on. Brambles tore at my uniform; my shoulder struck an unseen tree, and I spun away, pain scissoring down my arm. Suddenly there was nothing under my feet and I was tumbling downward, striking the river with a splash that sent warm water stinging up my nose. I swam a few weak strokes, bumped against a rock, and clung to it, panting. Water flowed gurgling around me, while overhead the ghost fog roared.
It took me three days to find my camera in the mist. It was scratched but undamaged. Nearby I found the remains of ToPu.
The picture shows the mask lodged on a bramble bush. Branches of bramble protrude through the eyeholes and the mouth. The papier-mache of the face has been dented and ripped in numerous places. The garnet and its setting are gone.
Scattered on the ground around ToPu's bush are the other masks—the rest of the full Arcana, Lilijel and MolanDif's mask among them. Their eyeholes all stare at ToPu, like an audience gathered to hear a speaker. Their gems are missing, but the masks are otherwise undamaged.
They must have been carried here by the fog cloud, then released. I like to believe the mask-spirits and their human hosts were released too. Perhaps they proved incompatible with the Mutan ghosts and could not truly meld with the whole; but I prefer to think ToPu saved them. Within the cloud, he located each familiar soul, watched it, took its picture, freed it by making it real.
That is what I tell myself. That is my mythology.
The gems are gone, and the mask-spirits departed. Lilijel will not dance on this physical plane again.
I dream that Chiala and MolanDif survived. Though I searched the length of the river, I did not find their bodies or the dinghy. The fog stayed thick about me, angry that my soul was closed to it forever; but despite the fog, I think I would have found Chiala's body if it were there.
I took this picture earlier today. I won't tag it for preservation like the others. It's better to go to the park and see the sundial for myself. I'm a man who should remind himself of the realness of things.
I came back to this city because the huts are here and all our supplies. The fog followed me back…or perhaps it never left. I think it will stay with me wherever I go.
The task force has surely left orbit by now and headed for a new planet. The universe is too rich in worlds for them to trouble with Muta. No colony would ever be safe here, unless they abandoned their masks and the dance. That is a price they will not pay.
The ghost fog swirls around me but its attempts to consume me are futile. My link to the spirit world is gone. If I want to commune with ghosts, all I can do is talk.
Are you listening to me, fog?
I've hated you a long time, hated you for the murders and my banishment here. But the loss that hurt me most was none of your doing. And the souls trapped inside you…I can't help thinking of them as people like me, though I know Mutans are alien, non-human. Maybe to them, being part of this undifferentiated mass is heaven; but I can't help thinking it's hell.
I've decided to do something, fog. I've failed to take action so often in my life, there aren't many options left for me. But I can still watch. I can still try to see, really see, the souls you've swallowed. They may nearly have forgotten the people they once were, but I think they can remember. If they try. If I try.
I'm watching. I know it's not much, but it's something. I'm watching.
Hardware Scenario G-49
There are few human beings who would not fit into a box eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high. Construct such boxes. Wire them, pipe them, tube them to provide even temperature, nutrition, and air. Don't forget sluices for the elimination of waste. Do something about exhaled carbon dioxide. Come up with neural inhibitors to prevent movement and sensation. Install epidermal scrapers to remove skin as it flakes off.
Add whatever else seems required.
Properly containerized, the entire population of Earth will fit into a cube about a mile and a half on each side. Put the whole thing into orbit? Nah, that's just showing off. Leave it on the ground in a desert somewhere.
Why? So everyone stays healthy and happy, of course. No walking around and stubbing your toes. No catching colds when someone sneezes on you. No smoking or drinking or eating fatty foods. Life lasts a lot longer when you live it in a box.
Quit asking such obvious questions…the Facility is run by
Give the designers a break, for crying out loud. They thought of
This is the kind of story where everyone does astral projection.
George Munroe sat in his hardware store wondering why there were so many types of nails. He had forty little bins in front of him, and each contained nails that were different from all the rest. He pulled out a one-inch finishing nail and a three-quarter-inch finishing nail. (His astral projection could pick up light objects if he concentrated really hard.) When you got right down to it, what was the difference between the two nails? A quarter of an inch. That's all. But one nail had to go in one bin and the other had to go in a different bin. That was the only professional way.
Running a hardware store sure was a precision business. George knew he could send his astral projection anywhere in the world to indulge in any lifestyle scenario, but hardware had such a depth and richness of scope, George didn't think he'd ever have time for more.
The bell on the front door of the shop tinkled. George looked up from the nail bins to see a woman, six and a half feet tall, posing beside the lawnware display. Her hair flowed thick and tawny, rippling in the ether wind; her skin was bronzed and flawless, tautly stretched over firm young muscles; her face shone with self-assurance. She wore the sleek skin of a black panther, cut into a maillot that left one breast bare, and around her waist was a cinch made of cobra skulls. In one hand she held an ivory spear, and in the other a dagger made of teak.
'I am Diana, Goddess of the Hunt,' she announced. She had an announcing kind of voice.
'What can I get for you today?' George asked. 'I'm having a special on nails.'
'You are George Munroe?'
'Yes.'
'Then rejoice, for Destiny has decreed we are to be mated!' She threw aside her spear and dagger with a sweeping gesture. George winced as the dagger headed for a shelf of lightbulbs, but Diana's weapons were only illusory astral props for her persona; they vanished as soon as they left the field of her aura. With cheetahlike grace, Diana strode down the home appliance aisle, seized George by the lapels of his Handee Hardware blazer, and hauled him up to her lips.
George had never imagined that tongues could be involved in kissing. In movie kisses, you never saw what the actors did with their tongues—it was one of the limitations of the medium. George wondered if it made movie directors sad that they could only show the outside of a kiss. There certainly seemed to be a lot of action happening on the inside.
Abruptly, Diana let him go. Turning her perfect chin away from him, she said, 'I don't think you're trying.'
'Trying what?'
'To love me. Destiny has decreed we are to be mated. At least you could try to generate some electricity for me.'
George's store carried flashlight batteries, but he was almost certain she had something different in mind. 'Is this some mythological scenario?' he asked. 'Because it's nice of you to kiss me and all, but right now I'm happy with the small-town hardware business, and I don't feel the urge to play god. Sorry.'
'This is not a scenario!' Diana shouted. The spear rematerialized in her left hand and purple sparks crackled from the tip. 'I'm talking about real life. My body. Your body. Egg and sperm. Two become one, then three. Computer analysis at the Population Storage Facility says we complement each other genetically and are ideal progenitors for the future of humanity. Well, at least for one new baby anyway. I'm scheduled to be impregnated by you within twenty-four hours.'
George felt himself growing faint; with an effort of will, he brought himself back to full visibility and tried to consider the situation rationally. He'd always known the Facility couldn't keep physical bodies alive forever. People died; presumably they had to be replaced. Somehow, though, he'd thought science would come up with a more impersonal way to create new life. Like cloning. Why did scientists always talk about cloning if they didn't really do it? It was disappointing the next generation apparently came from what amounted to arranged marriages.
'I'm sorry,' George said. 'I didn't understand what you were talking about.'
'The fathers are always the last to know. That's one of the sacred traditions the robots are programmed to observe.'
'They're really good robots, aren't they?' George said.
'They sure are,' Diana agreed with a warm smile.
George nodded, then kept nodding in lieu of speaking. He wondered if Diana was expecting to make love with him in the near future. Astral bodies could make love, of course; astral bodies could interact with each other in any way physical ones could. But George had watched people making love in a lot of movies, and the hardware store didn't seem suited for that sort of thing. To get a soft place to lie down, they'd have to make a bed out of bags of grass seed, or find some way to arrange themselves on one of the lawn recliners.
On the other hand, he couldn't quite see why making love was necessary. 'They're just going to use our physical bodies for this, right?' he asked.
'Right.'
'So I guess they'll, umm, collect my sperm and use it to impregnate you, right? And if it's like everything else they do to our physical bodies, neither of us will feel a thing. Isn't that how it works?'
'Yes.'
'Then I don't understand why you're here. It affects our bodies but not our lives. I mean our astral lives. You know what I mean. It just happens, no matter what we do. I can't see any reason for us to, uhh, interact.'
'You cold-hearted bastard,' she said. Her hair tossed wildly as if buffeted by a tornado; the cobra skulls in her belt hissed and snapped. Her skin turned scarlet, her pupils crimson, her lips black. 'Do you think parenting is a mere physical act?' she shouted in a voice like an earthquake doing ventriloquism. 'Do you believe love is irrelevant? Do you deny the importance of a nurturing psychic aura in the formation of human life? Do you want our child to usher forth from a joyless womb?'
George hadn't really thought about it.
Given that he'd been living as a psychic phenomenon for twenty-six years, he supposed he wasn't entitled to doubt the importance of psychic auras. Parental attitude at conception probably did make a difference—if Diana conceived a child in her current mood, the baby might turn out kind of cranky. (A cobra on her belt spat venom in George's direction; the astral fluid fell into a bucket of plastic fishing lures and vanished.)
Was conception the only crucial moment for the baby? No, George had heard prenatal influences could affect the child all through pregnancy. And after that, who raised the infant? The robots, of course; but could they provide a nurturing psychic aura in the child's formative years? Probably…they were really good robots. But just in case, George figured he shouldn't make any long-term
