"Is here. Is Abumaha Blinky. Didn't know?" Arlene had been half listening, bored as the rest of us, but she jumped into the conversation with both feet. "Abumaha built the thing? Our Abumaha?" "Our Abumaha, Sanders-san." Tokughavita slicked back a patch of hair that insisted upon curling around forward. I leaned over and shook him awake, describing Ninepin, but Blinky didn't have the faintest memory of building it! "Must jolly well have been under spell of Resuscitators, pip-pip." I spread my hands helplessly. "Well, did you take any notes? Draw schematics?" Blinky's face brightened. "Maybe, maybe, Jack! Kept data stack from way back, maybe used from force of habitat." He disappeared, reappeared ten minutes later in high excitement. "Yes, yes, is on nodule, damn good lucky!" Sears and Roebuck seized the interval in between to escape with their lives. I gestured to the engineering lab and we sealed Blinky Abumaha inside. The other five who knew engines prepped the ship. Nearly a day passed, but there still was no word from Blinky. When I knocked, he muttered some- thing incoherent and refused to come out, not even to eat. Sears and Roebuck had completely disappeared into the bowels of the ship--God only knows how they even fit through the passageways!--but they must have found a cabin far away, because we didn't see them again for the rest of the trip. The ship was fully set, waiting for the command, when finally the scuzz emerged, rank and disheveled, and rolling out behind him was . . . "Ninepin!" Arlene and I shouted simultaneously. The little bowling ball was crystal-translucent this time, not green at all. It said nothing, merely rolled on past, right over my toe, to a console that controlled the compression field for the hydrogen--and inciden- tally interfaced the ship's mil-net. Ninepin II bumped into the bottom of the console again and again until I picked it up (it allowed me to do so) and placed it directly onto one of the nodule sockets. Ninepin glowed brightly for nearly an hour. "He's downloading the entire freaking ship!" Ar- lene whispered in awe. Then it stopped and announced, in a peevish, irksome voice, "Have finished inloading. Please re- place on deck." I picked him up and put him down, squatted over him, and started the interrogation. "Ninepin, do you know where the tunnels are to escape from this boulder?" "No," he said succinctly. "We can't get out?" Arlene demanded. "You mean we're stuck here forever?" "Can get out, not stuck. Not tunnel, emergency escape separation." I leaned over the ball. "Okay, Ninepin, listen closely. I have more seniority than anyone else in the service, so I'm in charge of PARI. I need to know how to activate the emergency escape separation. Now how do I do it?" Everyone--all the humans and Sears and Roebuck were still MIA--leaned close to hear the answer, but Ninepin wanted to verify my authority. "Taggart Flynn, born 132 BPGL; joined service 113 BPGL; time in grade, 263 years. Seniority confirmed. Rank: sergeant; command nonauthorized, higher ranking personnel present." We all turned to Overcaptain Tokughavita, who turned red under the attention. He cleared his throat, looking at me. "Toku," I said, "why don't you give me the au- thority?" He inhaled deeply, looking from one anxious face to another. Then he seemed to deflate, nodding in acquiescence. "By powers vested in me by Commons of People's State of Earth," he intoned, "hereby commission Taggart Flynn Lieutenant of Citizens of State." My mouth dropped open, but Tokughavita wasn't finished. "Hereby . . . resign own commission and resign Party membership." He looked defeated, but determined. The scream heard across the galaxy was my own. Despite it all--though I smashed the idea down a dozen times when some Fox Company chowderhead would suggest it, and ignoring my feelings in the matter--in the end, the damned Marine officer corps got its claws into me after all! My face turned purple with anger, and Arlene laughed her butt off. "So what is your first order, Lieutenant?" Still flushing, I barked, "Nothing to you, Edith!" This provoked a new round of laughter from Arlene, so I gravely repeated my order to Ninepin: "The emergency escape separation, activation!" "Separation initiated at Lieutenant Taggart's or- der," announced the damned bowling ball. I swear, when I become king, all Data Pastiches will be annihilated. Nothing seemed to happen. We sat around the table looking stupid until suddenly Arlene glanced out the viewport. "How cow! Fly, c'mere, you're not going to believe this!" I leaned over her shoulder, stared out the porthole, and gasped. The entire moon was splitting in two! A crack formed in the wall of the great central lunar chamber our ship was trapped in. It grew wider and wider, and soon I could see stars through the crack. In the space of fifteen minutes, the two hemispheres of PARI pushed apart from each other, connected by a thousand telescoping pylons. The connecting tubes snapped off like reeds in a storm. Of course, all this destruction and horrific shifting of forces happened in utter silence, since there was no atmosphere inside the hollow sphere. The PARI moon base cracked in half like a planet- egg, the two pieces rushing away from each other at 107 kilometers per hour, according to the radar tracker. We waited impatiently--it would be at least two hours before they had separated far enough to risk a straight-line barrel-run with the ship, newly christened the Great Descent into Maelstrom by Blinky Abumaha . . . and the Solar Flare of Righteous Vengeance Against Enemies of People's State by Tokughavita. I planned to let the two of them duke it out for control of the history books. I sat in the captain's chair--we had one, despite the weird individualistic streak of our communist apos- tles, not quite as iconoclastic as the Freds--with Ninepin on my lap, stroking his smoothness as I would a puppy's fur. He didn't object; he didn't take any notice until he was asked a question. I suppose I may as well have been petting a network terminal, but I had developed an affection for the talking bowling ball. Sure got me in trouble a lot, but then so did a puppy. "My God," I said for about the millionth time. It was all I could think, watching the enormousness of the engineering. "I hope Sears and Roebuck know what they're missing." "Oh, they're probably watching and pouting from their stateroom. Yeesh!" Arlene leaned over and asked Ninepin the question that I should have asked minutes before: "Who built this place? Was it human- Resuscitator symbiots?" "Not symbiots," said Ninepin. "Human construc- tion. Mission launched nine years before People's Glorious Revolution, construction begun in year 96 PGL, completed 142 PGL. Disrespect to Death- Bringing Deconstructionists assigned to PARI lunar base launched year 13 PGL." "My God." This time it wasn't me; Arlene was the inadvertent petitioner. I was too busy wondering how many other far-flung human bases there were . . . and what terrifying aliens were following them home. "Wait," said Arlene, "that's too long.... We're only 107 light-years from Earth. How come it took the Disrespect, ah, 137 years Earth-time to get here?" "Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists stopped at following ports of call between Earth and this system, designated PM-220: planetary system designated--" "Skip it," she said. The names wouldn't mean anything to us anyway. At last, although the moon continued to split apart, we had a clear enough path to the stars. I suggested that Blinky could probably pilot the ship out of lunar orbit, and he decided I wasn't an idiot and throttled up the engines. I wasn't sure I liked this system: I'm used to giving and getting orders, not having a philo- sophical discussion whenever we needed to move. But it had its advantages: every man and woman in the armed forces was capable of acting entirely autonomously--a whole military full of Fly Taggarts and Arlene Sanderses, no matter what silly political ideology they espoused! There was no hurry. The ship would take many days to ramp up to speed, then an equivalent number to slow down. In between, we had five months of subjective travel time--five months! I thought about complaining, writing a strong letter to the manufac- turer. But the weird fact of proxiluminous ("near lightspeed") travel was that notwithstanding our sub- jective travel time of five months, vice the seven weeks for the Res-men, both trips would take just about 107 years in Earth-time, with us lagging only about twenty-five minutes behind. If it weren't for our twenty-nine days of acceleration vice only six days for the Disrespect, we would arrive while they were still maneuvering into orbit. But with that damned acceleration factor, the New- bies would have a three-week jump on us. I shuddered to think what they could do in twenty-three days to poor abused Earth, still reeling from the three- generation war with the Freds when Tokughavita and his crew left. There was no hurry, but my heart was pounding, my pulse galloping a klick a minute. It was all I could do to sit in the command chair and act, like, totally nonchalant, like I did this sort of thing every day: jump in my proxiluminous-drive starship and pursue molecular-size aliens who wanted to infect all of Earth and "fix" us! "Hey, Tofu," I said. He didn't notice or didn't catch the reference. "So when did the Resuscitators find you guys and infect you?" Tokughavita looked pensive. "Do not know. Been trying to clarify. Were not symbiots when left People's Planet, sure of that." "Don't you remember?" "No memory. Remember actions, not when in- fected by Resuscitators--may not have noticed if turned off sensory inputs. Long before landed at PM- 220, rebuilt engines en route, went over ship systems with hand of history." The overcaptain didn't know, or the aliens had blocked it from his mind. They left Earth 137 years ago Earth-time, but they had visited many other planetary systems and bases before arriving at this one. The molecular Newbies could have infected the humans at any port of call along the way. Arlene and I discussed it in private. "So what did happen to them?" I asked. "They left Newbie-prime in a ship, attacked Fredworld--then what? What happened to their ship?" She shrugged, making a nice effect with the front part of her uniform blouse. "Search me." (I wouldn't have minded.) "They must have headed here, but I don't know why or how . . . Jesus, Fly--maybe they didn't set out for Skinwalker; maybe they only ended up here later. Remember, it was forty years that the dead Newbie was on Fredworld. . . . Plenty of time for them to meet humans somewhere, change their course, and send out a general Newbie alert to tell all their buds where they were going." Arlene stood at the porthole, watching us drift slowly toward the crack. She spread her arms wide, stretching and almost touching the bulkhead on either side, so narrow was it. We kicked the idea around a bit, but really there was no way to settle it. Some questions must remain forever unanswered. I returned to the bridge when we approached the edge and forced myself to sit still and not bounce up and down like an orangutan in a banana factory. Blinky Abumaha piloted the ship about like I fly a plane: we didn't actually crash into anything, but it wasn't for lack of trying. By the time we finally found a big-enough hole that Blinky could make it through without scraping the sides--about seventy kilometers--my jaw ached from clenching it, and my lips were like rubber from the frozen half smile I had maintained. I was surprised my armrests didn't have finger marks on them. But we finally, by God, made it out of the PARI moon--intact. Blinky slowly burned the engine up to 104 percent, the highest it was rated, and Sears and Roebuck entered in the relative coordinates, direction and distance, to Earth. We kicked the puppy into over- drive, and the huge boot of massive acceleration slammed us all back against the aft bulkheads. Sud- denly, I wasn't sitting in my chair; I was lying back, like in a dentist's office. . . . I skip five months. Oh, all right, I can't completely skip it. We spent the coasting time training in every tactic of the Light Drop that Arlene and I could remember, plus any- thing we missed that the Glorious People's Army had developed . . . some pretty hairy tactics involving scanning lasers and enemy eyeballs, life-stasis projec- tors, crap like that. Sears and Roebuck had nothing to offer. Either the Klave had long ago given up actual physical fighting-- which I doubted after hearing Arlene describe their performance among the Res-men--or else they just weren't very personally creative in the mayhem de- partment. In any event, they sealed themselves into their stateroom again, and I didn't dare force it open for fear I'd find the walls papered with everything from nude pictures of Janice De'Souza to a Chatty Cathy doll. "Go to away!" they shouted in response to determined knocking. "Skip it this time," Arlene suggested. "What do they have to offer anyway?" So we did. It was all right. We humans were plenty ingenious enough for the entire Hyperrealist side. In five months, I was unable to instill a sense of cohesion among the apostles; they just didn't get it. They were the most mixed-up mob I'd ever seen in vaguely uniform uniforms. Somehow, they had a perfect fusion of utter individuality and total commu- nalism: they assumed that naturally the State would provide everything that its citizens could need or want, but they refused to accept the concept of duty to others even in theory! It didn't wash. They kept yammering about something called a "post-economic society," which I figured meant they had so much of everything that material goods were literally worth- less; even a beggar could pick discarded diamonds off the streets and dine on caviar every night. I have no idea what to call that system: Commu- nist? Capitalist? Heaven? It was a chilling thought: maybe the Char- ismatics were right, and the Rapture had come. Maybe when I got back, Jesus would be sitting there on His throne, wondering where we'd got to all these years. This continued off and on every day for five long months ... so I'm just going to skip it, if that's all right with everyone. Satisfied? We followed our course to the sixth decimal place and decelerated to match velocities with Earth at about six hundred kilometers low orbit . . . and fi- nally, the damned Klave appeared! They pushed into the bridge as if nothing had happened, slapping everyone on the back in congratulations and pouring around a seemingly endless bottle of some queer liqueur that tasted like head cheese. The rest of us were being dead serious--and here were Sears and Roebuck tripping happily through the low-g bridge, talking a klick a second! "Shut up, you idiots," I snapped. "Can't you see we're at general quarters here? Where are the damned Resuscitators?" Where indeed? Blinky and Tokughavita, along with a weapons sergeant named Morihatma Morirama Morirama, had figured out how to work the particle beam cannons, which basically were human versions of the Fred ray. They sat, one in each cockpit, waiting tensely for first sight of the Resuscitator ship, the Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists. They waited a long time. Arlene and I sweated a liter each standing in the control room with the artificial gravity set to 0.3 g, 0.1 g in the crawlways: just enough to avoid total vertigo, but still allow for rapid movement across the ship using our special low- grav combat tactics. We waited a long time, too. After seventeen orbits, radiation detection sweeps of the stratosphere, infrared examination, every damned thing we could think of, we faced the stun- ning truth. There was no Res-man ship, not in orbit, not on the surface. The Disrespect had not made it yet. We were alone orbiting Earth . . . and there wasn't a trace of our spacefaring technological civilization. We were home, but nobody had bothered leaving the lights on. 20 We broke into the outer layers of atmos- phere. The Great Descent into Maelstrom of Solar Flare of Righteous Vengeance Against Enemies of People's State--my impossibly ugly compromise be- tween Blinky and Tokughavita--nicknamed the Great Vengeance, to make it at least pronounceable, was a damned good ship. We flew lower and lower, stabilizing fins and the hypersonic air-cushion keep- ing the ride so steady that it almost seemed like a simulator. We skimmed quickly over Asia Minor and Western Europe, crossed England, and brushed the Arctic en route to Newfoundland. Blinky curved our orbit, blowing fuel like he didn't care. "Can fill damn quick from ocean--good jolly job!" Arlene grinned, but I didn't really like his attitude. Sears and Roebuck were behaving even stranger. They planted themselves at the perfect viewing port and hogged it utterly, staring down at the planet surface with a longing that I just couldn't understand. It wasn't even their planet! They didn't respond to queries, and we basically just forgot about them while we studied the remains of the Earth. Still no response from below. There were many cities left, and as we got lower, they didn't look particularly devastated by war. But everywhere we saw nature encroaching on human habitation . . . like all those creepy movies where the magnificent Indian city with spires and domes is overrun by the jungle-- vines and creepers and baboons invading in the Raj's palace. Nobody contacted us; no ships flew up to assess us. There was no fire-control radar sweeping the Great Vengeance, not even any ground response. The Earth slumbered like a doped-up giant. So where the hell were we supposed to go? Arlene had her own agenda. "Ninepin," she said, "who was actually with, ah, Gallatin Albert when he died?" "Lovelace Jill only companion when died in year 31 PGL." Arlene frowned. "Didn't anybody else see the body?" "Body exhibited in Hall of People's Heroes 31 PGL to 44 PGL. Body interred beneath rebuilt Tabernacle of People's Faith of Latter-Day Saints, Salt Lake Grad." Arlene gasped. I don't know why--was she still harboring hope that she would find Albert alive and well? "A.S.," I said, "I think you should accept what is. He loved you, but he's dead. Christ, girl, it's been something like five hundred years!" She didn't look up. "And he was working on life stasis when he died." "But there wasn't even a prototype until seven years after he died. Get ahold of yourself, Lance. Let's get a little reality check going here." I walked to the video screen that showed the for'ard view. "Don't you think if Albert were still around that Earth would have more civilization left than that?" We were cur- rently skimming low over the Big Muddy, north up the Mississippi River at midnight. There were settle- ments and even lights, but no evidence of high civilization other than electricity. Tokughavita came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I jumped. It was the first friendly contact from the amazingly solitary humans of the twenty-first century. I guess he had been watching me and Arlene--we had always tended to touch a lot, just as friends. "World is gone," he said, voice heavy with emotion withheld. "Where are Resuscitators? Ex- pected they at least would be here." I smiled grimly. "Maybe Fly and Arlene killed 'em." "Maybe they got bored and evolved again," said my counterpart from across the cabin. "Maybe they e- volved into something completely different and forgot all about us." "Who knows?" Tokughavita didn't seem satisfied with our left- hand, right-hand explanations, but it was the best we could give him. We would never know why the Newbies never arrived--but thank God they didn't. The Northeast Corridor was in the same condition as the Mississippi Delta: houses, buildings, roads intact, the power grid still working, but no evidence of anything but habitation. "I want to go to Salt Lake City," Arlene declared. I snorted in exasperation, but, hell, I didn't have any better suggestion. We turned west. "Toku, what was life like when you left?" I asked. He seemed at a loss for words. "People taken control of State from greedy-capitalists, run for good of all." He said greedy capitalists as if it were a hyphenated word, a linked concept. "You what--nationalized the industries?" "Industry run for good of all. But so efficient, paradise continued." "For the workers?" He looked puzzled. "No workers. Work old con- cept, not modern. Workers abolished before People's Glorious Revolution." Now I was the confused one. "Wait a minute--then who ran the industries?" Toku looked back at Blinky Abumaha for help. "Good damn system," Blinky added. "Automated, workers not necessary, just get in the way--jolly good!" Arlene started to get interested, since the conversa- tion was taking a notably academic tinge. "So wait ... if there were no workers, then who was being exploited by the greedy capitalists?" This stymied both Blinky and Tokughavita. "Never thought damn-all about exploitation. Machines, arti- ficial intelligence . . . can greedy-capitalists exploit electronics?" I turned away. The conversation had veered way over my head. Arlene continued, but I ignored them all. I don't deal well with academics, as you've proba- bly figured out by now. We were fast approaching Salt Lake City--or Salt Lake Grad, I remembered Ninepin calling it. It must have been winter in the northern hemisphere; we kicked through an overcast sky, and suddenly the rebuilt Cathedral loomed before us. "Jesus freaking Christ!" I yelped, freezing the economics lesson be- hind me. Arlene and everyone else rushed to the video, then to the actual viewports, evidently not believing the image on the screen. The new Cathedral of the People's Faith of Latter- Day Saints rose about six hundred stories into the Utah sky, a veritable Tower of Babel! It had a ball at the very top. An observation deck? A radar system? "Jeez, Fly, it looks like a huge fist of triumph raised over the Earth." "Built after Freds repelled," Tokughavita con- firmed. "Celebrates victory." Suddenly, every warning light on the bridge went off at once. The place lit up like a Christmas tree, and about six different kinds of sirens sounded. "Mises!" Blinky swore at the con. He jerked on the stick, and the whole freaking ship swerved violently to the left and up, flinging us all to the deck. I was pressed hard, nine g's at least! Then the acceleration let up. I painfully picked myself off the deck, shaking like a pine needle in a strong wind. "What the hell was that about?" "Force field," said our pilot, face pale. "Damn jolly strong. Almost killed--crash, crash!" We circled Salt Lake Grad for more than forty minutes, mapping the exact extent of the field. One of the crew was a mathematician, a girl named Suzudira Nehsuzuki; she calculated the highest probability that the center of the field was at the Tabernacle. My guess was that it all emanated from the bulb at the top of the structure, more than a kilometer above ground level. "Fly," said my lance. "I can't tell you why ... but I must get inside that Tabernacle." "Criminey, don't you think I know why? Albert's buried there, he spent the last years of his life there. Why shouldn't you want to see it?" "Fly--I want to contact it." "Contact what?" "The Tabernacle!" "Arlene, do you feel all right? It's a building, for Christ's sake!" She turned to stare at me; her eyes were filled with the intelligence of fanaticism. I took a step back; I'd never seen her like that! "Fly . . . what was Albert working on just before he died?" "Um, life stasis." "What else did he work on?" "What else? I don't remember anything else." "Worked on SneakerNet," Tokughavita said from behind me. I jumped, then was annoyed at being startled. I sat on a chair at the radio station and stared at the video monitor as we endlessly circled the looming Tabernacle. "He worked on artificial intelligence! Fly, I'll bet that building has some sort of net, and it's probably intelligent, and it's probably been sitting here for five hundred years waiting for me to get back!" Jesus, talk about your megalomania! Then again, wasn't that precisely why Albert spent the last years of his life desperately trying to extend his life, so he could see Arlene Sanders again when she returned? "Go ahead," I ordered, rising from the chair and offering it to her. "Talk your brains out." Arlene sat down and stared at the controls. "I don't know how to turn it on," she admitted. Tokughavita reached over her shoulder and flipped the switch. I noticed that when he did, he snuck a glance down her cleavage. Somehow, that made me feel better. No matter what weirdo hybrid of communism and capi- talism they had developed, they were still, by God, human beings. "What frequency does this broadcast on?" I asked. "All," Tokughavita said. "All right, which frequencies, plural?" "All," he repeated. I finally got the message that he had set it to transmit on all possible frequencies . . . though I couldn't understand how that was possible. "Arlene to Tabernacle," she said. "Arlene calling Tabernacle. Come in, Tabernacle." A voice responded instantly. "Tabernacle here . . . but how do I know you're really Arlene?" It sounded so damned familiar that for a moment I didn't even recognize it. Then our video monitor went to snow, and a moment later, a face appeared. It was a face I knew very, very well--it was her face. "Jill!" I screamed. "Hello, person who looks like Fly Taggart," Jill said. "I'm not really Jill--I'm an AI program that Jill Lovelace set up. Who are you? And who are those pair of gorillas you brought with you?" I glanced behind, honestly confused who she meant. So that's how familiarity breeds contentment! Or does it breed? "Jill, meet Sears and Roebuck-- don't ask which is which, they won't understand you." The Magilla Gorillas simply nodded gravely, impatient for the ground. Her little blond girl's face simpered a bit, as kids do when you introduce them to a new relative and they're trying to be polite and grown up, but in reality they haven't a clue why they should care who the new person is. "They're a Klave pair--" "Man! Really? Cool!" It took me a moment to realize she was being slightly sarcastic. "Love your store, guys. Now, if you don't mind, who the heck are you two, too?" "What the hell do you mean, who are we?" Arlene demanded. "We're Sergeant Fly Taggart and Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders, United States Marine Corps!" "Prove it." Arlene and I looked at each other. "How can we freaking prove we're really Fly and Arlene?" I asked. Jill's image smiled. "What's the password?" I sat down again next to Arlene. A smaller televi- sion monitor at the console in front of us showed the same image as the for'ard video screen. "Jill," I said patiently, "we didn't set up any password with you." "But you know it anyways, dudes." "We do?" "It's something you said to me ... something only you two would remember." Jill's face wasn't the aged grandmother she must have been when she died; instead, it was the Jill we knew from before--just a year or so ago, from our point of view. Still, I became so terribly homesick, looking at that fifteen-year-old's face; she was like a little sister or something--a bratty little sister, but still the closest thing to family I had left, besides Arlene. Everyone else I had ever known on Earth was long since dust in the dust. "When did I say it?" "You said it the first time you really trusted me. You made me feel totally adult, like a woman. The President of the Council of Twelve always, you know, made me feel like a little girl.... He was totally the Bomb, I'm not dissing him! But he always thought of me as a kid." I closed my eyes, straining to remember. Her first test by fire came when we took the truck with the teleport pad inside. Something appeared--what was it? "Arlene, remember back on Earth, with Jill and Albert, when we hijacked that truck? What was the monster that teleported into it?" "Um . . . Jeez, that goes back a ways. Wait--I've got it. It was a boney. We killed it, but it shot its rockets and just missed you, Jill, honey." The Jill image shuddered. "Yeah, I remember that! And you're right. . . . That's when you said the pass- word to me. Remember, Mr. Fly? Remember what you told me after the rockets went on either side of me?" Damn it all to hell--I didn't remember! I remem- bered saying something . . . but what was it? I shook my head sadly. "Look," Jill said, "let me cheer you up with a little game. You ever play Charades?" I nodded dumbly, and she continued. "I'll start: you watch and guess the phrase I'm thinking of." The camera pulled back--or the animated image shrank--and we saw a full-body shot of Jill. She held up four fingers. I wasn't sure what to do, but Arlene said, "Four words." Then Jill held up one finger, then one again. "First word . . . one syllable." Jill frowned like an angry mother and pointed savagely to the side. "Point," I guessed. "Look, look out!" "Leave, get out of here," Arlene suggested. Jill kept pointing. "Leave, go away, go--" Jill smiled and pointed at us with both hands. "First word is Go?" I asked. Jill nodded emphatically. She held up two fingers, then one touching her elbow. "Second word, one syllable." I was starting to get the hang of the game. Then Jill really threw me for a loop: she slapped her waist, pantomiming drawing a pistol and shooting someone. "Shoot!" Arlene shouted. "Draw, fire, stick 'em up!" "Pow, bang--ah--gun, bullet, gunfighter.. .." Jill touched her ear. "Sounds like," Arlene mut- tered. Then Jill stuck her thumbs into the shoulder holes of her sleeveless shirt. "Shirt?" I guessed, and Jill rolled her eyes. She touched her ear again, then closed her eyes and smiled blissfully. "Sounds like nap?" Arlene asked. "Sap, map, crap--" "Sounds like sleep! Weep, heap, teep . .." "Teep?" demanded my lance. "What the hell is a teep?" "It's where indies sleep," I griped. Jill was getting frantic. She finally pointed at her ear, waited a beat, then pointed at herself. Arlene muttered, "Sounds like . . . pest?" Jill almost yelped with satisfaction, but she kept her mouth shut, just pointing at Arlene. "Pest?" asked my lance. "Go pest? Go pester? Go best?" Suddenly I jumped to my feet--I remembered! Dramatically, I stabbed a meaty forefinger at our long-dead companion. "Go west, young lady!" I hol- lered. The image of Jill moved into extreme close-up on her mouth. "You have spoken the password. You now have infinite power! You may pass, Sahib." Blinky's voice from the back was an anticlimax. "Ah, force field down. Good damn show, that." "On to the Tabernacle," I suggested. "Put her down on that bulby thing, if there's enough room--that is, if you don't mind, Blinky." I really hated this new- jack command and control system. 21 Blinky Abumaha continued to circle the Tab- ernacle, fearsomely eyeing the bulbous tip. "Ah," he said, "ah, not sure is--not sure sir is too damn good idea, on the top." Arlene and I exchanged a glance back and forth, then we both turned the withering glare on Abumaha. "Can I, Fly?" she asked. I gallantly gestured her forward. "Blinky, don't take this the wrong way, honey, but--to quote Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove, 'I've been to a world's fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest damn thing I ever heard!'" The pilot looked simultaneously relieved and cha- grined. "Not serious? Just jolly joke? Oh, terrible fun--ho, ho!" He sounded genuine in the laughter, but seemingly unsure what he was laughing at. "Just put us down a quarter klick away," I clarified. "We'll, um, walk the rest of the way." We landed with much ceremony, a celebration that continued well past the first moment Arlene and I and Sears and Roebuck could squirm free. The Klave, having already had their celebration when we made orbit, disdained the party. Thank God. I didn't think I could take any more of that head-cheese liqueur! Finally, we wriggled off and marched resolutely toward the Tabernacle: Arlene in the lead, pulling us forward like an anxious puppy on a leash; Sears and Roebuck at the tail, looking worlds-weary; and poor Fly Taggart, Lieutenant Fly Taggart, stuck in the middle like the wishbone. From this short distance, less than 250 meters, the building utterly dominated one whole quarter of the sky, looming up so high we couldn't see the top for the weather--gray, ominous, overcast. Suddenly, before progressing more than fifty strides from the ship, Sears and Roebuck stopped. "Will we be okay," they said anxiously. "Yes, we're fine," I reassured them. "No, no, not to ask! Will we be okay, is calling on the telephone our uncles." "Huh?" I scratched my head. They were making even less sense than usual. Arlene, savagely impatient with her goal in sight, broke into the conversation. "Oh, wake up, Fly! I mean, sir. They're saying they don't want to go any farther; they want to call their uncles, probably on the lunar base, to come pick them up and take them home." My jaw dropped. "S and R, is that what you're saying?" "In ungood typical English of Arlene Sanders is a yes," they said. "Sears--Roebuck--are you aware of the fact that it has been about five hundred years since you left the Klave base?" They grabbed each other's head and pumped vigorously--frustration at my little-child inability to grasp the obvious. "Yes, yes! Is impatience why uncles wait with much foot-tapping for Sears and Roebuck's return!" I shrugged. I know when I'm beat. "So long, boys, can't say it's always been a treat, but it's been real." Even Arlene turned her attention away from her true love's final resting place to smile in farewell. "Don't take any wooden Fredpills," she said, thor- oughly confusing the Klave. "Has been it a slice," said the pair of Magilla Gorillas. Without another word, they turned left and strode off, marching in unison, subvocalizing all the way to each other. They disappeared around a tall ancient-looking column that supported a statue of what looked like Brigham Young, and we never saw Sears and Roebuck again. We didn't speak, Arlene and I, the rest of the way to the Tabernacle. There wasn't much to say. She knew what she hoped to find; I knew she was fooling herself. The building had a gigantic ceremonial door--and by "gigantic," I don't mean just huge! Just the door alone was bigger than the entire Tabernacle itself had been, before the Fred nuke. But when we touched it, it swung open swiftly and silently, and musical chimes played us in, sounding like a chorus of angels after our ordeal. I think they played some vocal work by Handel, but I didn't recognize it. The interior of the Tabernacle was hollow. I don't think you quite got that; the building was more than a kilometer high, and hollow. I felt like we were in the center of a volcanic crater! Inside was a huge city, with many temples and churches and such . . . and in the very center, on a hillock, was an exact duplicate of the original Mormon Tabernacle-- probably stone for stone, if it had religious signifi- cance. Arlene pointed at the recreation. "There," she said, deducing the obvious. We took twenty minutes to cross to the smaller Tabernacle within. Above us, the ceiling of the outer Tabernacle sparkled with jewels that must be worth nothing these days but the intrinsic value of their loveliness; in five hundred years, I would hope we at least would have learned how to manufacture perfect gemstones! But it was a lovely sight. The People's Faith of Latter-Day Saints didn't use just diamonds; they painted gigantic scenes in color using every imagin- able stone, from rubies to emeralds to blue sapphires to garnets and, yes, diamonds. It was no longer ostentatious, since anyone could do it--even the beggar in the street--but it was still stunning in its simple beauty. Taking a last look up at a scene of angels showing the Church Fathers' Salt Lake City (before it was Salt Lake Grad), I followed Arlene into the inner Taberna- cle. So far as I could tell, she hadn't even looked up at the ceiling. Inside, the place looked exactly like the original: exactly. I didn't check, but I'm sure if you made a nineteenth-century stereovision with one picture of the old and the other of the new, they would matte over each other perfectly as one image, but with one difference: the hollow interior of the tribute- Tabernacle was completely empty, except for the magnificent organ--and I'd bet the latter worked perfectly, too. We walked slowly across the floor, our melancholy footsteps echoing back at us. Arlene bowed her head; I don't think she was praying.... She must have been overwhelmed by the nearness of her love's life--and death. I almost put my hand on her shoulder, but I wasn't the guy she wanted just then. Ahead of us was a dark circle. As we got closer, I realized it was a circular hole in the floor. A hole? When we got to within ten meters, a grinding noise began. By the time we reached it, I realized it was a platform elevator . . . and there was a lone figure standing on it, rising out of the dark depths, waiting for us. Arlene halted in astonishment. "Jill!" I shouted, rushing forward. "Whoa, whoa!" Jill said, putting her hands out in a stop motion. "Don't get your skivvies in a knot, dudes! I'm not really me--I mean, I'm not really here. This is just a 3-D projection, and if you try to hug me, you'll fly right through me and mess up your knee . . . Fly." She looked exactly as she had when we left her, a year and five centuries ago. She was a little taller, maybe, but her hair was still blond, still punky. She had the same half smile and knowing eyes, still no makeup (thank God), and now she wore a bitchin' black leather jacket, lycra gym shorts that hugged her butt and upper thighs, and transparent plastic combat boots. I stood and stared, and blow me down if you couldn't have bet me two months' pay that that was the real Jill, and I'd have taken you up on it. "Jiminy!" she suddenly yelped, staring at us. "You really are Fly and Arlene!" "We told you!" snapped the latter-named. "But I didn't believe you, even after you passed, you know, the test thing. Now that you're in here, I just did a genetic sample thing, and like you're really you!" The animated image of Jill--just an artificial intel- ligence program, according to itself--dropped its jaw just like the real Jill would do. She leaned over and planted both hands on her knees to view us from a slightly different angle. "God, how did you live for four hundred and eighty-three years? Oh--relativity! Right?" Arlene nodded, sniffed, then wiped her nose on her military sleeve. "Jill, I ... look, I don't want to seem ungrateful, in case you have any surprises, but--" The fifteen-year-old stood tall and folded her arms, taking on that slightly superior look that age is prone to. "Don't worry, Arlene . . . I'm not going to throw an animated Albert at you. I know you wouldn't appreciate it. But I am here to take you downstairs, where there's a present for you." She waited a beat, then when we didn't move, she impatiently urged us forward with her hands. We joined her on the platform, which immediately began to sink. I didn't ask her any questions; I didn't know what to ask. I decided it could all wait.... I was pretty sure we could always come back later and catch up on what she did with her life--and get autographed copies of the books she wrote! If she didn't save a pair for us, I'd kill her, except she was already long dead and buried, or whatever they did nowadays. It was a creepy thought, and I stole many a glance at "Jill," trying not to think that Jill was dead. I felt a big lumpy knot in my stomach, even though I had known all along this would be the punishment for hopping around the universe at proxiluminous speeds. Damn it! I did what I had to do--we both did! Why, in the name of God Almighty, do we have to pay such a terrible price? Everyone we ever knew or loved, be- sides ourselves, Arlene an