should know about it."
        "Oh yeah?" said Ispat, who, being from Ohio, didn't see the necessity. "And how about that dumb name of yours?"
        "The mind needs chewing gum," said Medellin Spalding, cryptically.
        And waved all his (its?) green and yellow tentacles simultaneously for a solid ten seconds.
        The scientists of the world were ecstatic. Ispat Bean, who was just a guy who made hamburgers at McDonald's in Cincinnati, a guy who was a part-time computer geek, a guy whose one claim to fame was that he kept piranhas as pets - this Ispat Bean had actually extracted information from the aliens.
        The aliens were, it seemed, of the opinion that Papua was important, or should be, not to the aliens themselves but to Earthlings such as Ispat Bean.
        That was as far as anyone got with interviewing the aliens, however, because, the very next day, they abruptly departed from the planet, without warning.


*

        A year later, the itching disease broke out, simultaneously, all over planet Earth. It was monstrous. It was like your whole body was one big itch. And x-ray analysis showed strange branching structures - a kind of supplementary nervous system, by the looks of it - spreading through the bodies of the afflicted.
        "The afflicted" being the entire population of the planet.
        "It's those aliens," said Harlan Joe, speaking to other truckers by CB radio as he headed into Akron.
        His truck rolled past a car which was stopped by the highway. In the car, a man. Maybe sleeping, maybe dead. Harlan Joe didn't stop. He was intent on his conversation. He was through the itching phase by now - otherwise he wouldn't have been able to drive the truck - but he was still as mad as hell.
        Harlan Joe didn't know - and wouldn't have cared if he had known - that the man in the car was Ispat Bean. Harlan Joe had seen Ispat Bean on TV, a while back, but had already forgotten all about him. Everyone else on planet Earth, pretty much, had done the same thing.
        Ispat Bean had gone from global supercelebrity to nonentity. His attempt to make it big ("My vision: a piranha in every home! The ecological solution to the food scraps problem!!") had failed absolutely. He was totally broke and was on the run, trying to stay ahead of a consortium of lawyers which wanted to extract one of his kidneys and half of his liver. (Some of the testimony in the class action suit was heartbreaking. "My little girl ... this is a photo of her beautiful little hand, before that ugly ... before that monstrous ... oh! And she did so want to play the violin ....")
        "Aliens," repeated Harlan Joe. "They did it. This plague, it's them."
        Harlan Joe was no scientist, but, as it happened, the world's best brains agreed with him.
        But why?
        Nobody knew.
        After Harlan Joe had driven past, Ispat Bean got out of the car, where he had been pretending to sleep. He looked around. Nobody was in sight. He hauled the body out of the trunk and dumped it by the roadside. He had already strapped ten pounds of plastic explosive to the body and rigged up a timing mechanism, which he now initiated. Five minutes after Ispat Bean drove away, the body exploded, sending little pieces of flesh and bone flying in all directions.
        That night, in his motel room, Ispat Bean watched the TV, eager for the first news of the Exploding Dog Killer. Having been famous once, Ispat was sure he could be famous again.
        Kill humans? Anyone can do that. And there is something in our nature which cheers on the Hannibal Lecters of the world. Humans are, after all, our competitors, and our enemies. It's people - strangers - who park in our chosen place, who grab the last carton of milk off of the supermarket shelf, who keep us awake by talking on the plane.
        But killing dogs ... now there's a whole new dimension of evil. Unimaginable evil. Evil worthy of prime time interviews, a movie, a video, a TV series, a book.
        "Next up," said the announcer, "the exploding elephant."
        Elephant? No, idiot! Dog! Not elephant - dog.
        But it was an elephant, after all. There was a parade in Sri Lanka, wherever the hell that was, and this elephant exploded.
        "Tamil Tiger terrorists have claimed responsibility," said the announcer.
        Say what? A bunch of tigers made an elephant explode?
        Ispat Bean couldn't quite figure it out. But he was starting to appreciate the truth of Ted Bundy's famous dictum (often erroneously attributed to Andy Warhol): "Achieving celebrity is not only more difficult than you imagine, it is more difficult than you can imagine."
        "But Bundy did it," said Ispat, "and I will too."


*

        After watching the exploding elephant, Harlan Joe went to take a shower, leaving the TV on, sound turned up loud, so he could listen to the horse racing.
        He was in the shower when he was -
        - in the truck.
        Trapped in a kind of full-sensorium movie of his own life, talking into the CB radio, saying, "It's those aliens," and seeing, out of the corner of his eye, a car by the road, some man slumped inside, maybe sleeping, maybe dead.
        Then he was back in the shower.
        The impact of the water on his naked flesh was galvanic. His head jerked back and slammed up against the nozzle of the shower, gashing the back of his head.
        "What the?!" said the racetrack commentator.
        Harlan Joe stumbled out of the shower, heedless of the blood and water he was spreading around the motel room, and went to the TV. The race was still on, but the commentator had lost it - was trying to recover, but had gotten such a shock that he could not remember the names of the horses, the names of the riders. His own name, perhaps.
        "You too," said Harlan Joe.


*

        "Next up," said the announcer, brightly, "the exploding elephant."
        And Ispat Bean was forced to watch the whole thing all over again. The big story which had wiped his little story out of the news (if, indeed, his little story, his exploding dog, had even been noticed by the world.)
        Rubbing salt in his wounds.


*

        Inside of seventy-two hours, there were three distinct "playback episodes", in which every person on the planet experienced a playback of part of his or her life. The playback episodes were different for each person, but seemed to range in length from three seconds through to about ninety minutes. Regardless of length, however, subjectively each playback episode seemed to take close to zero time.
        The scientists came up with a hypothesis pretty quickly.
        The new structure which the Polysynthacella had inflicted upon the human race was an organic recording-playback device. It recorded part of your own experience then played that experience back, so you lived through it all over again.
        During playback, your perception of time was messed around with, so a couple of seconds were enough to permit the replaying of well over an hour of experience. And, at the same time, you were disconnected from your living body.
        The results?
        Well, a fair few auto accidents, and a couple of really spectacular mid-air collisions. Plus a big spike in the number of household accidents, particularly in the kitchen - nasty incidents involving boiling water, for example, or boiling oil. And some brutal stories came out of saw mills and factories, as well. The accident and emergency wards were full.
        "But we will survive," said the President grimly.
        President Bundy - Howie Bundy, the brother of Ted - was everything a president should be in that hour of need. Grim, spiritual, Christian, confident, resolved. No cheap jokes. No canned laughter. But no tears, either. No flinching.
        Watching the president on TV, Harlan Joe felt reassured. Okay, so they were living through a disaster, but it was a familiar American disaster, unfolding in the continental United States, as disasters should. You could understand it without a bunch of maps of weird places with strange names nobody could even pronounce. It was a disaster that America owned.
        (Okay, okay, so the people in Africa or wherever were living through the same thing. But it wasn't compulsory to think about them.)


*

        Harlan Joe fell asleep in front of the TV and woke to find his mouth full of glue. He was breathing it, hauling it in, gulping it down as if his life depended on it. He tried to stop, but found the body which owned him was not responsive to his commands.
        The body begged, scavenged, slept on the streets of a busy city. A full sixteen hours.
        Then - whammo! Harlan Joe was back in front of the TV again, wide awake. Back where he had started from. He looked at his wristwatch. He'd been asleep when it all started, so he wasn't sure how much time had gone by. The TV announcer was stammering, seemed to have lost his bookmark in the universe.


*

        By the next day, the city had a name - Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras. And so did the boy. Leon, little Leon, now destined to be dried out at the Betty Ford clinic at the expense of the CIA, which had muscled in as his protector.
        Leon was the first of the global playback stars. Presumably, there would be a second. If so, should there be a special category in the Oscars for playback stars?
        "I don't have an opinion," said Octave Bundy - brother of Howie and Ted - on the set of the movie provisionally entitled "Leon's Playback" (coming to a movie theater near you inside of the week, if technically possible.) "I deal with actors, not the real world."
        Meantime, the news was dominated by emergency precautions which people were taking - or could, or should - to cope with the "subjectivity lapses", which were now lasting up to half an hour. Globally, little Leon's playback had killed over 50,000 people and put several million in hospital. "Playback," as it was coming to be simply called, was shaping up to be a major problem for the survival of the human race.
        "We will unite you in knowledge," the aliens had said.
        And they sure had.
        But, hey - who wants to be united with some glue-sniffing kid in some gutter some place where they don't even speak English?
        "True charity cannot be coerced," said President Howie Bundy, denouncing the perceived agenda of the Polysynthacella. "The name for forced charity is gunpoint robbery, pure and simple."
        The gun manufacturers launched a big advertising campaign advising people to go out and buy themselves guns to protect themselves against "anyone who wants to rob you, whatever the hell their holy excuse."


*

        "You know what I want?" said Avaltreen.
        "What?" said Harlan Joe.
        "I'd like a, you know, playback. With some Hollywood stud, you know, like, someone on TV."
        "Someone famous?" said Harlan Joe.
        "Yeah ... you know ... doing ... Hollywood things."
        What things? Harlan Joe couldn't imagine. Neither could Avaltreen Blue. But they did their best to improvise their own Hollywood-style debauchery.
        "So hot," said Avaltreen, afterwards.
        "I know I was," said Harlan Joe, breathing her murmering perfume.
        What Avaltreen really meant was that she had gotten uncomfortably hot and wanted to cool down in a cold shower. But she let Harlan enjoy his delusions, and let him slip off to sleep before she extracted herself from his embrace and took herself off to the shower.


*

        Harlan slept solidly that night, only to wake to find himself standing by the white plastic door, looking through the little porthole at the wilderness below. Bleak whiteness, snow covered hills with a prickling of black pines. A slow wide river running through the wilderness.
        Then he was back in his own flesh, and awake, wide awake.
        The CIA never found out who that was, though a dozen claimants came forward - me, me, let it be me, me who housed the human race, if only a single minute.


*

        A month, and nothing. Then Harlan Joe was sitting in a roadside cafe, putting ketchup on his hotdog, when the cafe was suddenly gone, and Avaltreen Blue was saying "Yeah ... you know ... doing ... Hollywood things."
        Then they were doing those things, Avaltreen Blue was whispering beneath him, her fingers sliding across his sweating flesh.
        "So hot," said Avaltreen.
        Then she was gone, and Harlan Joe found himself back in the cafe, slumped over the table, his face one huge big mess of ketchup, the ketchup bottle on the floor, the cafe full of choke on account of the stuff which had caught fire in the kitchen.


*

        Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue were famous for all of a week, until the Bundy thing.
        "Hello," said Ted Bundy, speaking for the benefit of the camera which was filming him. "I'm in China. And this package here - let's call it Ching Chaw, though that's not its real name - is scheduled for execution in accordance with the law. Don't feel sorry for the package. It broke a whole bunch of laws. It has it coming."
        Then Ted did one of his famous performance art executions, this one using a plastic bag, a scalpel, six pounds of mud and a teaspoon. He had paid ten million dollars for the privilege. He got his money's worth.
        In the playback, subjectively, the whole world was Ted. The next day, copycats repeated the whole thing in schools and kindergartens scattered across the world.
        "Hey," said Ted, bewildered at the public's outraged response. "I'm an artist."
        But the assassin at his door pulled the trigger all the same, scattering his brains across the freshly-painted yellow wall behind.


*

        Ted Bundy was famous for all of a week, his fame largely extinguishing that of Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue. Then the pack rape in Papua New Guinea left thirty per cent of the world's population with post-traumatic stress disorder. And then came the free fall parachutist, then the twelve-hour production line shift in the Chinese plastic sandal factory, then the ten days in the life of a homeless person, then the electric chair incident which, overnight, jumped the global suicide rate by sixty per cent.
        By that time, Harlan Joe and Avaltreen Blue were forgotten.
        Almost.
        But I remember them.
        These days, Harlan Joe does beer advertisements, and Avaltreen Blue has this low-level soft porn career. That's not bad going considering how quickly we've taken to forgetting our playback heroes.


*

        Anyway. That brings me to the present moment. To me. You're in me, now. Enjoying playback. Enjoying? Enduring. Whatever. I trust you are. Or will be.
        I have this vision, see.
        I'm going to be a playback hero.
        It hasn't happened yet - granted. But it will. The whole world will be in me, living my life. That's my vision. So let me introduce myself.
        See this face in the mirror? This is me. Ispat Bean. Now, I'm going to punch that face right in the jaw. It's going to hurt. It's going to hurt like hell. But there's no escape.
        Wham!
        Boy ... that hurt. Right?
        Oh yeah.
        When my time comes, you're not going to forget me. Ispat Bean. Remember the name - okay?
        Now, this looks like an electric chair. And it is. Kind of. Only it's not fatal. Let me strap us in. The rest of the process is automatic. See that computer over there? It's programmed to give us a pretty wild ride over the next ... well, I won't tell you how long. That's for me to know and you to guess at.
        Ay-ah!
        That hurt!
        Pain. Lowest common denominator. Binding us - making the many one. E pluribus unum and all that. I believe it is my destiny to fulfill the agenda of the Polysynthacella, to unite us in knowledge, the knowledge being that pain is the ruling One. Now say my name. Ispat Bean! Ay-ah! That hurt, it hurts! Ispat Bean! Ispat Bean! Big one coming - hold tight and scream it! Ispat Bean!

The End

The Angel of the Seventh Apocalypse
        Fran and Cobril were prisoners of the Memory Masters, the intelligent jellyfish otherwise known as the Kabila Yutenji. Because their memories were limited by a thirty-day decay rule, it was not easy to keep track of what was happening.
        However, Fran was keeping a secret diary. Sometimes, when her duties kept her awake for two weeks at a stretch, she forgot about it - forgot almost everything, even her name at times, as the bright threads of computational pain ran recurrently through the suffering interstices of her mind.
        Then she would discover the diary again, and continue her education.

*


        Entry 9274, I don't know what day. He still remembers not to eat the red-and-white beans because of the worms, but he has forgotten how to kiss me.

*


        That was not so. Cobril had kissed her that morning, if you could refer to the growth of grayness as morning. His kiss had tasted, most oddly, of cold metal, and for one or two horrific moments Fran had thought that he had been Replaced.
        "But the Kabila Yutenji are not going to Replace anyone, ever again," wrote Fran. "The news on the crackle box is pretty clear. They've suffered the trashing of Strumpitus Pelapheng."
        She was not sure how far she was from Strumpitus Pelapheng, or even what Strumpitus Pelapheng actually was (or, more accurately, had been). A military outpost? A city? A planet? An entire galaxy? She had no sense of scale - could not tell whether liberty was a fingerwidth away, or whether escape might require a thousand light years of travel.
        But what she knew - what was known to all of them - was that Strumpitus Pelapheng was the mainplace of the Kabila Yutenji. That gone, the Memory Masters were doomed to lose their war to the Oitakaoi.
        "It would be a bright idea to escape," said Fran.
        "It was be a bright idea to eat baked beans, too," said Cobril. "You know. The ones with the little sausages mixed in. Do you have a can opener?"
        That was a joke, since neither of them had seen a can for however long it had been. Sixty days? Six years? Sixty years? The entries in the diary suggested a captivity which had lasted for months, if not years ... but, if the immortality rumors could be believed, it was possible that they had served as slaved computer peripherals for millenia.
        "Good idea," said Fran.
        Now that he had mentioned it, she realized how much she missed baked beans, too. Baked beans were part of her bedrock memory base, the part that was not affected by the thirty day rule ... though even that was trashed and jumbled, to the point where she could no longer remember whether New York had been a planet or a starship.

*


        Entry 9304, a day with no limes. I don't know why they are keeping the limes from us. Maybe they've run out. I hope this problem gets fixed. We can't go on living on clay and coconut forever, we'll die of scurvy. By the way, according to a datum in my base memory, coconut meat is really heavy on cholesterol. I guess maybe this isn't the time to be worried about your blood serum levels. (Blood serum. Is that a term? There's no way to check anything in this place!)
        Anyway, the Kabila Yutenji are on the downhill, that's plain, and the Oitakaoi are going to be all over them before too long, which isn't good for us, since humans don't have much of a shelf life when they're heavily radioactive. We should escape. If possible. We should get through the Doors. But how can we get the control codes.

*


        "And, anyway," said Cobril, "even if we did get through the Doors, where would we be then?"
        "In Other and When," said Fran.
        "That's just a phrase," said Cobril. "You don't know, do you? I think we should stay put."
        That was Cobril's nature. He looked young, and maybe he was young, but it was as if he had been born as an old man. He wanted a quiet life - unplug from work, climb into the aquarium, joy together for a briefness, worm into a cocoon, sleep.
        Well, maybe Fran could have endured it. She was adaptable. But there was an objective world out there, beyond the controllable realms of their emotions, a world unbearably real, its momentum indifferent to their crushable existence.
        "It is real," whispered Fran.
        Experiencing, as she sometimes did, the shock of the reality of the real ... the roughness of concrete, the clangorous heft of steel, the white softness of the maggot-fat worm in her liver.
        "Get out," said Fran to herself, again at a whisper. "Get out. If we can."

*


        The Angel of the Seventh Apocalypse appeared unto Fran Delilah Charles in her dreams.
        "Lo," he said. "Hearken unto me, for I am Perish Englis, the Angel of the Seventh Apocalypse."
        For the purposes of this communion, the angel had assumed the form of a very black golliwog mounted on a very large tiger. The very black golliwog was carrying a very blue big umbrella.
        (Dreaming, Fran corrected an imaginary student. Not a blue big umbrella but a big blue umbrella. Adjective order. Secret rules. The inner coding of English. In all Indo-European languages, these secret rules of order, imperatives not to be accounted for by communicative logic).
        "Are you listening to me?" said the golliwog, waving its umbrella at her reprovingly.
        "You are politically incorrect," said Fran. "You will leave my dream immediately. I've already called the Thought Police, you could lose your tenure for this."
        "Listen to him!" snarled the tiger. "You have copulated with seven men. You are no longer a virgin. You have eloped from the sanctuary for the sake of your own polluted lusts. It was your choice, you must live with it."
        Huge rank gust of unwashed cat's breath. Dead meat in the blast. The glistening teeth. Its mounting strength potent, waiting. A patriarchal archetype. That didn't seem fair - to be, at one and the same time, a prisoner of the Memory Masters and a victim of her own cultural programming.
        "Are you listening?" said the angel. "You had better be listening. Your neck would break if I shook it, and I am speaking to you. Are you listening? YI YAM YSPEAKING TO YOU!"
        "Then speak," said Fran, "but confine yourself to lower case letters, please."
        She found herself without arms, without eyes. Her throat blistered, and all her flowers polluted. But, even though earless, she could still hear the Angel of the Seventh Apocalypse perfectly.
        "We define ourselves by limiting ourselves," said Perish Englis, sounding like a poorly-amplified viorlaretto. "Does that make sense?"
        "Plato never had to bake scones," said Fran.
        "What is that supposed to mean?" said Perish Englis, puzzled.
         Then he vanished, and Fran woke.
        And, waking, found she knew the codes that would unlock the Door so they could make their escape to the realms of Other and When.

*


        "An angel?" scoffed Cobril. "An angel gave you the codes? What else did he give you? Are you suddenly pregnant?"
        "I would be," said Fran bitterly, "if you were more cooperative with my calendar."
        "Get real," said Cobril. "Your calendar's one part fragment, nine parts fantasy. Anyway, how could be possibly bring up a baby when we're wired into twenty-hour shifts?"
        "An average shift is only nine hours," said Fran. "It's been computed."
        "You believe in statistics?" said Cobril. "In a place like this? Here, you can't even believe in arithmetic."
        Well, one thing was for certain - Fran couldn't believe that right now, right when she had the codes, had the key, they were once again fighting their way through the worn terrain of the Baby Decision. The Baby Decision was part of their bedrock memories, though, because of the different ways in which their memories had frayed and fractured, they had different ideas as to what constituted Objective Recollection.
        "Anyway, let's try it," said Fran.
        Cobril said no. But eight hours later, Fran being unrelenting, his willpower finally cracked, and he agreed.

*


        "No go," said Fran, after the twentieth attempt. "The codes don't work."
        "Of course not," said Cobril. "The angel was just your hallucination, after all."
        The Doors to Other and When stood before them, huge, shimmering, pleated with bars of flexible energy, alive with veins of superheated plasma. They fluxed from green to blue into white-gold incandescence. To stand anywhere near them was both intoxicating and terrifying at one and the same time.
        "It's my memory," said Fran, desperately. "If I could only get a booster ...."
        She needed to believe, needed to think that her angel was real.
        "Ivan Eco tried that, and look what happened to him," said Cobril. "I think he was glad when the Blue Men finally finished playing and started skinning him alive."
        "I was trying to forget that," said Fran, shuddering.
        But Ivan's fate was unforgettable. Only, in this world of slavery, everything was forgotten, and swiftly, unless it was part of your baseline bedrock, or unless someone was programming you to remember. The Kabila Yutenji must have been keeping the communal memory of Ivan Eco alive, deliberately - and there were no prizes for guessing why.
        "Let's go home," said Cobril.
        "Home?" said Fran. "Is that what you call it?"
        "Well, you could call it the Slime Pit," said Cobril. "Or, equally, Cockroach One. But why make things worse than they have to be?"
        There it was again, his maddening capacity to build normality out of a fundamentally demented situation. There were plenty of precedents for this - prisons, combat zones, lunatic asylums, concentation camps, hospitals and universities, they all come to seem normal to their inmates. But, even so, his oh-so-determined sanity was slowly driving Fran crazy. It probably would have done so already, if not for the nagging erosions of her enforced forgetfulness.
        "Come on, let's go home," said Cobril.
        And that was when the ground shook, when the Doors screamed, when the sky split and yellow oil uncoiled from it, falling in thick sausages which splattered destruction where they fell. Fran and Cobril were at the remotest fringes of one of the splash zones, far enough removed from the impact center to escape almost unscathed. Cobril in fact had no more than a flecked scar on the surface of one thumbnail, but Fran got an ugly burn on her thigh, where the tiniest spash made a hole the size of a pea. Not serious enough to be disabling, but it hurt ... really serious hurt, flesh-damage pain.
        "I'm off," said Fran.
        Cobril did not ask where she was going. He guessed, and had the guts to follow.

*


        In the Hollow Quarters, there were many of the Blue Men, all dead, but for one, pinned beneath rubble, gasping like a fish. An hour's search, and Fran found what she was looking for: a vial of Cognition One, otherwise known as the Igniter. Everyone knew about this product, which the Blue Men used to prepare their victims for interrogation. (There was, after all, no point in torturing someone who was incapable of remembering.)
        "But you don't know the dosage," objected Cobril.
        "I don't know the day I'll die, either," said Fran.
        That didn't make sense, but it shut Cobril up for a couple of seconds, long enough for her to cold-gulp three tablets, all that there were.
        The ground shook again, and both Fran and Cobril fell. Thanks to that, they were flat on their faces when the sky went white, and neither was blinded by the blast.

*


        Home. Well, call it the Slime Pit, or call it Cockroach One. Whatever you called it, it was still the most familiar place in their universe, and it was difficult to contemplate leaving.
        "We've become institutionalized," said Fran.
        "What?" said Cobril, groggy with sleep.
        "Nothing," said Fran.
        Ordinarily, they should have been captured by now in the customary fashion, and wired into their ports for their next grueling shift. But, though the attacks seemed to have ended for the time being, there was no sign that the Kabila Yutenji were capable of organizing anything, at least for the moment.
        Both Fran and Cobril had been so systematically overworked that, released from the demands of the system, they found overwhelming sleep coming upon them. They were both wrecked by weeks, months, years of cumulative fatigue, not to mention the stresses of the day. And so, yielding, they slept.
        *
        Fran endured dreams. The drug was doing its work. In the grip of the Igniter, she endured nightmares which were part recovery and part fanciful apocalypse.
        The artist Vostala Sleth was the presiding genius of those nightmares. Vostala Sleth, who had always been the favorite pet of the dictator Obro Yelsan, until the dictator's moods had changed and Vostala Sleth had been injected with netazool, the drug which melts bones.
        As in Vostala Sleth's canvases, a woman with garish television sets for eyes. A fat man with lobster claws and a moon-faced watch, a wriggling sardine sprouting from his navel. In dream, the lobster man cried out to her:
        "Help me! Help me!"
        Fran waved at him and blew him a kiss. Rose petals descended as a music box tinkled. And already the scene had changed. The chained slaves of Delakan Voy, heads bowed by the clamping boards, sliding past in white-hot chariots. Whips glimmering with music, the bright blood flicked upwards to the photography flash clouds where it transmuted and changed, falling as white pearls and as black.
        The first oozing pearl ....
        She woke.
        And, having woken, she remembered. The garden. A path flanked by the overpowering height of huge sunflowers. An outdoor intercom chiming urgently, demanding attention. Black ants hot and quick and quick and hot in the scorpion sun. Obro Yelsan. His hands on her shoulders. Hands and knees, hands and knees. Her mouth wet. Her tongue in her mouth. A tongue is flesh. It is wet. It is oozing. Saliva generating. A bottle of saliva, venting. The intimate pain.
        "You will," said Obro Yelsan. "You will. Or I will sell you as a slave to the Kabila Yutenji."
        But she had not. Oh, she had complied with each and every one of his demands, because she had no wish to be skinned alive. But ... love him? Surrender her soul to him? The things he was asking were not within her capacity to give. And so he had sold her to the Kabila Yutenji.
        "But I will always be with you," said Obro Yelsan. "I will be your master in your slavery, your extra master when the other ones are done with you."
        Later, she had come to think that an empty threat. But here he was. She was wide awake, but he was with her, somehow. She was a citizen of two worlds at once. One, the familiar everyday disaster in which she lived. The other, a deep oubliette of insanity, where something was shaping, huge and slovenly. An ooze of muscles, of glistening excretions. Of pumped stuff as wet as spiderweb. Inflations of cascading steel. Steel massaged to fluid suppleness. Self-propagating, self-perpetuating. Feeding, converting. Becoming itself.
        "Freedom," whispered Fran, fearfully.
        It was the quest for freedom which had awakened the latent powers of Obro Yelsan.
        "The act of ego," confirmed Obro Yelsan, speaking to her plainly. "The act of becoming. What is waking? Let me name it. Gorth Grotus. Thus is this monster named. This thing, this Gorth Grotus, is your monster. You are making it. You, Alolica Kenzai. And, when it is done, you will unleash it on yourself."
        The threat was perfect, but for one dissonant element. Alolica Kenzai. Fran knew no person so named. That tiny flaw, a fracture in the perfection of her terror, broke the paralysis of her submission and gave her the chance to decide. Give in? Or fight?
        "Alolica Kenzai," said Fran, fiercely.
        Meaning: you, too, are less than perfect. You, too, make mistakes. Mistakes have been made.
        The garden again. Once again she was remembering, with hallucinatory force, the sunflower sun and the black ants and Obro Yelsan's fleshy tongue and the genetic insistence of his hands ... but the memory had less force the second time round. She had heard of this kind of torture device. If it functioned perfectly, it would cycle forever. But this particular mental implant was flawed, failing already, and she could count on it burning itself out after fifty repetitions ... or maybe a hundred and fifty, or a thousand and fifty repetitions ....
        "Or when it does," said Fran, impatiently.
        Not all that terribly far away, she could see a sluggish tongue of something red and turgid flowing slowly in her direction. Unless she was badly mistaken, this river-sized ingress was no hallucination. And, unless she was totally misperceiving things, that oncoming ooze of red was molten. Some weapon of war used by the Oitakaoi had melted a substantial fraction of this stronghold of the Kabila Yutenji. It was time to be gone. Now where was Cobril? Oh, there.
        "Cobril!" yelled Fran. "Cobril! Wake up! Now!"
        "I'm not asleep," said Cobril, grumbling out of his siesta posture.

*


        The Door.
        The Codes.
        The words came clearly to Fran, and, as she spoke them, the failing images of Obro Yelsan spindled into smoke and were gone. The Doors opened and they stepped through, escaping the domain of the Kabila Yutenji just five and a half steps ahead of absolute disaster. Escaping, and entering the realms of Other and When.

*


        So there they were. Fran Charles and Cobril Guru. Sheltering in the virtual world of Sunfish, one of the worlds Fran had created when she had been not Fran Delilah Charles but Alolica Kenzi, a citizen of Omnia Petris. Omnia Petris: Selyon's domain. Omnia Petris: a master world which had controlled many lesser worlds. So many that Alolica Kenzi had been able to use as many as she wished for pure play.
        Well: Omnia Petris had gone down to disaster. Selyon had been brought to ruin and defeat. But the world of Sunfish still existed. As, as far as Fran knew, its existence was unknown to their enemy, Obro Yelsan. So they were safe here. At least for the moment. Safe from those who hunted them.
        But there were problems.
        "Open the yadder safe?" said Cobril. "No! I mean, who knows what could be in it?"
        "A billion people could be in it," said Fran. "A billion, ten billion. Half of those whom we lost."
        "Yes," said Cobril, sceptically, "or something radioactive with teeth."
        Then he turned back to the book he was reading, which was a maintenance manual for the D76 rock crusher. He had apparently convinced himself that the study of this manual was useful activity, despite the fact that they possessed no suck rock crusher and, in any case, they had no rocks to crush.
        Cobril! Always playing the old man, though he had not yet reached middle age! Never mind. Fran would wake him up - she hadn't totally mastered the trick of it, but she got through to him often enough to make their relationship viable. For the moment, though, she left him with his manual, and settled down at her hacking board again, focusing on the task of breaking the lock-codes to the yadder safe.

The End