By the Light of the Moon

about doing that?'

'Of course.'

'But was there one moment, even one brief moment in the church, when you could have run?'

'Oh, man,' she said, and shuddered as she began to recognize the burden coming, the weight that they would never be able to put down until they were in the grave. 'Yeah, I could've run. Hell, yeah, I could've. I almost did.'

'All right, so maybe you could've. Maybe we still can run. But here's the thing… Was there one moment, even one brief moment, when you could have turned your back on your responsibility to save those people – and still lived with yourself?'

She stared at him.

He met her stare.

Finally she said, 'This sucks.'

'Well, it does and it doesn't.'

She thought about that for a moment, smiled shakily, and agreed: 'It does and it doesn't.'

'The new connections, the new neural pathways engineered by the nanomachines, have given us some clairvoyance, an imperfect talent for premonitions, the folding. But those aren't the only changes we've gone through.'

'Sort of wish they were the only changes.'

'Me too. But this righteous anger seems always to lead to an irresistible compulsion to act.'

'Irresistible,' she agreed. 'Compulsion, obsession, or something we don't have a term for.'

'And not merely a compulsion to act, but…'

He hesitated to add the last five words, which would express the truth that would shape the course of their lives.

'Okay,' said Shep.

'Okay, buddy?'

Gazing out of the tower shade toward the blazing land, the kid said, 'Okay. Shep isn't afraid.'

'Okay then. Dylan isn't afraid, either.' He took a deep breath and finished what must be said: 'The righteous anger always leads to an all but irresistible compulsion to act regardless of the risks, and not merely a compulsion to act, but to do the right thing. We can exercise free will and turn away – but only at a cost in self-respect that's intolerable.'

'That couldn't have been what Lincoln Proctor expected,' Jilly said. 'The last thing a man like him would want was to be the father of a generation of do-gooders.'

'You'll get no argument from me. The man was slime. His visions were of an amoral master race that might make a more orderly world by cracking the whip on the rest of humanity.'

'Then why have we become… what we've become?'

'Maybe when we're born, all of us, our brains are already wired to know the right thing, to know always what we ought to do.'

'That's sure what my mama taught me,' Jilly said.

'So maybe the nanomachines just made some improvements in that existing circuit, redesigned it for less resistance, until now we're wired to do the right thing no matter what our preferences, no matter what our desires, regardless of the consequences to us, at any cost.'

Working her mind through it, formulating a final understanding of the code by which she was henceforth fated to live, Jilly said, 'From here on, every time I get a vision of violence or disaster-'

'And every time a psychic spoor reveals to me that someone is in trouble or up to no good-'

'-we'll be compelled-'

'-to save the day,' he finished, putting it in those words because he thought they might wring another smile from her, even if a feeble one.

He needed to see her smile.

Maybe her expression was what a smile might look like in the twisting influence of a funhouse mirror, but the sight of it didn't cheer him.

'I can't stop the visions,' she said. 'But you can wear gloves.'

He shook his head. 'Oh, I imagine I could go so far as to buy a pair. But putting them on to avoid learning about the plans of evil people or the troubles of good people? That would be the wrong thing to do, wouldn't it? I suppose I could buy the gloves, but I don't think I'd be able to put them on.'

'Wow,' said Shepherd, perhaps as a comment about all that they had said, perhaps as a comment on the desert heat, or maybe just in reaction to some event that had transpired on Shepworld, the planet of the high- functioning autistic, on which he had spent more of his life than he had spent on their common Earth. 'Wow.'

They had a great deal more to discuss, plans to make, but for the time being, none of them was able to summon the nerve or energy to continue. Shep couldn't even squeeze another wow out of himself.

The shade. The heat. The iron and silicate and ashy scents of superheated rock and sand.

Dylan imagined that the three of them might sit exactly where they were now, dreaming contentedly of good deeds already done at any cost, but never venturing forth to take new risks or to face new terrors, dreaming on and on until they petrified upon this rock bench like the trees in the Petrified Forest National Park in neighboring Arizona, thereafter to spend eons as three peacefully reclining stone figures here in the shade until discovered by archaeologists in the next millennium.

Eventually, Jilly said, 'What must I look like?'

'Lovely,' he assured her, and meant what he said.

'Yeah, right. My face feels stiff with dried blood.'

'The cut on your forehead is crusted shut. Just some grisly crusty stuff, some dried blood, but otherwise lovely. How's your hand?'

'Throbbing. But I'll live, which I guess is a plus.' She opened her purse, withdrew a compact, and examined her face in the small round mirror. 'Find me the Black Lagoon, I need to go home.'

'Nonsense. A little washup is all you need, and you'll be ready for the royal ball.'

'Hose me down or run me through a car wash.'

She searched her purse again and came up with a foil packet containing a moist towelette. She extracted the lemon-scented paper washcloth and carefully cleaned her face using the compact mirror for guidance.

Dylan settled back into his reverie of petrification.

Judging by his stillness, silence, and unblinking stare, Shep had a head start on this turning-into-stone business.

Moist towelettes were designed for freshening your hands after eating a Big Mac in the car. A single cloth proved insufficient to swab up a significant amount of dried blood.

'You should buy the extra-large, serial-killer-size towelettes,' Dylan said.

Jilly rummaged in her purse. 'I'm sure I have at least one more.' She unzipped one small interior side compartment, poked around, opened another side compartment. 'Oh. I forgot about these.'

She produced a bag of peanuts of the size dispensed by vending machines.

Dylan said, 'Shep would probably like some Cheez-Its if you have any, and I'm a little-chocolate-doughnut sort of guy.'

'These belonged to Proctor.'

Dylan grimaced. 'Probably laced with cyanide.'

'He dropped them in the parking lot outside my room. I picked them up just before I met you and Shep.'

Interrupting his effort at petrification, but continuing to stare into the hard radiation of sun-nuked stone and sand, Shepherd said, 'Cake?'

'No cake,' Dylan said. 'Peanuts.'

'Cake?'

'Peanuts, buddy.'

'Cake?'