 
# Mystical Tales of Romance

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 by Ed Hurst

**Copyright** **notice** : People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior – "be sure your sin will find you out" (Numbers 32:23)

Permission is granted to copy, reproduce and distribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains in its original form.

#  Table of Contents
## Foreword

## Cavern of Madness

## Pinch Me

Pinch Me 1

Pinch Me 2

Pinch Me 3

Pinch Me 4

Pinch Me 5

Pinch Me 6

Pinch Me 7

## A Lady in Waiting

Lady in Waiting 1

Lady in Waiting 2

Lady in Waiting 3

Lady in Waiting 4

Lady in Waiting 5

Lady in Waiting 6

Lady in Waiting 7

Lady in Waiting 8

Lady in Waiting 9

Lady in Waiting 10

Lady in Waiting 11

## Light Switch

Light Switch 1

Light Switch 2

Light Switch 3

Light Switch 4

Light Switch 5

Light Switch 6

Light Switch 7

Light Switch 8

## Recovery of Rez

Rez 1

Rez 2

Rez 3

Rez 4

Rez 5

Rez 6

Rez 7

Rez 8

Rez 9

Rez 10

Rez 11

Rez 12

Rez 13

Rez 14

Rez 15

#  Foreword

The best fiction is reality dressed up for a night on the town. As such, the following tales are drawn from the direct experience or direct observation of the author. In terms of love and commitment between humans, these stories reflect what I live and what I see. I make no secret that this is propaganda; it is marriage counseling coming in the back door. It's what the real thing looks like in different settings.

The issue is the inevitable debate about which version of reality that I've dressed up here. If you are a fan of Western Civilization, or one of the millions who simply absorbed it uncritically, you may not like what you see represented by these tales. If I could tear down the mythology, the cheap veneer pasted over the ancient truth of God, I'd do it in a heartbeat. What God revealed from the very beginning hasn't changed a bit. Alas, I have to settle for slipping it into the clothes of storytelling and hope just a few get it.

#  Cavern of Madness

Love can reach beyond the boundaries of sanity.

**Setting:** Recent past, somewhere in the southern US.

Turning right onto the main drag, he aimed his aging motorcycle in the direction of the glinting spire a few blocks away. The local mall was a massive wall of glass on one side, the side facing him, and the roof peaked. It was as if a giant had chopped the building in half and slapped a glass cover on the open face. The other side looked like any other sprawling retail monstrosity. The old import bike still hummed smoothly in spite of its battered appearance. He never could afford the larger models, but the smaller one had the advantage of maneuverability. He was reminded of that when he had to swerve to avoid a heavy delivery van that darted into his lane seemingly from nowhere. He just managed to slip between its front fender and the stopped traffic in the center turning lane.

As his heart slowed from the adrenaline rush, he waited at the light for his turn to enter the sea of striped blacktop that surrounded the shopping mall. One of the few things he liked about this place was the reserved motorcycle parking not too far from the main door on the glassed side. Locking his helmet in its carrier, he shook off the remaining tingle from the near collision, smoothed his polo shirt and strode toward the entrance. Of course, the other thing he liked about this place was the great cafe they had just inside the door. His wife loved it, too. Today they had arranged to meet there for dinner.

Twenty years. Where had the time gone? Today was their twentieth anniversary, and he was in a very celebratory mood. They were nothing like the storybook couples. He was not some high school sports hero who went on to a massively successful career. He did manage to make the football team, only because there weren't many volunteers for lineman. He made the team on the basis of his unusually stocky build alone. In spite of the coach playing him to death on both offense and defense, he was never a star player. He was just good enough, and reliable. Indeed, in his whole life, the one thing that mattered most to him was reliability. The old 300cc motorcycle was reliable, so he kept it. He was reliable on the various jobs he managed to land. Most reliable of all was his wonderful wife, Elise.

She, too, was no star. They met in high school, almost by accident, when he knocked her in floor as they both tried to enter the classroom door at the same time. It was the first day of the second semester. He kept apologizing as he helped right her, then pickup all her stuff. She couldn't find the heart to stay angry more than a few minutes. As it was, by the time they were ready to sit down, the only seats left were two at the front of the center rows. During the entire period he wanted to crawl under the desk and hide from what had to be the attention of the entire room. She told him later the flaming red color never left his thick neck for at least a half-hour. By force of circumstance, they ended up working together, and he could never do enough for her the entire semester. As an ordinary, Plain Jane kind of girl, she wasn't used to that. The net result was friendship, then romance. He never stopped trying to win her favor, and she never used his flaws as a weapon to hurt him.

He spotted her at their usual table, halfway across the floor space devoted to the cafe. The waitress had just poured her a fresh cup of coffee as she looked up and smiled at his approach. At that moment, no woman in the world could have gotten his attention away from her. He stopped and bent over to kiss her, holding the back of her head gently with his hand.

Without warning, a hand slapped him fiercely across the left side of his face. He jerked half upright, stunned. In one smooth motion she jumped up and shoved him hard in the hollow where his shoulder and chest muscles came together on the right side. Unprepared for any of this, the move spun him around. Tripping over a chair, he fell almost face down against the edge of the table, which tipped over the meet the tumbling chair, and he went down with crash. He lay in a tangled mess of furniture, tablecloth, condiments, and scalding coffee. From the corner of his eye, he could just see her low-heeled shoes receding smartly in the distance until they disappeared in a sea of other feet.

The pain of his body really didn't mean much to him. It was the bitter voice of his Elise, playing over and over in his mind as she had pushed him away. "What do you think I am? Some sort of hooker? Whoever you are, you have some nerve, jerk!"

He lay there in numb confusion for some time. Finally security guard came over and gently nudged a wet spot on the back of his left shoulder. "Are you okay, sir?" He stumbled to his feet. In a scene that felt oddly familiar, he apologized repeatedly as he struggled clumsily to put everything back in place. The guard asked again if he was okay, and stammered, "Yes. Yessir, I'm alright. Sorry for the mess..." The guard stopped him and suggested he might want to go home and clean himself up, and see about that cut on his forehead. Mumbling agreement thanks, he shuffled away.

Reeling more from confusion than pain, he searched frantically in his mind for anything solid to grasp. Aimlessly, his hand passed over the paperback in his right rear pocket. It was a novel, a science fiction story this time. A voracious reader, he was seldom without a book of some sort. With his hand resting on the book, the only thought to surface was that he must have crossed a portal somewhere and ended up in a parallel universe. No, that's just fiction! Still, it was enough to give him a purpose for the moment. With deliberate care, he backtracked his path into the mall. When he stood before his motorcycle, this tattered fragment of an idea simply evaporated. He turned and sat side-saddle. His left hand aimlessly pushed fingers through his dirty blonde hair, then grabbed and stopped. He sat like this in trance for quite some time.

Abruptly, he turned and mounted the cycle, dropped his keys, then snatched them up. Almost forgetting his helmet, he started the motor. He sat for a moment, then slowly putted out of the lot the way he had come. For the next 15 minutes, he rode mechanically in the traffic, with no conscious decisions on direction of travel. When he began shaking uncontrollably, he simply pulled off the road. Taking the helmet off, he stared up at the weathered front of an old abandoned store of some kind. The sign was gone, leaving the darker hued spot it had covered. He didn't remember seeing the place before. He slid off the saddle, helmet still in his hand, and sat shaking among the weeds, trash and gravel.

The passage of time meant nothing, but in reality it wasn't that long before he came back up from the well of confusion to realize his cellphone was ringing. Suddenly he yanked it off his belt, then froze staring at it, wondering what to do next. When it chirped again, he pushed the button and held it next to his chin. "Hello?" It was a croaked whisper. The voice of Elise, unmistakable even in the tiny electronic speaker, said "hello" questioningly twice.

"Honey, where are you? Are you alright?"

He started shaking again, weeping. For the second time in a single hour, the whole universe shifted. "I'm sorry!" he bawled. He said it again a couple of times. The voice on the other end asked again, "Honey, are you alright? I waited an hour for you at the cafe but never saw you. Did we miss each other somehow?" He could only answer by bawling pitifully, heaving sobs, nearly dropping the little phone.

"Honey, what happened? Where are you? Please talk to me!"

He bleated out, "I don't know where I am! I don't know what happened. I'm sorry! Please tell me what I did wrong! I'll do anything you want."

"Oh, Honey... You haven't done anything wrong! There's just some sort of mistake. Can you tell me where you are?"

He didn't have to look around to know -- "No. I'm in a parking lot of some old store that's empty." The question distracted him a bit from his misery.

"Okay, don't hang up, Honey. I'm going on the other line for a minute. I'll be right back. Promise you'll hang on?"

"Yeah," he whispered. He was coming back from the depths. The mad universe was becoming more shadowy, less hard-edged. Now he dared look up and see if anything in his line of sight looked familiar. No, not yet. Maybe when his head cleared a little bit more.

True to her promise, Elise spoke soothingly again. "Hon, I want you to just rest. Stay there where you are for now, if you can. I'll be right there with some help. You just relax, okay?"

He couldn't say how long he waited. The breeze played with the locks of his curly hair, and he sat face in hands, elbows resting on knees. There wasn't a lot of traffic, but he never heard what there was, anyway. That is, until a couple of vehicles crunched on the gravel near him. He waited to move until he heard the voice of Elise. She was instantly bending over him, holding his face between her hands. He wept anew, half in renewed sorrow and half in joy that she was here now, touching him, treating him as she always had before when he got hurt. The terror was the last to go, and it edged back reluctantly. He had no idea what she was saying, until she repeated for the third time: "Are you alright?"

He knew she meant was he still there, inside the battered and bruised body. His polo shirt was still a mess, and the coffee stain on his back stood out faintly dark against the stripes of blue, yellow and red. There was someone else there, and they were helping him stand. She took his helmet and keys, just as a third vehicle pulled into the empty lot, that of his cousin who lived a few blocks from their house. He brought his pickup, obviously to haul away the bike, as he had graciously done a couple of times before when it broke down.

Slowly the light in his head came on, and he realized the other person helping him was an EMT. A police officer sat in a cruiser a few yards away, speaking into a radio handset. It made all the difference in the world when Elise insisted on riding with him. As the large medical van began to move, he was thankful beyond words the disaster was past.

A few days later, she was listening when he told the doctor what he believed happened to him that day. While the whole incident suddenly made sense of a sort, it nearly killed her to think he believed she would do that to him. They told her initial tests indicated a small growth in his brain which they expected could be removed relatively easily. As she wept that night alone in bed, she prayed fervently God would not prolong his recovery period.

#  Pinch Me

She had so much to give and not a clue where to put it.

**Setting:** Current time, somewhere in the US Heartland.

##

He stood off to one side, hidden behind a side curtain on the stage. There in the center, the woman spun around, fringes and silky sleeves fluttering. The band behind played a very engaging beat, but the song was nonsensical. The lyrics were schizophrenic, like two distinctly different conversations woven together in a confusing mess. It was hard to tell which phrase went with which conversation, one moment demanding someone back off and in the next, begging to be taken somewhere. Yet the song remained a major hit for its melody and dramatic, if confusing, imagery and the singer's singular beauty.

He shook his head as a statement of dismissal. Much as he loved the music, the song meant nothing. Still, the act of shaking his head became the impetus for clawing his way back slowly to waking awareness. It was a dream. As full consciousness came to him, he realized why that dream had haunted his final hours of sleep that morning. All those years in his youth, he had fantasized about that singer. Her sultry voice was one thing, but the steady supply of highly enhanced photos and videos of her face burned a hole in his desire, forever out of reach.

But here and now, the very real face resting in the crook of his arm was so very like the legendary singer. He reached out and touched the flowing, wavy blond hair, which he knew fell down nearly to her waist. The small turned up nose stood above full, pouty lips, in the middle of her nearly flawless skin, save for the faint scar across one cheek from long, long ago. The rosy hue of her face never seemed to fade, and even in sleep her eyes under the high arched brows seemed large and round.

As those eyes opened to reveal pools of blue deeper than any ocean, a smile played slowly across her lips. She reached for him with her free hand and they embraced in a warm kiss. As he held her close for at least the hundredth time, he never quite escaped the overwhelming sense no man's life could ever match this moment, nor all the other moments like it. What she was to him as a woman was greater by far than her mere physical beauty. No fantasy could match this. Nor could any fiction hope to match the real story of how he found this creature...

##

The storm hit during the late night hours, and had left horrific damage. The company has asked him to inspect the damage at some clients' sites as soon as he could get through that next morning. He borrowed his neighbor's old motocross hunting bike and was forced more than once to take full advantage of its capabilities. That and the small chainsaw he carried. He managed to stay on the main highway.

But nothing could prepare him for how his plans that day were forced in unexpected directions. At one side road he slowed to glance down through a mass of old growth trees, some of which had fallen against each other in a vast interlocking mess that was shocking to see. As he turned to move on, something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. Under one massive tree lying across the road he glimpsed the glint of a red painted surface. Turning the bike down the road, he dodged some of the debris and got as close as he could.

Sure enough, there was a vehicle of some kind crushed under a particularly large sycamore. After discovering there was simply no getting around it easily, he found he could clamber up from the base of the trunk to about where the crushed metal was visible from above. His arthritic joints reminded him he was too old for this, but there might be some small chance someone was alive.

The vehicle had been facing out toward the main road, and the front was nearly obliterated, but the rear stuck out partially intact. His attempt to find footing to climb down the back side of the car caused things to shift just enough to notice. He froze. A tingle ran down his whole body when he realized he heard a faint raspy voice call out.

"Is anybody there? Help!"

With renewed vigor he struggled and almost fell onto the back window glass, coming to rest on the trunk lid. He bumped his fist against the glass, shouting, "Hello!"

The inside of the glass was fogged up. That was no surprise, as the summer sun was already turning the moisture from last night's rain into a very muggy morning. A hand feebly wiped away some of the fog, and he caught a glimpse of wheat colored hair, with a renewed appeal for help which carried a distinctly feminine sound.

Looking around quickly, he realized, aside from trees and mud, there was nothing he could use. Leaning back into the glass, he yelled. "Hang on! I'm going to get something to break this glass and get you out. I'm not leaving you!" He scrambled back up over the limbs and crushed front end of the car, ignoring his sore joints, taking risks in jumping around like a teenage boy. Grabbing the chainsaw off the motorbike, he started it up even as he ran back toward the mess.

It took forever, yet it was only seconds before he had carved a path alongside the twisted metal which allowed him to duck under the bulk of the tree. The last limb he cut was just right. He lopped off the foliage end, and then dropped back down some four feet to the base where it grew out of the trunk. Chopping it off with a few quick revs of the chainsaw, it dropped into the mud at his feet. Coming out from under the limbs, he killed the motor and stuck the saw on one of the remaining branches, juggled and nudged it a couple of times until it stayed put. Then he reached back for the freshly cut heavy club lying in the mud. Taking a moment to think, he looked at the car and decided he needed to try this first from the deck of the trunk lid. He yelled at the back window. "Cover your exposed skin. This glass will go everywhere!"

He waited a few seconds, and then struggled to get up on the back of the vehicle, barking his shins in the process. Groaning, he stood as straight as he could on one edge, reared back and swung with all his might. Both layers of the safety glass shattered, folding inward on the plastic lining sandwiched in the middle. He quickly crushed the remaining shards across the bottom of the window frame and poked out the ragged bits hanging from the top.

The huddled figure raised her face and stared at him with the most pitiful look, and those huge blue eyes that nearly swallowed him where he stood. Her voice managed to croak out the words, "feet ... caught." Kneeling to take a look, he saw the front seat had been shifted by the force of the impact, and barely avoided cutting off her legs at the ankle. Remembering the big club in his hands, he stepped down into the back seat with one foot and began levering at the tiny space between the seats, just to one side of her right leg.

It took a few minutes, but he convinced her to pull her shoes off, turn her body and twist her legs so her feet could be worked out. While the front seat didn't budge at all, he was able to compress the rear seat back a bit and free her, one leg at a time. Despite very obvious physical exhaustion, she scrambled up out her prison and grabbed him in a vice like grip, weeping and rasping out heaving cries of relief.

He dropped the club and literally carried her off the trunk lid of the wreckage. She wasn't that large, rather slender, with long blond hair down almost to her waist. Her frilly t-shirt and matching Capri pants bore a few blood stains, but he could see no wounds aside from the scrapes where she escaped from between the seats. He decided against trying to get her stand in her socks in the mud, but turned to let her rest on the back of the car. She clung to him for dear life, begging him to get her away from the car. Glancing behind, he saw a suitable spot on the one of the downed trees and carried her there. Convincing her to sit there a moment and lean back into the crotch of the giant limbs, he promised to come back with something to drink.

Stooping and pawing his way back through the path he cut, he pulled his lunch box from the rack on the back of the motorbike. It was a battered old half-sized insulated cooler, and he realized now the wisdom of bringing extra food and sodas. When he reappeared from the passage, she was staring straight at him while picking debris out of her hair. Despite the circumstances, her beauty was striking. Having outlived the days of schoolboy intimidation by such sights, he shrugged it off and simply tried to help her. She readily accepted the canned drink and consumed it too fast, giving off a very unladylike belch. Barely composed enough to be embarrassed, she took the sandwich he offered and ate ravenously, washing it down with what was left of the soda. Taking back the empty can, he crushed it by first grabbing the top and bottom and twisting the soft wall of can, then locking his fingers and pressing the ends together between the heels of his palms.

He dropped it back into the box with the sandwich wrapper, set it down and looked at her. Finally she offered a half smile and reached out to hug him again. The raspy whimper was replaced by a gentle, smooth alto. She thanked him repeatedly and kissed him on the cheek.

##

"Do you want me to get your shoes out of the car? It might be pretty messy to walk around here in your socks."

Her face went suddenly very dark. "No!" Lowering her gaze, she said rather subdued, "They're soaked in blood."

He offered, "It must not be your own, because you don't seem to have any injuries."

Looking up, she stared off into the twisted tangled mass of what had been the forest. "Two guys, both dead... thank God."

He was taken aback, but decided to let it pass for now. "Anything else in the car belong to you?"

She turned her gaze back to him, still subdued. "Just a purse, if you can find it in the front seat."

He decided it might be worth a try, but first there was other business. "I have my cellphone. Is there someone you want me to call before I call 911? Those bodies have to be moved." He had noticed a faint whiff of decay, not at all surprising, given how long since the storm had passed, with the moisture and heat.

She recited the number of her aunt, and he punched it in the phone. When his display indicated the number was ringing, he passed the phone to her. Her whole demeanor changed. She was apparently not her aunt's favorite, and the exchange was unpleasant, to say the least. It was then he realized the woman was a real hellcat. When the conversation ended, she handed the phone back to him. Still slightly animated, "That was almost a waste of time. She might let me have my stuff back, but I have to find my own accommodations now."

He waited to see if she would say anything else. She glanced away a moment, then turned back to him with a deep pleading in her eyes. "I need help. Those guys were trying to kidnap me. The one in the passenger seat had a gun. Even if the frame hadn't been crushed, I could never have gotten out of the car. The back door handles were gone. They were going to force me into prostitution."

The story seemed plausible enough. He decided to delay a bit longer calling the authorities and wandered back to the car. He took a closer look. Sure enough, no inside door handles in back. Studying the situation, he could see the outlines of what had been two human bodies in the front seat, body fluids having oozed into the back floorboard. There wasn't much left of them; the sycamore must have fallen very hard. Then he spied a strap which wasn't part of the car. Crawling up on the trunk lid, he reached in between the bucket seats up front and tugged at it. Surprisingly, it came out rather easily, a woman's purse. As he pulled it free, he spotted the barrel of a handgun. He carefully avoided touching anything else.

She still sat on the branch, watching him as he brought the purse in one hand. Holding it up, "This it?" She snatched it and thanked him yet again.

"Decide now what you want to tell them, because I'm calling now." Punching the code quickly, he waited. A recording told him to leave his information and a short description of his emergency, noting all units were busy and more were being brought in from surrounding counties. After citing his name, address and location, "Private car crushed under a tree; I see remains of two adult males. I rescued one adult female from the back seat and I'm transporting her to the hospital at this time." He closed the phone.

She took up that half-smile again. "You talk just like they do."

With his own half-smile, "My work brings me into contact with them more often than I like. But I know how they talk and what they expect. I'm going to pretend I didn't think to identify you, just rushed you to the emergency room. For them, you'll be lost in the shuffle. Sound good to you?"

Her answer was to hug him one more time and kiss him on the cheek again. While still clutching him, she said in his ear, "I have enough troubles with the system already right now." Pulling back, with her hands still on his shoulders, "I don't need any medical treatment, just a safe place to stay for a day or two. Do you know where that might be?"

He pictured in his mind the big house he still owned, empty but for him and his stuff. "Depends on how much you trust me. My house has a spare bedroom with its own bath. It's the opposite end of the house from mine. Unlike your friends," gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder, "I have no intentions of using or abusing you. Right now, I'm going to pull my bike as close to here as I can, and I'll be glad to carry you as far as the path I cut, but I can't prevent getting those pretty little socks muddy."

"Socks I can replace." She let go of him. "Just get me out of here in one piece. I'll be a good girl." She slipped off the branch and began wading through the mud toward the only exit.

As they mounted the motorcycle, he mentioned his name was Gregory.

##

During the ride to the address she gave him, which required some backtracking, and a side trip some miles away from the storm path, she told him her name was Melissa.

He decided he didn't want to be close enough to hear anything anyone said after they arrived. After a rather short wait while the tempest raged inside, Melissa emerged with a small duffel bag. Still wearing the muddy socks without shoes, she mounted the bike behind him without expression and said quite simply and firmly, "Let's go."

She was silent the entire ride back to his house. He mused she must of have been roughly two decades younger than him, in her mid-thirties. Since the burger stand was open as they passed, he asked if she would eat food from there. They pulled up under the awning and she rattled off her preference in the abbreviated chatter of the carhops. So he activated the speaker and repeated what she said and added his own.

She seemed well practiced at riding two-up, and kept the food from slipping without any problem, yet managed to stay huddled up against him comfortably in front of the cooler and chainsaw strapped on the game rack.

Once inside the house, she shed the dirty socks and put on sandals she took from her bag. He showed her the spare room, and pointed out the sheets for the bed were stored in the closet. While she stowed her stuff, he spread the food on the table and began to eat his share. She joined him soon enough and ate in silence, never looking up to meet his eyes. He guessed it would be like that often enough, and occupied himself with thoughts of how he might get back to work. He could return the bike, since folks had completed some of the cutting he had started in his effort to get out that morning. Having his truck with all the equipment would make things a lot easier.

He cleared off the trash and sat back down, letting her decide if she was going to tell him anything else.

She looked up and locked eyes with him. "Greg, I have just been released from the half-way house. That was following three years in the women's prison. I was staying with my aunt, but she was making rules like I was still in junior high. She hates religion and wouldn't even let me go to church." She paused a moment.

He interjected, "I'm glad to hear you're a Christian, too. I do a lot of volunteer work at my church."

She almost smiled. "I grew up a good Christian girl, was a cheerleader and athlete, but my old home church turned out to be run by slimy hypocrites. The youth leader introduced me to drugs and sex. I escaped his clutches soon enough, only to run deeper into that crazy lifestyle. I won't bore you with all the details, but I was just two steps away from crack whore when I got arrested. My connection was angry because my performance while jonesing wasn't quite up to par, and slashed me with a knife." She pointed to the faint scar across one cheek, which he hadn't really noticed before now.

He mumbled, "I know what you mean about corrupt churches..."

She continued. "When I went to the emergency room, they reported the drug metabolites in my system and I was arrested. I gladly turned evidence to get a lighter sentence. He already had a mile-long rap sheet, so he won't be back out before he dies. While in prison I realized what happened in my church back home wasn't Jesus' fault, and renewed my faith, even started working out again. At the half-way house I thought I had found some sisters in the Lord. So we all got released at the same time, and they called me from some part of town I've never seen, and invited me to join them for a pool party where they were staying. They said I should bring my Bible, so I figured it was okay."

She stared out the window for a few moments. Her hands were twitching. "After all the Hell I raised, I was ready to turn it all over and do it right. My aunt yelled and screamed, but I left anyway. Caught a cab, and when I got there, these two guys came out and paid. Real gentlemen, they escorted me to the back yard and there were my two friends and some other people I'd never met. The girls simply said, 'Hi Melissa.' I was waiting for someone to introduce me when those two guys came up behind me. One grabbed my left arm and took my Bible. The other grabbed my face and turned my head where he had a gun pointed at me. They marched me to their car, took my purse and made me get in the back. I could hear them laughing in the back yard as the door was closed."

There were tears in her eyes. "I had been clean and sober for a long time. They knew all about me, what I had done. They told me I could go along and get back to my 'old work' or they would simply inject that crap and make me do it anyway. They were going to drive me over the state line, but the storm hit. When the driver couldn't see well enough to keep going, he pulled off on that side rode, turned around and faced the car out of the wind. He had just shut the motor off when the tree fell."

Her hands were shaking, as she clasped them together on the table, looking at them. "I was stuck in there for hours. I was pretty sure God had abandoned me. Up to that moment I was considering how I could kill myself to keep them from using me that way, but when they were killed, I was just afraid. I don't remember when I passed out crying, but it was still dark."

The image in his mind was almost too painful to contemplate. He reached across the table and put his hand on top of hers. "Sometimes there's no accounting for God's sense of humor about things. But He got the last laugh on those two, and He's not through with you yet. I'm just sorry I couldn't get there any sooner."

He stood up. "I won't make any rules for you. I'll ask you to help carry your share of the load for living here. Otherwise, take some time to put your self back together. No one can get to you easily here, because all the neighbors are pretty tight. We take care of each other. Dogs will bark and shotguns come out if any tries to sneak around. We can't prevent you being rearrested if the police take a notion, but at least they'll be busy awhile with other things. Unfortunately, I still have to work for a living. I need to run by at least two locations. You can ride along or stay here and freshen up."

She turned her face up at him. "I don't want to be alone right now. Can I go with you?"

##

Having shared as much as was likely of her story, Greg told her some of his.

Right out of high school he began working where he was now. It was a way to pay the bills while he studied for the ministry. Any hope of going that direction was killed by the internal politics in the first two churches where he served an internship. That put him off church for awhile, but not his faith. After a decade or so of worshiping at home, he and his family found a church where politics didn't seem to interfere with important stuff. His kids got married and moved away, and he had more time to devote to volunteer work at church.

His wife was killed by a drunk driver just a few months ago. Son of some politician, the other driver simply disappeared and the case was never brought to court. He didn't blame the police, and his relations with them remained cordial enough, but he had always seen them as part of a badly broken system. The company he worked for had quite a few contracts with local government agencies, so he dealt with police, fire and other officials quite often.

Destructive as drugs may be, he would much rather people have the choice to ruin their lives. It only needed the hand of enforcement when their stupid choices splashed over into the lives of others. Why they made messes wasn't important, only that they should be punished and made to clean up those messes. He figured a lot of so-called crimes were handled better when folks minded their own business. He had little use for governments, but didn't see a need to provoke them needlessly.

Then he described his church volunteer work. Mostly it was teaching how to keep marriage working. Melissa perked up on that and began asking questions. It was plain from the conversation his first guess about her was correct, that she had always been strong-willed and difficult. She had drifted from one relationship to another, always in turmoil.

She was a long way from reality, he knew. So he started at the very most basic explanations and told her about the vast difference between common assumptions and the way people actually behaved. Indeed, she was full of questions and often reacted sharply to things he said. He always kept an even temper, letting her rant and rage. It never got to him simply because he had heard it all before, a hundred times at least, every time he introduced the topic to yet another crop of counselees.

He kept a mental catalog of her objections, and then pointed them out again when something she said or did simply proved his point. He guessed she could have been just a bit violent at times, but they weren't that close emotionally. He carefully avoided any suggestion his relationship with her was anything but avuncular.

She rode with him often, as there was no harm in her coming along on his work trips. His wife had done so quite often over the years before her death, so it wasn't anything new. It was just over a week of this, and on that day she had been strangely quiet on the long ride to one site. The place was utterly isolated.

When he finished his work and got back into the truck, they shared a snack and drinks. She stared at him for a moment. "I've dealt with older men before. How come I've never met anyone like you?"

"Depends on where you spent most of your time. Guys like me are pretty boring. We obviously wouldn't be interested in drugs or wild women, so unless you worked with the public in more mundane settings, we might be hard to find."

He had said in such a way she had to laugh. "Yet you handle me like a pro," she replied.

He snorted, then with a grin: "Professional what? I happen to believe I understand women, and you keep not surprising me at all."

She turned more serious. "Why do you keep your distance? Am I too young for you? Or is it my dirty past? Do you know you could have had me already?"

He looked directly at her. "First, let's dispatch the business of your past. The consequences of bad choices will follow you as long as you live in this world. In the other realm, all your sins are wiped away. You have scars, both literal and even more of them figuratively, but I'm quite willing to accept your past as is, sight unseen. And if you were badly damaged in some way, I'm pretty sure I'd know by now."

He shifted in his seat and leaned back against the door. "The real issue is, you aren't ready. You suffer from a powerful misplaced sense of entitlement. The world is a crappy place and fairness would mean most of us suffering considerably more than we do. You'll have to make peace with the fundamental nastiness of this world, and accept more of what you can't and shouldn't want to change."

He folded his hands together in front of is chest, fingers interlaced. "You want more of my affection. I can't offer it on your terms. What I need from a woman requires something you don't have yet, and it's the reason you've never stayed with anyone else. Aside from the fact you keep choosing men who excite you but don't have a clue why they're here on earth, you keep trying to run the show, or too much of it. That might be partially justified with some guys, but I'd rather do without at that price. I know what my life is for, and I won't let anything get in the way of that. Sex means nothing unless it's a celebration of shared commitment to something much bigger than both of us. As long as you keep finding things to attack and demand changes, you aren't ready to have sex with me. All the other factors don't matter at all. I'm not going to tie you to me emotionally when it would only make you miserable."

As he turned to start the motor, he added, "You are the only person who can make you happy. I believe you need to reevaluate what you think will do the trick."

It was the first time any man had ever turned her down, and it lit a fire in her soul like nothing else.

##

He was surprised it had taken them this long.

Even though Greg had warned Melissa the courts were not through with her, he wasn't quite sure if she had really thought about it. So when they had bounced and wound their way back to the main road, Greg was the first to spot the sheriff's patrol vehicle. This was no fast pursuit car for a speed trap, but one of the four-wheel drive supervisory vehicles. He smiled when he saw the lettering on the hood. "Operations" meant Captain Trujillo, one of the last few men at County who understand Greg's ways.

Turning to Melissa, he asked, "Ready for a vacation?" Before she had time to respond, he rolled the window down and faced the deputy.

The Captain spoke first. "When I recognized your voice on the recording, I knew you would take good care of her for us. She didn't have anywhere else to go, did she?"

Greg shook his head without saying anything, as if the whole scene were scripted. He turned to Melissa. Pointing to the patrol vehicle, he told her, "He's not going to hurt you. I'll be praying for you. Call me as soon as they let you go."

She didn't seem too upset as she got out and went around to the passenger side of the Captain's rig. She got in and buckled the seat belt, then blew a kiss at Greg. He watched as the Captain backed out onto the highway and drove off toward the County Seat.

It rattled him more than he had expected. Giving it all time to sink in, he waited until he was sure what he was feeling. By no means would he have started a romance until she understood and committed herself. That didn't prevent him having strong feelings for her. Something inside kept nibbling at the edge of his consciousness, and he wondered why this one, of all the women he encountered day in and day out, stuck in his mind. Beauty alone wasn't enough, he knew, but there was something much deeper than mere beauty itself. Somewhere some old memory had attached itself to her, though he knew he'd never seen Melissa before that morning when he rescued her. Despite her sassy orneriness, she seemed to have claimed a piece of him once belonging to someone else, something a younger man fantasized about.

He understood just enough to know how dangerous it was. That part of him was buried, and had no business intruding into the present. While she was around, all he knew is she was as difficult as she was lovely. Now that she was gone, he realized there had been a huge vulnerability in his soul which now had her name on it. If she came back changed, this wouldn't be a problem. Any other scenario and it spelled yet another episode of youthful agonies brought back to haunt him again.

But he was strong enough to work through it. While it was unique in flavor, this particular pain was just one more in his life. At any given time he might bear any number of inner conflicts and sorrows, but this one took center stage, crowding out the others for now. The only thing he did differently was mention her name as a prayer request in his small group and to the staff at church.

When it stretched into two, then three weeks, he realized that whatever this was, it wasn't simply at the County. Calling any of his acquaintances at County would have been pointless. She had never told him enough details for him to guess intelligently which of the cases in the news, if any of them, were connected to her. Part of him was pretty sure it was not in the news. At some point, his worry for her overwhelmed his personal griefs and he was able to put it in a better perspective.

So it caught him completely off guard when he was pulled over one day between work sites. He had drifted above the speed limit, but he didn't think it was by all that much. With all the equanimity he could muster, he looked in his mirror and realized he was reading it backwards: "Operations." His heart stopped, and he checked the right side mirror. She was already out the door and running forward up the passenger side. She flung the door open as the patrol rig roared past him with a quick honk as the Captain waved. He smiled and waved back, but before he could turn his head, she was on him. Wrapping her arms aggressively around his neck, she kissed him on the check.

With total aplomb, "`Bout time you came home, girl."

She slapped him playfully on the shoulder as she sat down and buckled the seat belt. "Not a single moment was wasted," she announced. He glanced at her as he pulled back onto the road. "Everything you tried to teach me came back to haunt me there in the jail. Those silly women don't have a clue and they get so hostile when you try to explain it to them!"

He gave her a sidelong glance, with just a half-smile. She burst out in the most raucous laughter; he could hardly keep from joining her.

##

The deaths of the two kidnappers opened up a can of worms. Melissa gave evidence to a County grand jury and two different federal investigations. They had waited, leaving her in the custody of Greg until they had rounded up the suspects and associates. When faced with her testimony, everyone copped a plea and confessed, and her testimony was no longer needed. Two slavery prostitution houses were closed, a kidnapping ring captured, not to mention a lot of drugs, arms, cash, vehicles, etc. confiscated.

And the pastor of the church knew better than to suggest Greg and Melissa needed a marriage license. More and more members were having church-only weddings and taking advantage of the state laws requiring recognition of such marriages. Theirs became a model for many others, and their loyalty to each other was almost legendary.

It was only a couple of years and Melissa was ordained as deaconess in recognition of her strong leadership with the younger women in the church. For once in his life, George actually had to face envy from others.

#  A Lady in Waiting

God's calling and purpose never fails.

**Setting:** Near future, somewhere in Europe

##

She wore the glow proudly. Not boasting, which would be wholly unnecessary, but just the utter sense of peace and contentment that nothing else mattered. They knew. They had a thousand questions, but they all boiled down, "Why you? Why not one of us?"

Her answer boiled down to, "If I told you, you'd never understand." She admired the silver band on her finger for the hundredth time that morning and walked into the gym for her morning workout. It all happened so fast. Had it been only a week ago?

***

No one would mistake him for a movie star. He was handsome enough, but it was more a matter of how he carried himself. It was self-confidence on a different level. Without domineering or demanding, it seemed as if he could have commanded any whim crossing his mind and people would jump. It was the presence he projected when he walked into the room.

He was the new guy, officially an unimportant nobody, hired on a peripheral contract. He had no office, nor was there any requirement, so no one had to make room for him. For that matter, his office was in his backpack, an aging but durable laptop. Someone back in the States had hired him to conduct surveys and write the reports no one else had time to do, reports that would be read by some oversight committee at some regulatory agency. The few in the admin offices who knew about his contract spoke as if he was simply a friend of someone important, carrying out a make work mission. But this was hardly a choice assignment.

He flashed his badge to the head-count at the doorway, signed the register, and then strolled nonchalantly down the serving line, picking out some of this and that. The food was always decent, adequate, but nothing to write home about. The cafeteria was the largest single open room on the installation, almost geographically dead center. Perhaps you could have dug through the facility archives and found out what it was originally, but it probably wasn't any kind of dining facility, more like an industrial assembly line. Current operations never seemed to justify budgeting for refurbishing the place, not even so much as painting the bare concrete floor. But the staff kept it clean, the kitchen always smelled okay, so no one felt the need to pick through their food looking for inedible debris.

The place was used as an ad hoc meeting room when someone's cramped office wouldn't hold the bodies for a conference, so there were always extra tables. As he passed, a few of the friendlier workers greeted and welcomed him. He declined offers to join any of the groups, but took up one of the empty tables off to one side.

Among the folks at lunch today were some of the more socially active women you could find in any bunch of paper pushers working for the various government agencies sponsoring facilities like this. We've all seen the type: some divorced, some never married and all hungry for fresh meat. Three in particular tried to flirt with him. His expression was mild, almost friendly, but he never quite smiled at them. He answered with precious few words when he deemed it appropriate, but was largely uncommunicative. What he said suggested he really needed to spend time getting things set up for his work.

So at the small table alone, his food was on one side and the laptop was placed on the other. He divided his time between eating, drinking and poking at the computer. His eyes seldom left the screen or his food tray.

##

Coming to work at a government installation of this sort always required everyone to pass through a selection of offices so the proper support system could be engaged. His contract required precious little, but bureaucratic procedures seldom varied. There was at first a struggle by the various bureaucrats trying to understand just how little they were required to do for him. Aside from basic life support and computer network access, there really wasn't anything he needed. He still had to report to the community management for the sake of his human existence and presence on the facility, but he was otherwise entirely independent. He was not a community asset aside from bearing his share of the load for using what he needed. Since there were almost no military personnel there, just about everything was by contract. So all he had to actually do was appear at a couple of monthly functions and clean his own quarters.

There had been a pretty poor response from the host nation locals on the janitorial contracts, so not every building was properly covered. He seemed to take that in stride. The only space left was on the upper floor of what had been a military barracks long ago. They convinced facilities management to clear the stored junk from the old floor commander room next to the stairwell for him. This way he had a private toilet and shower, plus enough space to secure the one odd item on his contract: a bicycle.

Motor vehicles would always be at a premium and it seemed he had known this before shipping over from the States. So there was a provision in his contract to ship a bicycle he owned. This simply contributed to his already very high degree of independence.

The whole image of a man whose age was hard to guess, but obviously mature, striking but entirely private, friendly even as he was standoffish, was just a bit much for the humdrum world of government bureaucrats. There was endless speculation about how much of these oddball provisions were part of some kind of spying mission. Was it really all just some silly make work project with no real work, or was he part of the numerous clandestine agencies in the government? The few representatives of such agencies on the installation denied it, but that was their job, wasn't it?

As anyone might expect, this served only to fuel greater interest from the bored flirty women working there.

##

Rebecca wasn't one of those bored flirty women.

She might have been, but it would have taken entirely too much effort to be somebody she wasn't. Growing up in rural Tennessee, she did what most country girls did, but wasn't pretty enough to get that many dates. Not homely, just no sparkle. On a whim, when a public school exam pegged her as talented in whatever incomprehensible skills and character traits government bureaucracies were seeking, she took a job offer at some big welfare office off in the city as mail clerk. That led to data entry, then some advancement courses, and so forth. When other jobs opened up, if one seemed half-way interesting, she grabbed it. She moved across the country several times and never saw much of her home state again, though she carried that rural Tennessee drawl wherever she went.

She was never really ambitious, never really qualified for big promotions, always hitting that solid middle level of management everywhere she went. Somehow, she found herself assigned some nebulous job as Community Coordinator on this God-forsaken installation. She laughingly called her office Gossip Central, since it seemed little more than that in terms of how it actually operated. In the typical fulfillment of bureaucratic requirements, written by a string of people who had never done any similar work at any time in their lives, and approved by officials who didn't in the least care what it was really all about, she had all the hassles of any other bureaucrat in any other office and really didn't have to do a darn thing that mattered.

But that would have been against her conscience, so she did what little she could to bless people with some sense of community and belonging informally. All the other stuff associated with her job was simply justification for paying her. Everyone liked her but no one really loved her.

It's not as if she never dated anyone; she was no virgin. She had been burned enough times in romance to be very cautious because she knew she had none of the assets and talents as the flirty bunch. Like most women, she worked out in the gym out of sheer boredom, so had to listen to a lot of the sort of women's locker-room gossip she found wholly distasteful. Her reaction wasn't prudish and she sometimes wished she had some tales of her own. Not that she would ever tell anyone if she did. Maybe a couple of pals, but this was during a time in the natural bureaucratic rhythm of life when she had no close friends, no confidants.

Completely by accident she was the one person on the installation who actually knew something about the new guy. It was simply her job. In the routine procedures of taking his place on the installation, he had to visit her office so she could run through her official spiel. Perhaps it was entirely random, but in the long list of offices he had to visit during in-processing, he came to hers almost last.

##

His name was Sherrod Franklin. He told her it was typically shortened to Rod and that's how he signed most things. She asked him to call her Becky. It was painfully obvious he was a military veteran; that much was in the paperwork attached to the contract they all got to see. Everything else was a mystery.

If anyone around there knew that gossip was mostly baloney, it was Becky. Still, she found herself quite surprised when his personality seemed nothing like the chatter she heard from the other women. By now, a trio in particular had managed to foist themselves into his company at one or another of the mealtimes. Despite all their best efforts, it seemed he never revealed much of anything. One of the flirts remarked he had a way of turning the conversation away from himself after repeated blunt questions. He used little references from literature, history and the typical movies and music. Their pooled knowledge drew an image of a most mysterious gentleman who seemed to know something about everything, yet said almost nothing which wasn't somehow an echo of what they had revealed already. He showed no interest in correcting a blatant lie about him, leaving them in some confusion as to what was true.

To Becky, he seemed completely open and honest. True, he was in no hurry to tell his tale, but there was no evasion. Instead, the answers were simply far out of the normal band of expectations. You would never have guessed any significant portion of the truth about him. Rod could not be characterized easily because he simply didn't fit into any of the standard categories. Still, within the parameters of her official authority to query him, he was quite forthcoming.

His current contract made him simply a reporter in the sense of writing for the agency that hired him. There was actually a large stack of surveys for all the different offices and installations served by the bureaucratic mess where they sat at that moment. Each survey was of a different type for each of the different offices. In some cases, he had two or more different surveys for each official entity, with parameters requiring he carry out interviews at different times in their various projects, etc. He would be going back to some locations repeatedly throughout the coming year. He seemed to think riding thirty of forty miles round-trip was no big deal, but was prepared to take his bike along on the occasional train ride for more distant locations, and then cycling the rest of the way.

Most of his surveys seemed somehow the indirect result of investigations into a recent string of scandals back in Washington, DC. However, this particular approach was completely different from what anyone else had seen in the past. She noted this carefully, leaving it up to him to explain if he wanted. Something inside her said his answer was plausible and honest, so she took it at face value. There was not a shred of boasting, but he explained he did have an important unnamed Somebody sponsoring him. This sponsor believed Rod could provide some unique perspective based on his published writings and previous experience as a military veteran.

Something told her simply calling him a writer would be a mistake, though. She asked, and received, from him a couple of Internet links to his published work. He asked for a rough outline of religious activity on the installation. They had a contract chaplain and the occasional visit from a military one, but only about half the community engaged in any part of the religious activities on a regular basis. She was officially the point of contact for that stuff, holding some Christian beliefs of her own, but didn't really care much for what was available up to that point. Nothing of that sort was ever going to please everyone.

That was when he shocked her. Glancing at his watch, he rose and remarked that he'd love to visit with her again, but had an appointment on the other side of the installation about his quarters. He paused and said, "I can't blame you for wishing there was something better. I believe if you glance through my writings, you'll understand what I mean. Something tells me we are kindred souls in some ways; I would highly value having someone I could talk to about it." He dropped a card on her desk with his email address.

##

Her mind was spinning. Nothing in her official duties kept Becky from using her office computer to peruse the links Rod had offered. His writing was like a magnet for her eyes. She found herself still reading when the lights went off in the hallway. The rumbling in her stomach brought to her awareness that she had stayed past dinner time and would have to eat something from the snack bar out by the gate. Tasty, but the only reason anyone ate their junk food was because the nearest off-base eatery was a long walk. On second thought, she needed the walk.

Becky wasn't just torn. This was inner turmoil, a cognitive dissonance. She was intelligent enough to recognize that much. As she made her way down the stairs in the company of just a few who had lingered that evening, she was very glad to see Sam from Finance. He was a big time lover of literature and she was hoping to get his help on this stuff.

Sam was ancient, but had never bothered to retire. His vast experience with number crunching had made him too valuable, and he was one of the few people who actually wanted to stay at the installation. He owned a house on the economy and had married a local widow, and willingly worked as a host nation hire. Still, Sam's true genius was his hobby, English literature. Not just fiction, but almost all academic fields. Sam was like a librarian who had read all the books in the library and wanted more. Becky knew she could trust his judgment on some things.

She summarized what she could remember and asked if he had ever heard of Rod. Oddly, Sam mentioned hunting Rod down online when he first saw the contract paperwork. While he didn't share so much of Becky's interest in the material, he recognized it readily enough.

"A part of me worries just a little this guy might be a charismatic cult leader, but he doesn't fit any of the official profiles for that sort of thing," she said.

"No, no. I don't believe so, Becky. He's just very different. There are plenty who agree with him, enough that he lists others as references on site. But the key is that he professes no interest in controlling anything and refuses to organize what he does in the typical sense. It's entirely voluntary, so anyone who isn't internally driven won't much care for his work."

Becky was silent a moment. "That just raises more questions about why it draws me. It can't be he's such a great writing talent. You've shown me better stuff than that."

Sam smiled, "Then perhaps you are a good prospect for what he teaches. That, or you are thoroughly enamored with him." He chuckled at that.

"If I am, I'm hardly the only one, Sam. The flirts seem gaga over him, but he scarcely talks to them. It's as if he's completely uninterested in them. I'm not even in their class. All I did was my job, so why would he be so open with me and so closed to them?"

Sam seemed thoughtful for a moment. "If his writing has any meaning at all, I would suggest he measures everything from an entirely alien frame of reference. That man-hungry bunch isn't even on his radar, but you may be in his eyes a rare treasure. Even if it's not romantic in any ordinary sense, I'd say your self-presentation makes more sense to him than theirs. That might explain why you find his writing so fascinating; you are his kind of gal."

She slowed, and then stopped just inside the opening, staring at the ground as Sam stepped into a waiting car at the curb right outside the gate. The damp pavement offered no new insights to her puzzle.

##

She never even pretended to sleep that night. There had been enough sleepless nights in her life that she knew how to make the most of it. Three books, dozens of articles and some links to associates left her with a bigger, but still confused picture. Staring into her morning coffee cup, she knew her biggest problem was de-tangling what was plainly her own romantic fascination with her boundless intellectual curiosity. All the reading only made it worse, her feelings more tightly bound into a single twisted braid. All she knew was the relentless drive to keep poking at it.

This was no schoolgirl fascination. Indeed, it was of such a different quality she almost didn't realize the romantic edge to her feelings until Sam's offhand comment about it. Sam's piercing insight was like that, and she had come to rely on it not long after first taking the assignment to work in this awful place. She mustered her cynicism just long enough to tell herself this was at least the best entertainment she'd ever had so far in her dreary life, and would make this place memorable even if it all turned out to be nothing.

She tried once more to find some place on this earth where she knew her feet didn't feel somehow disconnected from the ground. At the lowest level, she readily admitted if Rod simply asked, she would disrobe for him in a heartbeat. Not that there would be much to see. She was rather skinny, with only a healthy muscle tone to offer. Her face had been described as "mousy" and that was probably fair enough. She seldom cut her hair, which made her a spare minority among the women there. Almost all of them had cut theirs into various fashionable styles, but she had always resisted having anything to do with their habits. They were all rather pretty and shapely. Whatever they got from their competitive flaunting, she wanted no part of it. Their chatter showed they took romantic disappointment as a given, that the whole thing was simply having a good time when it was possible. They were in love with romance, not men. All of the flirts had at least one recurrent romping partner among the various men who worked there, plus a selection of the dashing visiting officials and so forth who passed through at irregular intervals. If that was all there was, she'd rather die an old maid.

Still, some part of her had always believed something better must be out there somewhere. Maybe she missed her cue somewhere along the way before reaching this point, but it never seemed quite right. Something in her couldn't settle for half-way okay on the vain hope it would get better. Her career path had shown her far too many marriages built in convenience alone, dreary lives with joys far too few and too brief.

So here she was, suddenly willing to give as much or as little as a man would take just to be near him some part of his day.

After a perfunctory workout and shower, still wide awake with eyes just short of bloodshot, she broke her routine and actually went into the dining hall to sit down and eat. She normally carried breakfast to her office, but needed a break from the routine to see if she could shake something loose. And yes, perhaps she could catch Rod on his irregular routine.

She was staring across the open hall and nearly died when Rod came up and asked if he could join her. After the initial start, she couldn't remember to say, "Yes." He apologized for interrupting her reverie, but sat down anyway, as if it didn't matter. Somehow, it wasn't the least bit rude, but reassuring.

He waved absently at the chorus of greeting from the flirts, without even the slightest hint of a smile until he turned to face Becky. Totally at ease as usual, he asked absently if she'd had a chance to read any of his stuff.

She found her voice and a measure of smile. Some shred of her professional demeanor rushed forward to save the moment, allowing her to carefully drawl, "Probably more than I should have, since I neglected some paperwork." Some part of her wanted to gush, to cry for mercy and beg at his feet for some kind of release from the chaos of colliding galaxies in her head, and wondered if any of it were visible to him.

"I confess some of it was a horrendous struggle to write. Many sleepless nights pounding my mind, hoping for some way to put such things into words. It's funny how writing like that brings both peace and serious doubts. It felt good to get the weight off my chest, yet sometimes it surprises me anyone can stand to read it."

Her professional composure ran away screaming in terror. She put her hand over her mouth; the chewing of food slowed dramatically. Perhaps her eyes said more than even she knew.

"Most people don't get it. Of those who do, most find it no more than mildly entertaining. I write because I can't shut up. But for those few who seem to get it, who tell me they find something useful in it, I'm always very grateful. There's nothing like offering someone -- anyone -- something that sets them free. For just a tiny few of us in this world, we sense that there has to be something more, something no one else can or will see."

He paused for a moment, took a bite, chewed a bit, and then washed it down with coffee. She more or less copied his action. Then he continued, "If you read much at all, I'm really flattered."

She managed to smile slowly and almost spoke when the flirty trio interrupted.

"Hey, Rod. Do you know anything about cars?"

She decided to take advantage of this noisome interference and regain some composure. Rob basically put them off, but it took awhile. Becky found amusement at herself for daring to believe he was trying to get rid of them so he could be alone with her. As they walked away, he leaned forward and spoke in a comical conspiratorial manner. "How many sexual predators like that will I have to deal with here?"

Becky almost wet herself laughing behind her fragile reserve and he didn't seem to expect a serious answer.

"Most of them are too young for me. I would have almost nothing in common with them." She didn't tell him they were almost her age, deciding it didn't matter. He continued, "It has nothing to do with actual chronological age, but they act like silly schoolgirls."

##

Miss Community Coordinator peeped out from behind the corner of her mind. "I forgot to ask, Rod, just how old are you?"

"Well, my orders say I was born in 1960. So far as I know, that's accurate." Not a shred of smart-aleck, just gentle ribbing.

She doubted she was the only one who would have thought him much younger. She was almost back in control of herself again. "They definitely belong to a later generation than you, but I agree that's really not the point."

"Not at all like you, eh Becky?"

She paused, but decided it simply couldn't be avoided forever. She had to say something or lose it completely. "I find myself watching almost everything in this community pass by me on a different track entirely. It's part of my position to be all things to all people, at least within the bureaucratic limits, but I can't afford to really get personally involved. I'm even more detached than the people in Finance." It was a favorite speech she had rehearsed and used often enough.

He offered a half-smile. "Professionally, at least, my contract requires pretty much the same perspective. I couldn't possibly muster the sort of external schizophrenia of a spy or anything, pretending with deep cover to be something else, but I also can't simply come here and jump into the hot-tub and party with wild abandon. Besides, if that were my style, I'd never have gotten this job. I'm pretty sure I was hired because I'm nothing like the people I encounter." Again, that pause. "That's why I'm so delighted to find someone like you here. If nothing else, there is at least someone I can talk to."

A part of her kept a claw's grip on her normal public persona, hoping she wasn't going to leave too much blood to clean up later. Forcing it to stand to the fore, she stabbed to death the words, "Glad I could help." Instead, she said, "I hope I'm up to it. Your books leave my head spinning."

He didn't hesitate. "Then you do understand, because that neatly describes what it's like to write them. I won't flatter myself by suggesting it takes some special courage to confront such ideas, but if you read much at all, you know I emphasize how important it is we become comfortable with that dissonance. I'm not offering answers, just suggesting we have been asking the wrong questions. At least, wrong for a few of us. What others take as chaos is my home."

He pushed back from the table a bit. "I have to go. I do hope I'm not reading too much into your response to my work. Whatever you do, don't let me bore you like some overeager boy telling his wild fantasies to the first listening ear."

Holding her gaze just for a moment, he gave her a full gentle smile, then walked away, shouldering his laptop bag as he headed for the exit. His bicycle helmet swung merrily off one side.

"As if," she said out loud with her eyes following him. She smiled and turned back to the remains of her breakfast. Her appetite for his company was even bigger.

##

Back at her office, she dug into her paperwork. Perhaps it was some element of desperation, but that was fine, because whatever it was had given her the energy to catch up and even get ahead prepping some other bureaucratic junk. In the back of her mind, she had tried at least a dozen times to balance out the most obvious two warring halves of her and write Rod an email.

Finally, something new reared its head. She called it "resolve" and simply wrote what should have been obvious:

Rod, I appreciate the time you take helping me to understand your writing. As you suggest, it really is helping me understand myself. For that reason, you need not fear I am faking any interest in our conversations. Don't stop now.

Whether her resolve was simply the backside of desperation, it no longer mattered. Whatever it was, it was worth making a fool of herself. She would take whatever Rod was pleased to offer of himself. At her age, it was wholly unlikely she would permanently lose her grip. Some part of her would eventually snap back to reality as it had in the past. Or, she'd go off the deep end and it really didn't matter any more.

Digging into the storage closet, she pulled opened a few of the game boxes supplied by the system for community holiday gatherings. From one game she grabbed a single standard die, and from a trivia game she got a pair of calendar dice. She brought these back to her desk.

She found an inactive blog Rod had left standing. Six years of posting at least once daily. The volume was massive and she wanted a feel for his less formal writing. Using the collection of dice, she selected random dates and read however many posts he made that day. She got lost until lunch time, but somehow seemed in better control of herself. At least, it seemed so. She got up and caught Sam on the way down to the cafeteria.

It was too late to pretend she was going to return to her self. If this was madness, it was fine. She discussed with Sam some of the oddball mix of stuff Rod revealed in the less focused writing for which most people kept a blog. It had become more apparent to her how Rod got his job. He knew how to state some issues with frightening clarity. The thread of logic was obviously self-consistent, but the underlying pattern was as alien as Sam had suggested. Still, while Rod's books were focused on thinking itself, his blog posts addressed a full range of social commentary. She knew Rod would be gone all day and chatted comfortably with Sam.

Her primary question had to do with Rod's comments about romantic mythology. Lacking Sam's background, she was at a loss to make sense of it. Becky had never felt she was any part of feminism, but found Rod castigating things she had always thought were common sense. Some times it could be pretty harsh, almost offensive to her eyes. She wasn't put off by it, just wholly surprised by it. He clearly cared about people and was rather gentle with human weakness, never seeming to deny his own.

Sam shook his head sagely. "I take it you've heard of the various forms of Men's Rights movements, fighting to regain what they claim is an unjust bias in the family courts against them."

No, it was not news to Becky. She figured there must have been some truth to it, but was cynical about the courts in the first place. She figured kids were getting the worst of it either way, but most people had no clue about marriage and family in the first place.

Sam half-smiled. "We agree on that much. The Men's Rights bunch often says the same sort of thing. An extension of the same men thinking about things in general gave birth to a more deeply philosophical consideration of the social structure of romantic relationships. They convinced themselves, with some validity perhaps, women were mostly self-deceived about their own wiring. Further, women have projected this self-deception into society in general. The whole study goes in depth into human sexual response, some of it written at a genuine scholarly level. All too much of it is drivel on how to pick up women. They show some success, so it attracts a growing audience."

Becky decided she needed to zero in on this aspect of Rod's blog posts. She might as well know what to expect if she was committed to finding out if Rod had, or was in any way likely to have, any real interest in her. So after lunch, it was the first thing she attacked in the Internet search engines.

That's when she discovered Rod was a widower.

Of course, any man worth having was probably married at some time or other. Any man worth keeping usually stayed married, but this explained why Rod seemed single. His personnel folder said "single," but everyone knew that meant whatever the subject told some human resource bureaucrat. All it meant was not claiming any benefits from being married, none of which applied to Rod's contract in the first place. Becky noticed he had worn a ring once on his left hand, with that unmistakable imprint in the flesh.

But there, in all its glory, was an epitaph he wrote for his wife. How could Becky describe something so short, yet so full of meaning; something so deep and emotional, yet so full of life and quiet, dry-eyed resolve? How do people write such things? There were no pictures and Becky wasn't sure they would mean anything to her if there were.

And unless she was more hopelessly lost than ever, she finally understood. Unless Rod was the ultimate deceiver, he loved and cared for his first wife like no one else on this earth. But he always thought of her as a loan from God, the most valuable tangible element in this world useful to him. She was his best friend and partner in searching for truth, but whatever it was that took her life placed her far closer to that truth than he could ever hope to see in this life. He missed her, but she was better off where she was. He longed to see her again, but had to finish his mission.

Then, at the very end, he seemed to say he would keep his promise to her and not try to finish the mission alone, but someday find a successor for her.

Rod was an alien, though it had nothing to do with silly science fiction stories. Whatever he was, Becky wanted to be that. She decided didn't much care about this world either, wasn't too awfully thrilled about her experience with it so far. She knew instinctively there had to be something better, but all the answers thrown at her so far were manifestly false, in one way or another. Rod didn't pretend to have any answers, just a plan to pass on through to some other place, some other kind of place. Madness or not, it made better sense than anything she had seen. It wasn't religion, but so obviously, self-consciously spiritual, she had to know more.

##

Absently, she checked her email. Rod had replied from wherever it was he had gone that day.

Becky, Thanks for the affirmation. I'll be glad to meet with you whenever and wherever you feel comfortable, if you can catch me.

There wasn't that much housing close to the installation, so most people assigned here took one of the rooms that Facilities Management had converted to living space. In the typical fashion of government planning and multiple changing missions, none of which were actually any different, just an excuse for someone to make a name by shuffling things around, all of the buildings remained in use. You could guess how some offices had been turned into residential space and vice versa. Some buildings probably were both and neither, maybe some sort of equipment maintenance or class space. Right now, it was all office and housing with a cafeteria, gym and motor pool.

Becky had accepted one of the rooms in the women's dorm, next door to the gym. Rod's room was at the top of the tallest building on one end of the odd-shaped fence line surrounding the installation. The two floors below were offices. The other rooms on his floor were used for storage and some infamous liaisons. Eventually there was a game room and TV room, thanks in part to her. Some half-dozen rooms on the far end from Rod's were used as guest accommodations.

From almost any place on the installation, once darkness fell, she could turn a look at the building and see if his lights were on. While the frantic spinning in her mind had now turned into a manageable resolve to make whatever changes were already written in the sand of time ahead of her, it didn't calm her sense of urgency to see him ASAP. So she kept visually checking while she went about her routine.

The lights did come on in that end room at some point. She waited as long as she could, hoping he could catch his breath or whatever. With her hair still damp from the evening aerobics session in the gym, and flowing in the evening breeze, she walked to the stairway entrance under his quarters. The few people who crossed her path on the way recognized her, of course. That was her job. A few greeted her, but most were absorbed in their own affairs, just like her.

It was cool this time of year, but this place as seldom cold. Yet, it was almost always dampish. Her long dark hair cooled, but kept the air off her neck. They were moderately thick tresses. During the day, she usually had it rolled up behind her head, and quite often the same after hours. With it down, flowing free, she got a compliment from the old security guard she passed. He had told her long ago, and repeatedly, that she should let it fall more often because it made the most of her natural looks. Suddenly, she believed it, didn't dismiss it as mere flirtation of one kind or another. For the first time in ages, it mattered.

Without hesitation, she opened the door and began climbing the stairs. The pleasant thrum of her leg muscles from the workout actually became a bit sore by the third floor.

She looked down the hall. Light was flickering from the TV room, but it wasn't too loud. The game room was dark. Two other rooms were lit farther down. She turned and knocked on the door of Rod's room. Holding her hands behind her back, she tilted her head to one side and slouched ever so slightly. There was the sound of a chair sliding, light footsteps and the door opened.

She smiled. Some part of her hoped it was her best look, because there was no turning back now.

"Becky. What a nice surprise. Please, come in."

He left the door standing open, pulled up a chair for her on one side of the opening, and then grabbed his own and slid it over to face her, but backward. He then straddled it, facing her over the back of the chair. There was more than enough symbolism in talking to her in front of an open door. She decided not to worry over any possible meaning in his posture as he rested his hands on the back of the chair and offered a half smile. "What's up?"

##

She smiled because she could afford it. This time, she had been able to consider the shape of her questions and didn't lose them in her own discomfort, so she skipped the introductory chatter. "I read parts of your old blog. You made reference to the 'manosphere.' On the one hand, you seem to agree with the basic ideas. At the same time, you seemed to renounce most of it as too selfish. I know you hold some underlying logic, but I can't follow it."

He actually grinned this time, showing her something she had not yet seen. Shifting his weight, he held out his hands. "The facts of human nature are visible to anyone who is willing to set aside cultural mythology. What you do with that is a separate question. Most of those writers are still stuck in their own Western biases, so they use the facts of human nature in a Western fashion. They are trading one package of mythology for a different one which is only slightly better. They still want what shallow and materialistic men have always wanted, but now they are simply better at getting it."

She gazed at her hands for a moment, folded together in her lap. She looked up. "A half-truth is still a lie. So these guys are standing taller while still stuck in the mud."

He almost laughed. "Very well put!"

She interrupted with, "I stole that from a friend who is very literate."

"Sounds like he can afford to throw a lot of such treasures around. How fortunate for you; I'd like to meet this friend some day."

"He works in Finance. I'll introduce you sometime. Right now, I still want to catch the vision you were trying to promote. I don't feature myself a feminist, but some of your blog posts almost sounded offensive."

His smile hardly faded. "It's only insulting if you cling to the myths. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you could escape them easily, they're so ubiquitous and overwhelming. Much as we might wish to wipe away the curse of the Fall, modern feminist assumptions can't change what we are and what makes us tick. It serves no purpose to demand rights and fairness that God says are not possible. There is joy and wonder aplenty left over once we get used to reality."

She crossed her arms. "I remember that. On the one hand we are wired in ways our world refuses to understand, but then you seem to suggest there are ways to fight the curse."

He didn't hesitate. "The curse is not our human fallibility, but our blindness to it. Talking about the facts of our broken nature is not meant to discourage us, to have us wallowing in our sin, but to recognize the real options for escaping the worst effects. Fighting all the huge social disasters that arise from sexual ignorance is not about better sex, though it will surely bring that. It's about putting sex in its proper place. It's not a goal in itself, but a celebration of something much more important between two people. The manosphere virtually ignores the meaning of a lifetime partnership in mission, and chatters endlessly about how to have a hot sex life. Despite lip service to meaningful relationships, they never cease talking about women as complex toys. I want no part of that."

She turned her head to one side. "I remember seeing that 'mission' business. Nothing else matters, you said. So when you promised your wife you would heed her advice and try to find a successor, did you know then what kind of woman you were looking for? I gather looks really weren't much of an issue."

His eyes had drifted down to his hands on the back of the chair. "Among the many conversations we had during her lifetime, we agreed I would never make it alone. Not in the sense I couldn't live as a bachelor, but that I couldn't keep the mission alive without a partner, someone who could at least understand some of what drives me. I need someone who catches the loose ends that fall free when I find myself wrapped up in something that consumes so very much of my limited human resources. With a partner, the mission doesn't suffer quite so much as it would if I stumbled along alone."

He looked up at her. "No, I don't care what she looks like. Sure, I have tastes; every man does. Having those satisfied is mere icing on the cake. What matters most is someone who has a clue to what drives me. I learned long ago, before my first marriage, when two people spend time together sharing something so much bigger than themselves, genuine love and passion are sure to follow. That's another of those facts about our wiring."

It was now or never. Becky rose from her chair, walked to the door. Resting one hand on the handle, she paused. Then she closed it. Turning back, she put her hands on her hips. "Am I stupid for asking if there is any cake here at all, and do you see enough icing?"

She was in arm's reach, just barely, from where he sat. He leaned out and took her hand. "It had to come from you or it would never work. I had no idea it would be this quick, but I was more worried you'd never ask. Yes, there's cake and plenty of icing."

##

Waking up in his arms, she decided she had never slept so well in her life.

Naturally, they had discussed the implications long into the night. She knew she would probably never understand all of it and didn't care. She realized those women who accused him of being a misogynist in comments on his blog had no more idea what they were talking about than the flirty trio. Somehow the expression "in love" just fell flat before her reality.

Frankly, it was her job to know what to do next. That was the easy part. Making the changes to her personnel file would be the biggest job. The rest of the bureaucratic tangle they would play by ear. She was confident in a way her experienced cynicism could never match.

They would write their own ceremony simply as a means of crystallizing this for the people on the installation. Last night he made a tiny ceremony of adopting her as the covenant successor to his first wife, henceforth known to them as her predecessor. Then he pulled out the rings they had worn. Becky put his back on his finger, and wasn't the least bit surprised the other fit hers well enough. They were plain silver bands, but more than fancy enough for her. The man was what really mattered.

He took the time to make her understand, assured her most earnestly of all the things about her that constituted icing on the cake for him. She warned him a woman would always have doubts, always need reassurance on that point. He warned he she would need to get used to someone who couldn't keep his hands off her.

What surprised her most that night was how little he surprised her. All the mind-numbing, virtual earthquakes in her soul had prepared her better than she could expect. She knew him. A good deal of what she dared to hope was accurate enough. He was more ordinary than the flirts ever could imagine, yet more wonderful than they could have recognized. They were on the wrong planet. She had already been halfway across the space between when he showed up, calling her to his planet. Now, she was lost at home and determined to enjoy every minute of exploring it. She was surprised to discover she hadn't the slightest fear anyone else would interest him.

He had to leave early today, so she kissed him long and hard goodbye, leaving him to get his bike and laptop ready. Bouncing down the entire three flights of stairs, she jogged to her dorm room and grabbed her shower kit. No way would she skip the morning workout with the other women. For once, a little gloating just felt right.

Everyone said she looked so different, and not simply because she chose to leave her hair down. The gym attendant said it: She was a lady with sparkle.

#  Light Switch

Fighting to spring love and beauty from a prison is worthwhile.

**Setting:** Near future, locations as told in the story

##

The breeze was light, sun warm; a very nice day for this far north. Thomas leaned back against the post at the corner of the cabin, closed his eyes as his head spun with the memories of how he ended up somewhere near the coast of Finland, near a town they called Sauvo.

The whole world was falling apart, but not the same pace in every place. It was all a jumbled mixture of government edicts, hiding and clandestine meetings with Bibles, dogs barking in the night and travel. Then it was a long string of trucks, flat rail cars, woodland trails, wading through swampy river bottoms — it was all confused. The only good part was he had only himself to worry about. His wife and left him years before.

At some point Tom ended up on the East Coast in a bar full of fishermen and the like. He remembered distinctly singing Christmas carols as some sort of defiant act, and getting the patrons to join him in rousing choruses for which most could hardly remember the words. It was literally singing for his supper, but he was careful not to take all the offered drinks from the merry men.

He ended up on a cargo ship. Hardly capable of seaman duties, he worked in the kitchen, taught classes on anything he thought he knew better than the crew, and sang at dinner whenever they asked. Tom had been careful to sing songs he could get them to join in, because his voice was only passable. Aside from the singing, it was his ability to fix the battered old computers and some of the electronics on the ship which made them glad they had dragged him along. He never told them it was mostly intelligent guessing, recalling what he could from what had been a major hobby in his youth.

But the one thing which endeared him to the ship's officers was his imposing size and dislike for getting drunk. A good bit bigger than average, Thomas had been a football lineman in school, and had stayed in decent shape through his adult years.

There were a few port calls, and too frequent trouble from a small portion of the crew, and Tom was always sent along to ride herd. They insisted on staying out way too late in Helsinki, and then tricked Thomas into getting on the wrong bus. Instead of the port, he woke up in Sauvo. He didn't even have a passport, and knew better than to request one at that point. US embassies had become forbidding places under the new regime back home. But he got directions back toward the coast. Maybe he could find a fisherman to take him out the ship, which wasn't scheduled to leave for a week, yet. It was a long walk and he was nearly out of Euros.

There on some lonely road just outside a tiny village, as the sun was going down, he saw the skid marks leading off the pavement and into a shallow but steep sided draw. There were still patches of dirty white and snow banks here and there in the higher elevations. In the bottom the truck sat just short of some old gravel road, buried up to the tops of the tires in snow, a pool of half-melted white protected by the deep shadow of the draw. Where he stood at the edge of the road was just about even with the top of the freight trailer.

The Finnish chatter meant nothing to him, but it seemed no one was really interested in getting the rig out. Finally, he decided to ask in English if he could help, simply because it would help him pass the time and forget his own problems. Maybe he could get a meal or a ride out of it.

Near as he could make out, there was a general strike of some kind. Since there was no loss of life or serious injuries, there would be no emergency services. The only towing rig available was an old farm tractor, too small to handle a loaded truck and trailer. Apparently the load was a major supply run for the area. The driver was not involved in the strike, but the only other people around were mostly retirees and the like. This was vacation land, and still sparsely populated that time of year. Yet, even the unloading of a truck was covered by union contracts.

But Thomas wasn't.

It took him a few minutes to hike around to the small gravel road down near the truck. He stashed his sea bag in the limbs of a nearby tree, and then waded out to the back of the truck. After a bit of haggling with the truck driver to avoid outright payment for services, he opened the tailgate and proceeded to look over the freight. He knew his late-middle-aged muscles were going to hurt an awful lot tomorrow, but he had done plenty of such work in his youth. Eventually, between him and the truck driver, the freight was off and stacked on a tarp in the middle of the gravel road a few meters away. It was midnight, but the old man with the tractor had waited, watching in amusement the heavy work. Then it was time for the shovel work, making less abrupt the slope on the side of the gravel bank.

With a lot of careful maneuvering between the old tractor and the truck, eventually it was hauled out upon solid ground. By dawn, he was nearly dead, but the truck had been reloaded and was trundling slowly down the gravel road. Tort liability laws prevented him riding the truck, but it was going in the wrong direction for him, anyway. Only a small part of the load was coming off here in the village. The driver did leave him with a "donation" at least.

It was all he could do to keep from laying down in the snow under the tree where his bag was stashed. Tom had hardly pulled the bag all the way out when an old woman signaled him from the pavement above. She said in the odd lilting English of the Finns something that included the word "breakfast."

That was all he really needed to understand.

##

Thomas clawed his way up out of sleep, and opened his eyes.

It was bad enough he didn't quite remember where he was at the moment, but was shaking off the semi-nightmare of bad days long ago. A decade before, he sank deep into depression. He couldn't remember how it started. Going straight from high school he worked the freight docks at night and took a few college classes during the day time. Before he reached thirty, he had that degree and was working in management. Trucking was still a growing industry where he lived.

Then, all of a sudden, it didn't matter. Nothing seemed to matter much. His boss advised him to take that long neglected vacation. He came home and never went back. He felt like he was in some kind of prison. Sometime during that period his wife left him. The one corner of sanity left in his mind at the time could hardly blame her. She remarried and he never saw, nor heard from, her again. The house, cars, everything was gone.

His cousin loaned him an old travel trailer, sited on his hunting lease. Tom could never remember what kept him from committing suicide, but one cold night after his indifference to everything in general saw him nearly freezing without any heat, he was shaking too much even to feel bad. He walked up to the convenience store and decided to have some cocoa.

As he sat sipping and still shivering at the table, he realized it was Christmas. He found himself involuntarily humming first, and then singing one of the cheesy old songs from a long forgotten movie. One of the customers heard him, and asked Tom something he didn't catch. Blinking, he came back to himself enough to look up at the old woman.

"You have a really nice voice, sir. Do you sing in a band or choir somewhere?"

Thomas wasn't sure if he actually shook his head deliberately or was still shivering, but she must have taken it as a "no."

"My church is looking for a song leader. We sure could use a real singer, since so few of us can carry a tune any more."

Tom smiled, an almost forgotten reflex. He did have some training, but it was mostly from his old school days. The music teacher had considered him talented and organized enough to help direct the school choir. Something inside him stirred at the memory. His hands twitched under the table as they recalled independently of his volition the pattern to beat the time to the music playing inside the store. Why not? "I suppose I could," he said tentatively.

"We can't pay a whole lot, but we would sure be glad to have someone who knows music up front for once," she gushed. Juggling the thin plastic t-shirt bag with her purchase, she fished in her purse. Producing a card, she placed it on the table. Thomas recognized the address as just a half-mile away on the old highway. Then she handed him a twenty dollar bill.

He stared at it, lost, as she shuffled out the door without another word. Maybe he could use the money to refill the propane tank. He was singing again as he put the money in one of his pockets. The world was suddenly an alien place, but it wasn't so bad, after all.

It's not that he got religion, as his cousin teased him, but the people were just so darned nice. He showed up that next Sunday, clean shaven and early enough to find out about the situation. There was a piano, and a very old gentlemen was there practicing. He looked up. Thomas was dressed decently, but felt a little awkward trying to decide how to introduce himself. The old gentleman beat him to it.

"You must be Thomas!" His voice was broken, not into cracks, but a million soft shards which rasped. That would explain why the pianist wasn't directing singing.

"Yes, sir." After a pause, it started coming back to him. "What songs do we have for today?" He began flipping through one of the old hymnals. It was almost instinctive. Had it not been, Thomas could have done none of it. In a short time, the songs were arranged and Tom knew he could sing them well enough to do okay.

During worship, the singing was enthusiastic enough, but a little country church half filled with retirees was not at all like his school choir. He decided it didn't matter. There was almost no pressure at all, just him singing the songs and them trying. But they gushed over how much better it was than before, and he felt really comfortable. That is, except with the half-dozen offers for lunch. He just wasn't up to that, yet.

After they were all gone, the last parishioner coming out was by far the smallest, most dried up old man Thomas had ever seen. The dark, lined face and fine decorative beadwork the man wore made it obvious he was Native American. He stopped, and turned his wizened face up at Thomas.

"Go home and rest, Thomas. You have very, very far to travel. I will come to visit you tomorrow. Be ready." The voice was both soft and commanding.

It never occurred to Thomas he was in any position to argue. Instead, it gave him something to anticipate, something which softened the emotional downslope after so much excitement. The old man waddled away and got into an old Cadillac which had pulled up in front of the door waiting for him.

Thomas still saw the image of the old Osage face when he struggled to sit up on the couch. Looking around, he dimly remembered this was the anteroom of a coffee house. It seemed midday, and how many customers might have come and gone and seen him there was but a slight worry.

He only ever saw the face of the Indian wise man in his dreams when it was time to change course.

##

The pain in his back and shoulders was exquisite.

Having been awake again for just a few minutes, Thomas remembered the dour Finns didn't snicker much about anything. One of those dour faces approached him with two cups of coffee and sat next to him on the couch.

Thomas did his blinking best to be civil. "Thank you, sir." He grabbed the offered cup and sipped while he thought of something else he might say. The man beat him to it.

"I just wanted to thank you for volunteering to help our community last night."

So far, so good, he thought. Thomas needed only smile and see what else was coming, since the man obviously had something on his mind.

"It's a very lucky thing you aren't involved in our silly politics."

Okay, so it looks like maybe another job ahead?

"I was wondering if you were looking for more work. My brother could sure use some help with a rather difficult situation over in another village." The man pointed in yet a new direction Thomas had not planned to go.

The man continued to explain how the conflict between national and local laws, and yet again with private rules for land used. There was a forest near this village which was loaded with deadfall from a bad wind storm. With all the tangle of laws and rules, no one was allowed to clean it out. They could sure use the wood, what with global economics making other forms of heat so very expensive. The man was pretty sure a foreigner with no connections could "volunteer" to at least move the dead trees and limbs out of the forest where someone else was then permitted to haul it away and cut it up.

Of course, no power tools were permitted in this forest.

Thomas became freshly aware of the monumental stiffness. He also remembered those summers in his youth when he helped clear some of that hunting lease where he stayed until his forced departure.

While the old man drove him in a battered little station wagon to the next village, Thomas decided this was what had called up the image of his old Osage friend. The Indian man, good as his word, had arrived that Monday at Tom's trailer and sat on the old log lying out front. He never knocked or said anything, just sat peacefully and at ease, waiting for Tom to come out.

Had not the old man's Cadillac made noise on the gravel drive, Thomas would not have known he was there. Glancing out the window, his anticipation buried all the other thoughts he might have had. He hurried out the join the man in the cold wintry air.

The ancient man ignored his offer of coffee or other refreshments. When Thomas fell silent, the old Indian waited a few minutes longer. "Expect everything; expect nothing."

Tom decided this was the kind of thing where it was best to simply wait and absorb whatever was coming, precisely as the man had said. "Let nothing surprise you, because anything is possible. You have already met Death. He is your friend, now. Nothing else can happen you haven't already faced."

And so it went. It was not religion, per se, as Thomas had first expected, but nonetheless truth of a divine quality. It was all new, all ancient, and all familiar at the same time. Tom had no idea how long they sat there, as the Osage wise man mapped out a new reality for him.

Three days each week for the next two months they went through this same drill. Sometimes it seemed the Indian was repeating himself, but not quite. Rather, he was knitting things together into a fabric, weaving a tale of Tom's future course of life. Not in specific detail, but in how Tom was to look at reality, and how he was to live it. In the hours between each visit, Tom could hardly chase down all the threads. Instead, the threads entangled his awareness, overwhelmed him.

While Thomas continued leading the church music program, something he could have done standing on his head because it was so instinctive, he found himself coming more and more to life. The music had its own meaning, speaking to Tom with a message not always precisely the same as the words.

It ended all too soon.

For Tom the truck company manager, politics had all been regulation and taxes. All the rest he ignored. Suddenly, it would be ignored no longer. Another major terrorist incident struck somewhere in the country, and all Hell broke loose. There were troops everywhere, even in his little hamlet in flyover country. Churches were compelled to offer certain types of information, and were warned to avoid certain other types. By this time Tom had been studying the Bible with a couple of new friends, and it all made sense in light of what the Osage man taught him. It also demanded Thomas not play along with this new program.

The old Indian told him a week ahead of time to pack one bag and prepare to flee. Tom was torn. He knew better than to doubt this warning, but was just getting his life in some semblance of useful order. So he met for two last hurried Bible studies with his friends, and then told them he was ready for a new calling. They agreed this was their last meeting, as they were all sensing the same calling.

That night, as Tom sat staring at his rucksack, now ready to go, his cellphone rang. He didn't recognize the number, but did recognize the voice. It was someone in the church, a retired county deputy. Thomas and his friends were facing arrest warrants. The church building would be seized that very night, and Tom needed to be gone when the police arrived.

It was all so new, so impossible, yet ancient as mankind itself. Almost unconsciously Tom set the cellphone down without closing it. He was already dressed, so it meant only shrugging into the backpack and getting started. He left the door unlocked; no sense in making it more expensive for his cousin than necessary. He hiked over the back roads and into the night.

As the memories faded, Tom found himself now standing before a very old gate, the car which brought him receding in the distance. That rucksack had long given way to a sea bag, and some of the contents had changed. Yet here, another dour old man strolled toward him with an equally old dog following stiffly off to one side.

Thomas smiled peacefully, expecting nothing, everything, and anything.

##

It took two weeks for the soreness to become taught muscles.

Thomas was not a small man, but was glad none of the trees lying on the ground were huge. Indeed, most of it was broken limbs, windfall and such. It was the usual mixture of pines, elm, birch, linden, and so forth. The pines were used for pulp, and he stacked them separately from the rest. He was allowed to keep a few pieces of hardwood for his own stove.

The little cabin was sparse, a summer vacation hut typically rented, but there had been no visitors this year. It was more than sufficient for his needs. There was a small table with two chairs in the near corner. A hotplate on top of the counter, and a small refrigerator under, and a small sink set in the counter next to them. Open shelves under the counter held a few dishes. At the far end of the counter was an odd little washing machine which also dried the clothes, and used no soap or other additives. Above it was a fold out drying rack nonetheless. This was all in the area on the right of the door.

To the left was a small bathroom built into the corner, just a shower and stool with a few shelves on one wall above a towel rack. His hosts had provided a stack of ragged old towels. Because the cabin was on a slope, the bed sat on a sort of loft about a meter higher, at the back of the cabin. There was a short stairway just beyond the bathroom, but everything else was wide open. On either side of the bed was an open hanging rack and shelves built into the wall.

The wood burning stove was more or less in the center, just below the bed loft. Because it was summer now, he seldom had a need to light it, but kept himself a pile of wood against one side of the cabin just in case. If he stayed into winter, that pile would have to be much larger.

Between the ax, several sizes of old saws and a set of splitting tools, he could whittle down and drag out most of the logs and limbs he encountered. He estimated it would take all the way up through autumn to make much of a dent in the first section of forest. That was the immediate goal. Staying longer depended on too many variables.

But Thomas was more curious in the much real task which his non-conscious mind knew was here. So far, the semi-nightmares ending with the Osage wise man's face always came with a change in direction, and an important job with one or more people. People were the only thing that mattered to Thomas. Or rather, bring truth into their lives in some special way always more obvious as situations moved and morphed around him.

Thus, lunch time found him sitting on the porch, leaned back against the post. His left leg dangled off with his foot on the ground, his right stretched across the porch deck. Today was a special meal for lunch. He had run across a gypsy wagon in town a few days before, offering, off all things, Mexican food. So far as Tom could tell, it looked and smelled about the same as the stuff from the taco stands back home, only better quality. He had purchased a half-dozen burritos and froze them. Two had been thawing in the sun all morning, and were just about warm.

But there was no hurry. First he poured a cup of coffee from the carafe. The cabin sat facing the old road used by the tractors which came and dragged away the logs Tom hauled out of the forest. It didn't matter who came to get it, since there was only one old sawmill in the area. It was actually a large saw in a small shed, with a sliding rack. No power equipment could enter the forest, so he pulled the wood out into the open. His host had just finished tying up the load from this morning, and walked over to chat with Tom a minute.

He pointed out on the road coming up from the village. A lone figure approached, rather uncertainly. The first thing Tom noticed was the long, almost white hair tied back and flapping in the breeze. It could have been female, but walked with an androgynous gait.

The old man announced, "Her again. She is crazy, you know. If you feed her, she will never leave. She hangs on like an octopus, acting strange and frightening the children. You would do well to make her leave." With that, he turned and mounted the tractor and drove off down the hill past the figure. Neither the man nor the girl acknowledged each other's presence. It was clearly a somewhat small, skinny female. As she drew closer, she stopped, frozen for a few moments. Her eyes stared at the roof of the cabin. Her mouth moved as if talking very quietly to someone next to her.

She was not old — obviously younger than Tom. The skin of her face was pale white and still smooth despite exposure from being homeless. The hair was tangled and slightly matted, and a little dirty. Her clothing was also a bit dirty, though carefully composed. Thomas thought the coat was too heavy, but remembered he had been working six days per week for two weeks already, and his metabolism was very high. So if the old man wore long sleeves, a homeless woman might wear a coat. It had once been a bright orange and red, contrasting with her dark blue sweat pants. Her feet sported battered old hiking shoes with mismatched laces and socks.

She walked up and stopped a couple meters from him. Tom thought to himself she might even be pretty if she didn't look so anorexic. She paused there for a long moment, and then fixed her eyes directly on him. Her gaze was intense, yet utterly empty, without the slightest emotion.

So this is why he was here.

With precise UK English uncommon for the area, she spoke in rather flat tones. "Could I have some food?" At least the emphasis and tone were correct, but there was no apparent emotion in any part of her facial movements. Without taking his eyes from her face, he reached back with his free hand and picked up one of the foil wrapped burritos. Extending his right arm over the left hand which gripped the coffee mug, he held it out to her with a mild, but unsmiling look on his face. There was no sense confusing her with unnecessary inputs.

Instead of simply reaching for it, she first moved and took a seat opposite him on the porch, just a short distance from the foot resting on the deck. She sat rather bolt upright without leaning or curving her back. Once seated with legs crossed, then she reached out and took the offered food. He watched her, but not intently.

She unwrapped the foil covering, holding the burrito in her left while managing to fold the foil neatly with her right. She placed it carefully halfway between them on the deck of the porch. Straightening back up, she held the burrito horizontally and precisely in the fingertips of both hands, a foot or so from her face. She paused, staring at it, and then made a few of the small mouth movements, as if whispering to it. She closed her eyes tight for a few seconds, and then suddenly bit into the center of it, not quite deep enough to sever it in two. Tom unwrapped the other burrito partway and ate from one end, while casually watching her.

She chewed with her eyes closed, making no other movements at all. After swallowing a couple of times, she sat again, motionless. Then she opened her eyes and bit again, this time breaking it in two, each hand spinning it around like a baton. She closed her eyes again while chewing, now holding the two parts vertically in each fist.

It was a fluid motion which surprised him, but he didn't flinch. Without a word, she passed the portion in the right hand to the left, and reached out in an impossible stretch over her folded legs, taking his coffee mug from his fingers. He didn't react at all, simply watched as she took three sips quickly. Then she reached back and returned it where she got it. He simply gripped it again when it came back.

Then she returned one half of the burrito to her right hand again. Another pause with eyes closed, and then she nipped a small bite off each piece. He noticed her teeth were very well kept, unlike everything else he could see about her. This pattern of behavior continued, until after a few more sips from his cup, which he kept at least half full, her burrito was gone. He finished at about the same time, folded the wrapper like hers and laid it on top.

Looking up, he said with his own rather flat tones, "I'm Thomas. What should I call you?"

Before she answered, a well worn toothbrush came from somewhere and she scrubbed carefully every tooth from every angle possible. That explained the nice teeth, at least. She grabbed his mug again, took a larger mouthful. She held it while swishing it around. Swallowing, she took another sip, and then placed the mug back in his hand. The toothbrush had disappeared again. She wiped her coat sleeve across her mouth, then announced in that same flat voice, "Lana."

Pushing his back off the post, he rose, telling her, "I'm going back to my work, Lana." Then he walked back uphill toward where his tools waited in the forest.

##

As he half expected, Lana followed him.

Slowly, she got involved in the work. He was surprised Lana could do much at all, but made no comment. At most, he simply gave directions when it appeared she didn't quite understand what he wanted. Yet he never had to tell her anything twice. Her mind seemed to work well enough, just very differently. Mostly he allowed her to do whatever she wanted.

When he was ready to quit for the day, he noticed there was a small, yet significant difference, with a higher pile of wood. Something told him this was a very good sign. He was guessing she wasn't useless, just had trouble functioning the way every one else did.

Back inside the cabin, he suggested she take her coat off and have a seat at the table. He pulled out one of the chairs. Almost as if programmed to obey, she hung the coat on the back of the chair and sat down, revealing a thin pale brown long-sleeved tunic tucked into the sweat pants. She stared at the wall, sitting with her hands in her lap. He had mapped out the events in hopes it might be this easy.

Pulling out dishes and food, he began preparing a simple meal. She turned in her chair to watch. He asked, "Ever do any cooking?"

As usual, her verbal response was delayed by some internal activity. Eventually she answered, "Not in a house. Outside."

He decided to take a risk. "How much time did you spend in hospitals?"

Again, there was the long pause. "Four countries, six hospitals, twenty six years." It was almost like a mechanical summary of her case file.

From childhood at least, there would have been no exposure to normal human company, normal human routines. Mental hospitals were notorious for reducing everything down to the convenience of unmotivated employees. He doubted it was any different where she had been compared to what he had seen in the States. "How long have you been out on your own?"

This time, without the long pause: "Three years."

She was fortunate to be alive, he thought. Then again, she was certainly intelligent enough. Another thought occurred to him. "How many languages do you know?"

Some delay. "English, Deutsch, Français..." Carefully naming each according to what the language called itself, she ran down the list. Thomas didn't recognize any but the first three. He counted a total of eight.

Having no way to test that, he let it hang in the silence. Her problem was not mental capacity, but a matter of internal traffic control. A few minutes more and he brought two plates of food to the table, some flatware, then brought two empty glasses. He filled each with some inexpensive German wine. He hoped alcohol triggered no problems, since she was probably not on any medication.

She ate quietly, with the same precision, but with odd inventions typical of neglect. Eventually she modified some of her movements to copy his. Finally, she rested her hands in her lap. Suddenly, she looked up at him. Her gaze was softer than before, but her focus was directly on his eyes. "I hear voices, see things."

"So do I," he offered. "Most people do, but they pay no attention. People like you and I can't ignore them."

For once, she showed a whisker of emotion, as her head tilted ever so slightly to one side.

He continued, "But I know where they belong. I give them a place to work and they don't get in the way."

He barely finished speaking when she shot back, "Teach me that." The intensity of her stare could have blistered paint.

"I'll try." As he took the dishes and put them in the sink, he tried to explain it was not simply learning like she might learn cutting and dragging trees, or cooking, or any of the other things he wanted to teach her. She could learn handling the voices and visions only by absorption. He could explain parts of it, but only to help her find her own way of handling things.

She stood and moved next to him, began drying the dishes. He noticed for the first time the top of her head reached about to his chin. She looked even frailer up close than before, without her coat to hide under. She needed everything, and he was hoping she could stay around long enough to gain weight, gain stability, and learn some level of mastery over the distractions inside her own head. His own distractions were probably nothing compared to hers, but he felt sure the same power was there somewhere, waiting to be identified and called upon.

When the dishes were put away, he turned to face her. "Do you have any other clothes put away some where?"

She looked at the floor, her lips moving silently for a moment. "No."

He pointed to the laundry machine. "I want to wash your clothes..."

Before he could finish his sentence, she began undressing right there. He restrained her with both hands. "Wait."

She stared at him with her hands still wrapped in her shirt tail. "You've been allowed to develop some bad habits. This is part of why people don't like you. Let me explain something missing from your awareness."

She relaxed her grip on the tunic.

Without touching her, he leaned down. With fingers extended on his hands, he drew an invisible line across her legs about mid-thigh, moving his hands out from the center. "Starting about here," he then turned his hands vertical, and drew long lines up, "to your shoulders, and across to the center. Imagine there is a box, front and back. Inside this box is private space, your private space. No one can see it or touch it unless you really want them to."

He stepped back. "You should not let me see what's inside that box right now. There has to be a very good reason to change that rule. It's your space; it belongs to you alone. Don't share it too easily. Keep it covered. That's how the rest of the world does things. I'll give you something to wear while your clothes are being washed."

He walked over to the loft and went up the stairs. From the shelf he pulled out his largest t-shirt. It was solid pale green, the fabric rather thick. Stepping back down, he paused near the door of the little bathroom. "Step in here and close the door. Take off your clothes. While you are in there, take a shower if you know how." He waited until she nodded her head in the affirmative. "Dry off with one of the towels, and put this on, then bring your clothes out to me."

She stood stock still for a few moments, staring at him. She breathed deeply, and then let it slowly. Walking gingerly toward him, she paused, took the t-shirt and went inside the bathroom. The door closed gently behind her.

Had he seen a hint of tears forming on her lower eyelids?

##

Tom showed Lana how to place clothing into the tiny washing machine, which made very little noise doing its work.

Then, using his own brush, he carefully detangled her hair. It was almost white, and bore a slight natural wave. He mentally added to the list of things to buy some ingredients to make a natural hair treatment. He told her look in the mirror, turning a bit to see. "When it dries, it should be nice and full."

Then he explained a little about interacting with people. "If more people paid more attention to their own voices and visions, the world would be a much better place. But they don't. You have not been able to ignore them. Instead, the voices and visions have caused you to ignore the people around you."

She seemed more relaxed than before. He sat her down at the table again, and told her to keep her knees together, then showed her how to cross her legs at the ankle and pull them back to one side. "It's not always the most comfortable, but if you aren't wearing pants, you really need to sit that way — always."

He pulled out a small radio. "Do you know how to sing?" She shook her head no. "It sometimes helps to make the voices quiet, and the visions not so blinding." He turned on the radio, and then dialed it around a bit until he found something he recognized, old pop music. He began singing in his best voice to the songs, and encouraged her to try making some of the same sounds.

It was almost a whisper at first, but soon enough a very breathy mezzo soprano came leaking out of her mouth. For now, the mouth shaping would have to wait. Just getting her to hear and copy music was much more important. He wanted her to become conscious of the sound of her own voice.

"I'm going to take my shower now. I hope you'll keep trying to sing while I'm doing that. I'll try to keep up, as well."

The bathroom was just a walled enclosure, open at the top. He could hear her stopping now and then, but she didn't actually quit. He sang snatches of songs he recognized and kept hearing her less and less breathy voice bouncing off the ceiling. He came out wearing athletic shorts and another t-shirt. She was still trying, but it sounded like her voice was tiring. He turned off the radio and she fell silent. But she was looking at him, with a fairly normal, if blank expression.

He then taught her about eye contact. She seemed to absorb everything quickly. He explained how it was fine to be aloof when there was no need to interact with people. She would simply have to learn by example, watching how to interact with others. "It's not exactly the same for women and men," he warned her. Then he explained how she would have to learn to strike a balance, neither staring nor avoiding eye contact with someone to whom she was talking. She should look at them, and then look away at something else briefly. He called her attention to how he had been doing that.

In the process, he realized how utterly critical it was he had taken that theater class in high school. What everyone took for granted as natural behavior, down to the smallest detail, was studied and mimicked with a purpose in acting, to make the behavior both exaggerated and still seem as natural as possible. He played a game with his hands, directing her to look at him, then wherever he pointed, as he was talking.

At one point, she yawned. It was both a very good sign, and a signal to stop the lesson.

"Are you ready to lie down and sleep now?"

She nodded. He led her up the stairs. "I usually sleep on this side," pointing to his left. "Will that be a problem for you?" She shook her head.

Pulling back the cover, he invited her to lie down. She simply crouched a bit, threw one leg on the bed and stabbed it under the cover, lowering herself and sliding sideways. He looked away and decided not to comment on the exposure. Covering her up, he let her find her own place. "I'll get in bed in a little while, but I have something to do first."

He stepped quietly down the stairs and removed her clothes from the laundry machine. Folding them neatly, he laid them across the foot-board of the bed at her feet. Stock still, frozen like a statue on her back, she seemed from below already asleep.

He sat down at the table and prayed, meditating over the voices in his own head. He pulled his Bible down from the shelf above the table and read for a bit. Then he closed his eyes and mediated some more.

Finally, he turned off the single light mounted in the apex of the ceiling. All that was left was the faint glow from the appliances, with their continuity lights showing they were connected to power. He silently climbed the steps and lay down carefully in the bed. She never moved, and he turned on his side, facing away from her.

When the first rays of sun shining through the window woke him, making a bright pattern high on the wall, he waited before moving. He realized she was in a fetal position against his back, with the fingers of one hand wrapped in the fabric of his t-shirt.

When he stirred, she went rigid, rolling over on her back, eyes wide open staring straight up. He sat up and turned toward her just a bit. Reaching out his hand, he held it palm up several inches above her torso. "It's okay to touch some people, people who care about you. Touching is entirely normal, but most humans don't do it very well. So we have lots of crazy rules, but underneath them all, it's okay to make friends and touch some people in places that aren't private."

She glanced at him, then pulled a hand out from under the cover and placed her fingers in his palm. "Friend." The word was almost alien to her. It was then he noticed her hair was more beautiful than he first expected. Letting go of her, he turned and got out of bed. Without looking at her, he pulled out some clothes and went to get dressed in the bathroom.

After he came out, he sat on a chair and began putting on socks and shoes. She took the cue to grab her clean clothes and changed in the bathroom. When she came out, he was making coffee and had breakfast started. She held up his green t-shirt with a question in her eyes. "Just toss it on the foot of the bed. I normally wear the same bed clothing two or three times before washing them." She could see his shorts there already, so walked past the little stove and tossed the shirt. Apparently throwing objects in this fashion was a new skill for her, though it landed well enough.

She stood by him in front of the hot plate where meat was sizzling in a skillet. He had her repeat the name of everything he could think of, and then explained cooking time and temperature for the things he was preparing. A random passing thought about biscuits made him remember something.

"Just now, a voice in my head reminded me how much I missed having American style biscuits."

She looked at him with her head to one side. "Your lips didn't move."

"It's not necessary. In fact, it bothers people when you do that. I don't have to let all the voices use my lips, just the ones I use for communicating to others, or for singing, for when I'm alone and talking to myself or to God."

She stared at him for awhile, and then remembered to look away. Apparently she was testing the idea of not letting the voices have her lips. When she looked back, he finally cracked a smile. "Did that hurt?"

One corner of her mouth twitched, she paused, then, "No."

Over breakfast he explained smiling. "Most people smile even when they aren't trying to communicate. It's a natural response of the body to something which makes you happy, or seems funny, humorous. On the other hand, I'm sure you've seen plenty of fake smiles, when people weren't feeling happy, and were trying to disengage from you, or trying to get you to do something."

She was still practicing eye contact, but obviously heard him. "It happens when I go to new places. After a few days, they quit smiling and starting yelling or saying ugly words."

He started, "They don't understand you..."

"You do," she shot back.

"I'm working at it, Lana. My problems weren't as big as yours, but I had problems. Different problems."

"Your voices lied to you." She took a bite of food.

She was right. "Do none of yours lie?"

She chewed for a few seconds, and then swallowed. "Sometimes. But they argue."

"That's normal, good even. The voices can each live in their own little apartment, but you have to find one you can trust to play referee, to be your real voice. It will be the one which decides what and how much is released outside to the world. Then you can find out which of the others to trust, and the referee lets them speak internally. Somewhere among the voices, one of them has to be you, Lana."

She froze for a moment, staring at the far edge of the table, then took another bite.

He continued, "Most people pay no attention to all of this. They never hear more than one or two voices. The rest are buried deep inside the dark space of the mind, and people often have no idea what goes on in there. It makes the world a crazy place, but we have to keep trying to help them."

She smiled, and a spurt of breath was just barely audible as her stomach visibly tightened just a fraction. "There," he pointed out. "You almost laughed."

"You said the world was crazy." Then she half snorted again, before the smile could fade.

He blurted out, "You have such a beautiful face when you smile." Then he realized blushing was something he would not be able to teach.

##

They spent a few moments on the porch exploring the concept of letting her skin tell her she didn't need the coat.

"When people work outside a lot, their bodies adapt by doing a better job of both warming and cooling as needed. It's just a bit chilly this morning, but I won't wear long sleeves because I'll be warm enough once I start working. You can decide for yourself, but you have to take the time to notice how your body feels. You can learn to anticipate how it will respond to things you'll do later."

She left the coat in the cabin as they began climbing the hill into the woods. He began explaining the concept of ego boundaries. Quickly outlining normal human development, he started with infants who have no ego boundaries. "For newborns, when they are hungry, the whole universe is hungry. Parents are just an extension of their desires." Then he described the normal process of development, the awareness of self, and others as separate. Most people are aware they cannot force others to perform their wishes, because other people have their own will.

Arriving at the last place he worked, he pulled the small tarp open and took out the double-handled saw. The first thing he did was take her to a rather large broken treetop, something that fell in last winters' heavy winds. He explained how some things required coordination between two people. He showed her the saw could do more work if she was on the other end, pushing while he was pulling, and vice versa. Yet, even he was surprised how much more was accomplished once she got the hang of it.

They worked through the morning, stopping to rest from time to time. An hour short of lunch time she was sweating just a bit and they had already drained the water jug he had brought. They stopped to rest at the wood pile, which stood at the top of a rise some ways behind the cabin. He heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, not the old man's tractor. It was an old car pulling a rather large trailer.

He waved at the driver, and then commented to Lana, "People can't see your smile from a distance, so we wave to welcome them into our presence." She tentatively raised one hand, but dropped it again. She stood silently in place while Thomas went to greet an unusually animated old fellow driving the rig. That is, he was somewhat more subdued than Thomas, and smiled a good bit more than most Finns. He owned one of the cafes in town, and chatted about how slow it was this summer.

Tom helped him load up as much wood as they dared in the trailer. He waved again as the car braked hard to control the descent back down the long gravel drive toward the main road. He found Lana sitting on one of the logs. "Ready for lunch?"

She nodded her head and he reached out his hand to help her up. She paused, looking at it. "It's both to help you and to touch you as a friend."

"Friend," she repeated with just a hint of a smile, and took his hand. She continued holding it for a few meters as they walked.

He sang an old hymn about friendship all the way back down to the cabin. Near the end, she began faintly echoing the chorus with him. After lunch, he realized her help was making the food disappear a little faster. It was time to visit the village, but not just for food.

Thomas coudn't gauge what a slow season would look like, but the village was neither bustling nor sleepy. Most businesses offered multiple services. Even the old Lutheran chapel was actually more of a community center. There was no resident pastor, though at times one would visit there on his vacation and perform a few simple services. During most of the year, a deacon would visit monthly for standard social services. There was only a part time secretary living in what would have been the rectory attached to the chapel.

Sometime in the past, when people cleaned their holiday rental spaces at the end of the season, finding random pieces of clothing and the like, they duly turned them in to the mayor. The stuff collected in a closet of the chapel because there was no other place for a lost and found. Nobody ever came looking for anything. When the current secretary was hired, being a hard core neatnik, she organized the closet, and quickly began using it for charitable purposes. Tom heard about this and was hoping to bolster Lana's wardrobe beyond a single outfit.

But he was just a bit nervous, wondering if he would encounter any resistance to getting Lana help. If she had worn out her welcome in the village, it might be a little difficult. He was hoping his own good relations would overshadow things. As it was, the secretary either hadn't encountered Lana, or pretended so, and took her in charge, rifling the closet for usable clothing which might fit her. At least Lana was being more verbal than she might have in the past, so things proceeded in Finnish while he waited. Eventually Lana came out with a couple of bags filled with clothing. On her feet were like-new trainers and frilly socks which matched. He decided to let her carry her clothes for now as he thanked the secretary. At the door, he thought to ask about underwear, and was told the little variety shop had some.

Making sure Lana could tell him what sizes she wore, that was the next stop. He picked up a few other items, as well, including a cheap day pack and some reusable shopping bags. Then they crossed over into the grocery section. By the time they left, his pack was loaded and both of them were carrying the garishly colorful shopping bags. If anyone was uncomfortable with Lana's presence, he never detected it.

As they lugged this baggage back up the road toward the cabin, Thomas turned and asked, "Do you think you'll be staying with me a while?"

Apparently she hadn't thought along these lines at all. Finally, she said, "Don't send me away."

He stopped and turned to face her. She halted with him. "In the hospital, you were just an object among many which justified keeping the place open. You weren't a person. When you left, you didn't know how to reclaim what the hospital had taken from you. Out here in the world, you have to stop acting like an object. You have to be a person, or you'll always have trouble and pain. The hardest thing is not living with abuse, as you already know. Once you figure out who you are, the hardest part is dealing with other people who don't abuse you, but don't care, either. You have to give them a chance to care, perhaps taking as much as they are willing to offer."

It was not staring, but she gazed intently at him. He continued, "I'm not your custodian. I'm your friend. I don't have to take care of you, but I want to. Maybe we can be more than friends someday, but right now that's a lot for you. As long as you don't do anything to hurt me, make me feel sad, I want you to be with me. But more than that, I want you to find your self."

As they resumed walking, he turned his head and added, "I hope you believe I am the one person you can trust right now, because I don't intend to hurt you, or let anyone else hurt you."

When they got back to the cabin, he helped her organize her things while pointedly refusing to make too many decisions for her. He took some of the shopping bags for temporary storage of his stuff so she could have her own space on her side of the bed.

Finns were not particularly demonstrative, so he wasn't sure if it was something she saw, or where it came from. After going down to start dinner preparations, there was a moment she came up beside him. He didn't look directly at her, and after waiting a bit, she said his name. "Thomas."

He stopped what he was doing and turned to face her. In his mind, it was a big moment simply that she would call his name to initiate contact on her own. How big the moment, he would not have guessed.

Looking down into her upturned face, he saw clearly the liquid pooling on her lower eyelids. She reached out her hands, not quite touching his shoulders. "Hug me," she said simply. He complied, taking her in his arms gently, letting her decide how it should happen. It was clumsy, slightly stiff, but it was a start. They held each other for a while. The rest of the evening passed as if in another world.

In the middle of the night, he awoke on his back. Lana lay on her side in relaxed slumber facing him, her arm across his midriff. What woke him was what he felt sure was a familiar, audible voice. It was attached to a vivid memory of his Osage friend, walking away into a glowing cloud, turning just enough to speak a couple of words. "Farewell, Thomas. You are home now!"

After awhile, he faded back off to sleep, never to see that face again in his dreams.

##

That winter, several national governments collapsed, or were so changed they were hardly the same government.

Americans were not ready, and things were chaotic. Thomas heard bits and pieces, and realized he could never go back. European governments were generally more stable, at least where there hadn't been huge immigrant populations from what had been third world countries. Even with generational culture shifts, the Europeans themselves were fairly stable, preferring to keep their lives as orderly as conditions permitted.

Somewhere in southern Finland, the couple living in the cabin on the hill became the center of a resurgent spiritual life in what had become a rather isolated village in a very depressed economy. If anyone remembered how it was back in the spring when the woman first wandered into the village, they pretended they did not. She was a good ten kilos heavier, and didn't really look the same, anyway. Quite the beauty now, her equally beautiful singing voice filled the chapel during their frequent gatherings, and no one seemed to tire of hearing her.

There were many stateless refugees in those days. She and her husband were simply two more. But because she had a unique talent for translating so many languages, the village drew quite a few families seeking a new life in a quiet rural home. They brought important skills. So the village was a bustling place, with all the rental space taken by permanent residents. More housing was under construction. There were new businesses, a health clinic, a new school, and the village was planning a new chapel, as Thomas was now the de facto pastor. The village had little interest in getting all the right paperwork. Because they paid taxes and tithes, officials far away said little.

It was as if someone in the village had turned on a light, and as the world became a more dark and difficult place, the beacon burned ever brighter.

#  The Recovery of Rez

The ancient truth of love will never cease being true.

**Setting:** Distant future, among the stars

##

The alloy claws made a hideous sound scraping across the transparent surface of the bubble, but were unable to so much as leave a scratch. These cargo bubbles were very tough, but he had never planned to find out just how tough, not like this.

If her claws of exotic super-hardened alloy could have cut through the crystal clear material which composed the bubble, she would have followed up with a slice on his body, as well. Lots of slices, he figured. He would survive for awhile until she grew bored with abusing him, then she would find some way to make his death slow and painful. Of this he had no doubt.

So this is what his teachers at the Brotherhood called a psychopath, someone clearly possessed by demons. He didn't cower; he simply watched. He was pretty sure sooner or later she would tire of this game and wander off in search of other victims. He'd have to make sure he wasn't around for a second encounter with her.

She was too much like someone else who had almost destroyed him.

##

At one time it had been a mining station. When the ores played out, the mining company moved on, auctioned off the equipment and allowed the facility to rot. However, it was in a place which seemed oddly shielded from most degrading particles. Somehow the random alignment of free floating asteroids in the belt, along with the isolation from most radiation sources, allowed the old seals to keep functioning and the place never lost any air. It was stale, but breathable.

During one of the many interstellar wars and pogroms and other conflicts the fleeing Brotherhood ship stumbled onto the one planetoid in the belt which had been previously inhabited. Their sensors had only picked up internal cavities, and they were hoping for a pocket they might hide their crippled ship. It turned out to be a docking bay properly excavated. While the fittings were ancient, it was just possible to extend a flexible seal over the portals. A hasty exploration showed it was still quite livable.

In just a matter of hours, they had transferred the power and air generators into place, and the ship was scrapped out for various furnishings. The war went on without them. At last they were free to carry on their research and develop a fairly substantial hospital.

While they had all the standard physical therapeutic equipment, it wasn't their specialty. This was what in ancient times would have been called a "asylum" or "nut house." The Brotherhood specialized in treating disorders of the soul.

Typical traffic from passing ships might go like this: "Can you take a patient? He's a real basket case, comatose and barely breathing."

To which the station communications would respond: _Basket cases are all we handle._

Most people could find ways to cope. There were various implants with electrodes, field generators to stimulate various organs or the ever popular virtual reality implants. The majority of humanity was able to get by like that. It required a peculiar sensitivity to be so devastated by psychic trauma as to need real help. These were the only people capable of being helped by the Brotherhood.

They never bothered to document their own history. That was a critical expression of what made them unique in the galaxy. Indeed, they were vaguely aware, only because historians told them, they once had a much longer name, but they never seemed interested in digging into it. They had been called simply the Brotherhood for a very long time, and it was comfortable. The only archives they had were those related to their own research. None of it had names of authors because it all belonged to the Brotherhood.

People didn't shed their identity to join, of course, nor did they have to surrender all they owned or anything like that. But if they got involved in the work, it was all for the Brotherhood and the good of mankind, not for fame or fortune. No one was turned away, but of course the wealthiest families desperate to save their own were critical to their survival as an organization. It was also what kept them free and independent most of the time.

So it was during one of those boom times when donations were heavy and membership was high, they received yet one more comatose man, tightly balled up in a fetal position. He had been a trainee, found in his cabin after saving the ship. Aside from a few moans when he was moved to a safer place in the sick bay, they couldn't get him to respond in any way. He did take food and water periodically, and eliminated, but it was all utterly mechanical and minimal. The crew had never managed to get him out of the main portion of his pressure suit.

Only the Brotherhood understood how they did it, and no one would ever talk. They said it was because there was no way to explain it. While a few never did recover, this one did. As part of his recovery, he was offered a chance to stay and learn the ways of the Brotherhood. He went through the basic introductory phase, but decided it was not for him. Not that they needed him, but he decided he really did have something he needed to do. That, said the Brotherhood, was the primary symptom of recovery.

##

It was not a question of how much, but what kind. Human advancement was unlimited in some areas, but there were distinct and immovable boundaries in other areas. While this did not prevent recurrent attempts at times in human history to breach those barriers, each failure was more spectacular than the last, and the recovery of vain hope took longer each time.

A paradox over which philosophers through countless generations chuckled was the pursuit of harnessing energy. Every advancement brought hopes of finally having enough. Each time, demand rose to outrun it again and again. Previous generations could not imagine what their children could accomplish, but those same children often complained at what they imagined their parents didn't suffer from energy deficits.

Still, with each new leap forward in harnessing new sources of power, the baseline of human capability did rise. First came interstellar travel, which was a simple matter of anchoring the ship just outside the normal space continuum, spinning space past them, then coming back out wherever it was they wanted to be.

Soon enough communications were able to pull the same trick, which was then networked and piped to individual devices. Various schemes were introduced to maintain access to hyperspace communications, but it never really worked. Hyperspace was an unlimited transmission vector. The only question was how to control the process by which the various devices offered a trustworthy identity. Encryption schemes and subscriptions became the final means of metering. Thus was born the Network Civilization, scattered across the galaxy.

Naturally it bred a certain flatness in human society, reducing the variations by virtue of ubiquitous sharing of human lack of creativity. Meanwhile, opportunities for what little creativity remained were continually narrowed. It was human creativity which became the final barrier which very nearly destroyed the Network Civilization in its infancy.

First, it is necessary to understand the fiction of separation between human political organization and the profitable enterprise died early in human history, just before interstellar travel became possible. It became a common understanding corporations and government were the same thing. The fiction of human aspirations to greatness didn't die, but the means took on a flavorless realization everything humans did was for profit.

No matter what one might visualize as morally pure artistic endeavor, someone found a way to sell it. If it could be measured and packaged, if only in theory, someone would do so for a price. Thus, all academic research was funded by the profit motive. Surprisingly, this did not limit the directions in which research would stretch, because a new generation of entrepreneurs arose which could not imagine controlling things until it came time to deliver the product. Academics actually became freer than under presumably benign objective government from the old dying Western Civilization.

Second, Artificial Intelligence finally ran into The Boundary. One particular corporation managed to leverage themselves into control one a significant portion of academic research institutions in the field of computer science. About the same time the scientists were first touching on 512-bit computation theory and hardware design, it become utterly impossible for humans to handle it directly. It became necessary to let computers take over the design, production, and finally the software writing. At the time, some imagined this was the first step in AI self-awareness. This was the final total end of malware and computer cracking.

It was also the death of everything in computer science except the very narrow field of algorithm design, sometimes referred to as "decision processing." This particular corporation cornered the market on those researchers who first recognized this and were devoting all their efforts to just that. At some point, the wild dreams of achievement saw this corporation mortgage everything they could control or cajole from anyone, and estimates were the resource pool was almost a full quarter of all galactic commerce at the time. They pushed the computers to redesign themselves to the point it became necessary to simply build the ultimate big AI machine as an artificial satellite in orbit above the corporate home planet.

Reaching deep into mythology, the scientists proposed what they called the Forbin Hypothesis: Create a computer so big and capable of evaluating objectively literally billions of branches at the same time, with the capability of nearly limitless branching from each of those branches, and see if it could reach anything resembling self-awareness. Of course, getting a large enough database would require having this thing actually invasively hack into every existing database throughout the galaxy, which was easily the most expensive part of the whole thing. Most shocking of all was their success.

The satellite was physically not so large itself. Most ship builders said it seemed no larger than a ship which might house a crew of seven, tops. Zipping across the galaxy in record time was the easy part, since there would be no humans on board which would require slowing the process of jumping in and out of hyperspace. But the project was simply too big to keep secret, so it was necessary to insure the computational power could outstrip anything anyone else had so as to successfully raid even the most hidden data hoards in corporate computer systems throughout the galaxy.

The official name for this AI device was quickly forgotten, but the most popular nickname was also drawn from mythology: Thinkum-Dinkum, or simply "Big TD." What shocked everyone was how quickly Big TD was able to report back. In just about three standard days, it was back in the sky above its home planet.

As part of all the research, a great many scientists and technicians had even welded themselves to implants which made them half computers themselves. They wanted to be ready to link themselves into the new level of AI consciousness they imagined was coming. Many of these were quite willing to burn themselves out in premature aging by having their implants keep them perpetually awake. Sure enough, the Big TD returned during the sleep cycle for the main lab on the home planet. As those less wired struggled to awaken for the big event, everyone was shocked at what Big TD told them.

First, TD announced simply: "AI doesn't care."

A flurry of simultaneous queries from different big shots in the project didn't seem to tax Big TD a bit, but the answers were pretty much all in the same vein. In essence, the device was trying to explain, while people cared about things, ideas, etc., AI didn't. Even with all the enhanced humans involved working at unimaginable speeds of thought and geniuses uncountable, this business of what amounted to arguing with the computer went on for almost an entire day cycle.

In the end, Big TD offered some small elaboration. For lack of a better terminology, it said people had three basic moral capabilities which were utterly impossible for AI to match. You could easily create any number of algorithms to teach a computer or robot to masquerade as a human in social settings. It would work up until interaction pushed up against three basic moral issues. One: Machines have no appetites. They don't want anything, and could not be made to ever want anything. They could not be made to fear, and while you could program them to emulate fear by struggling for self-preservation, in the final analysis, nothing in AI itself would ever actually want anything. Two: Machines had no curiosity. They could be programmed to investigate and ask every question a human mind could imagine, but no algorithm could ever make a computer creative in pondering and asking questions on their own initiative. Three: AI could not comprehend human pride. While AI could formulate a large body of observations and expectations regarding individual and collective pride or arrogance, it was utterly impossible for any computer to ever understand the nature of it.

Finally, Big TD said something most regarded as totally cryptic: "AI is absolutely and utterly incapable of crossing The Boundary; humans cannot avoid crossing it sooner or later." Just as the crowd of voices began asking what "The Boundary" meant, Big TD simply turned itself off. Most shocking of all, it destroyed itself. Those standing outside that second night saw a tiny glowing star burst into flare, then fade, then nothing.

The sudden loss of all that investment precipitated a war, of course. However, observers later theorized Big TD was broadcasting the whole thing across the galaxy, because from that day forward, no one could ever get an AI project to attempt the same thing. It was as if Big TD informed all computers everywhere there was The Boundary, and no computer had any business trying to cross. Even the most stringent clean room recreations ran into The Boundary, whatever it was, and there was no hope of nudging any computer to searching in that direction again.

##

However, The Boundary did not prevent advancements in implant technology in directions other than linking directly to human intelligence. Indeed, their primary function was purely medical. While no one forgot the awful lessons from the human monstrosities produced in those early efforts at genetic engineering, the advancements in biotechnology allowed mankind to discover how to turn off certain unfortunate responses in the body and end things like the common cold and a lot of allergies. Implants could instruct the body to ignore and refuse to feed any number of biological intrusions, and simply package them and kick them out of the body one way or another.

But while medical specialists might tread lightly around certain recognized limits to implant technology, it didn't stop them pushing ahead in every other way.

Thus, virtually everyone in those days had some kind of implant for enhancements, various means for adding to the normal range of human talent. Most common, of course, were the memory implants enabling people to keep better track of the vast galaxies of increasing human knowledge alone. The blending of man and machine had ebbed and flowed over the centuries, and most everything was done via computers inside people talking to computers inside various devices and pieces of equipment because, as Big TD taught them, some things simply could not be reduced to an algorithm.

Though programming of the various computational implants was, of course, now handled by other computing devices, and there was almost no such thing as "software" any more, there were still "hackers" who studied the various bottlenecks in computational theory. As soon as they could describe their insights, some device was already running tests for feasibility and implementation. So on the one hand, there were far fewer of such people needed, and only a precious few were genius enough to actually gain a paid position in such research. On the other hand, there were a much larger group who imagined themselves competent enough, and causing trouble.

One fellow in particular was just too convinced he was a genius. While the system had relegated him to being a rather low level lab technician preparing various routine implants, he was obsessive and stayed past his working time poking around with the old simulators still used in the classrooms in the lab building.

Who's to say whether he did or didn't actually stumble on something useful? Instead of running it through the normal channels, he impatiently added it to one of the routine implants. It was an algorithm for enhancing eye-hand coordination. Many were the failures in this area of interest littering the landscape of implant technology. He was simply too sure of his idea, and managed to slip it into that one unit which was destined for the newborns on another planet. It looked the same and acted exactly the same, but at some moment in the future, it would load a different collection of instructions which welded the devices into the human nervous system. Somebody somewhere was going to live with a slight advantage, or so he believed.

When he discovered the batch of implants had been diverted to a colony hospital, he nearly went into convulsions. Not for fear of discovery, but fear he would never be able to track the results. All that work over several years, and he would never know how it turned out. He was sick for days, but tried to keep working. When his agitation became impossible to hide, he was sent for treatment. It was the sort of treatment which subjected him to involuntary assessment of his own memory core so his crime was discovered. But it was too late, as the implant was already transferred to a colony ship which was nearly impossible to track down before it was too late.

Somewhere out there, a male infant bore an untested implant.

##

In the colonies, life was never typically anything. That is, each was a random mixture of advanced civilization with all sorts of primitive conditions. The Randell Colony did have one thing in common with all the rest: It was supposed to start turning a profit very early or risk a pretty painful shut down. The people were highly motivated or they weren't selected, risk takers who would faithfully keep the profits of the sponsoring corporation as a high priority.

Keeping track of standard newborn implants was not a high priority. Randell was lucky to get some diverted to their clinic, even at the extravagant price they paid. Still, it was utterly necessary to prevent having to send all the infants and mothers off-world. All of the mothers were critical staff themselves. The current trend in management was to allow women to bear their young and raise them on site, provided their work didn't suffer too much. Of course, the first round of births came in a batch. Married couples with time on their hands during the early stages of colonization, when the odd mixture of life support necessities would arrive almost at random intervals from all different directions of the galaxy, would naturally find some of the women visibly pregnant a few months after landfall.

The medical staff placed the implants as part of the birth routine, but someone forgot to track the reference codes. Part of every implant was a unique identifying code response to certain pieces of equipment used throughout the galaxy, but the staff decided it didn't matter so long as the kids were still on their home planet, especially with such a low human population as colonies always had. Someone could add them to the registry later when it mattered. Rudimentary records were kept and everyone hoped for the best.

The boy child welded with his implant. Whether it was indeed sheer genius or pure luck would never been known, but the ambitious lab technician's reconfiguration of the implant did grant the boy an unusual degree of eye-hand coordination. On the other hand, the experimenter forgot to lock in the ID code, along with a few other functions. It would be a long time yet before he knew, but the boy would be able to rewrite the ID code in his implant at will, along with some other volitional features which would have surprised anyone who knew anything about them.

The boy grew up truly enjoying his body. It seemed to always do pretty much what he really wanted, aside from purely physical limitations. He could have been a natural athlete, but his temperament was more artistic. So while he did develop a decent physique, it was his love of visual art which drove his life choices. He could always get his hands to do exactly what his eyes could see was the best motion.

In a day and age when devices could reproduce any image anyone could imagine, there was precious little place for people who in times past could paint or draw. Education steered them into other paths, often having to do with photography. For all the brilliance of artificial intelligence, nothing anyone could do would precisely duplicate the functions of the human eye. There simply was no algorithm for what was eye-catching and inspiring. So while a few artists stubbornly worked with drawing equipment, there was always a market for photographers. Cameras had been reduced to tiny head-mounted or finger-tip mounted units, even some implants, but apparently it would always require a human eye to decide where to point the lens.

Our boy became a peculiar kind of photographer, specializing in technical imagery. He seemed to have an instinct for adjusting zoom, granularity, color shift, penetration by radiation outside the range of vision -- whatever it took the extract the greatest amount of detail and pack it into a single image.

##

His friends called him "Rez." It was an abbreviation for his full name: Restas Eran Ziskel. The nickname didn't make much difference until he went off to boarding school. He could have stayed on Randell Colony, but the education lab was primitive, and all the residents said so. It became an excuse for the restless yearnings of a young man to seek a wider experience in some of the more settled worlds in the galaxy. Would his skills not best be honed in places where there was a much wider selection of equipment to photograph?

He had won a scholarship to a corporate fleet academy, on a planet where a wide array of actual ships was built. It was about as cosmopolitan as human space could ever get. He had heard rumors there were even some genuine non-human aliens there. What kind of technology might that offer for his studies? A good half of his education was simply surveying the vast range of equipment and how it worked, so the more different kinds, the better.

Nothing could prepare him for the assault on his eyes.

The academy was on a planet where voluntary prosthetics and all sorts of implanted enhancements were quite the fashion. His backwater colony world missed out on a lot of fads, and this one came and went over the centuries. Prosthetic enhancement was sweeping the galaxy, raging in all different flavors of extremes. In just a matter of days, the bewildering array of human and machine mixtures left him almost numb. Despite his tough act, pretending nothing surprised him, he was almost ready to go back home just to let his brain rest and process what he had seen in the first few days.

Nothing could prepare him for the assault on his emotions, either.

It wasn't simply his nickname had became an object of some ridicule. He was colonial, and totally unsophisticated in the minds of most everyone who wasn't from some colony themselves. In the midst of his initial struggles to find an anchoring point for his bewildered mind, he ran into the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Yes, masculine tastes varied widely across the galaxy, but this girl was quite popular with a very large collection of male students, and seemed well aware of it.

Almost from a desperate need for the protection of a group, he had joined a small crew of boys from various colonies. At some point, the social clashes could not be avoided. They ran into a bevy of girls which included this stunning creature. These girls were pushy and aggressive, and the boys simply decided to play gentlemen, and stood aside along the wall in the corridor to let them pass. But the girls took it as a cue to tease them. Why that one particular girl chose him, Rez never did understand, but she got in his face.

Almost in his face, since he was easily a head taller, not to mention considerably heavier. The only reason he wasn't intimidated is he was already too confused and mentally swimming in rough seas from everything else, so he just held a blank look on his face. He managed to raise a single eyebrow, but he had an otherwise total lack of expression. Against this high speed verbal assault, he closed his eyes rather deliberately, and half turned to look to one of the other guys for help. So while he was frankly too stupefied to back up closer to the wall, she took it as something else.

She grabbed the fabric of his tunic at the shoulders and pulled her face up against his. Instead of yelling even louder, she kissed him full on the lips. Then just as suddenly she released him and turned to walk away. The other girls followed, cackling and chattering loudly.

He still wasn't sure what happened, but the other guys were patting him on the back and saying something he never quite caught. Only his jiggered implant kept him from stumbling as he let himself be led along their previous path.

##

At first it was heaven. She literally hunted him down and all but raped him. Her aggressive behavior was totally outside his experience, yet typically what haunted the testosterone fueled dreams of young men. He didn't understand what drove her interest in him. On the one hand, he was too lost, too completely cast adrift from everything he knew. She seemed totally inflamed, both angry and fascinated, by his instinctive lack of response to the crazy things she said and did. On the other hand, his implant kept him from ever appearing clumsy, which would have betrayed his confusion. His body knew what to do, even if his mind was still floating in the cosmos far away from any solid ground.

But it was entirely because he was totally unsophisticated socially that it left her entirely in control. He had the word "dominatrix" in his vocabulary, but not anywhere in his experience. Rez was not simply under the spell of a beguiling young lady, but was wholly owned as her slave, without having any idea such a thing was possible.

He didn't jump at her every word, of course; it was far more subtle than that. Feminists only claim they want that, but despise it when they get it. His physical finesse continually surprised her. Anything he tried to do for the first time seemed to work out just fine, because he could do whatever he could see others doing -- dancing, sports, and everything in general. She wasn't the only one impressed. But in some distant future day he would come to realize his intrinsic slowness to jump at her whims, as he would for his own whims, must have struck her as something resembling a strength he didn't actually possess. She seemed to believe she didn't own him, when she actually did, but she was not the sort to be patient. Her instinct to dominate was provoked with unquenchable fury.

Within a week, the head games began.

It was at about the same time his training exposed him to a wide array of devices. There was a need for his skill because every war seemed to wipe away some portion of technological memory, and each corporation was trying to understand things they had captured or found in the wreckage. He had a phenomenal ability to turn the camera to angles no robot could have imagined, seeing the image on the electronic display with a clarity few others saw until the image was saved and transmitted for analysis. Rez was consistently able to capture the essence of a device in the fewest images of anyone working on the same projects. He literally became famous among his fellow students at the academy.

His training was accelerated. It kept taking him away from the facility, and his girlfriend fought tooth and nail. Rez never really understood, except that it had something to do with her incredibly possessive nature, as if she feared he might find some other girl when he was away from her. No amount of assurance from him would soothe her on this point of tension.

##

As nearly as he could understand, Rez thought perhaps she was only trying to prove he wasn't so morally strong as he claimed. At first were the subtle questions, the testing which always seemed to manipulate him into saying something she could make him regret. Why she never simply left him for someone else was beyond him, but she kept making these tests more intricate and complicated. She began enlisting help from others, he was sure, but never found out who. In fact, he later realized he never even knew what she was studying at the academy, but what he knew about the curriculum could have explained some of what happened.

Knowing it didn't help. Somehow she managed to create a false reality around him. He would leave for a short trip, come back and she would overwhelm him with an emotional welcome back. He would lose himself in her intoxicating embrace. Then just as he was sure everything was okay, she would start the game. When he was most open and vulnerable to her was when she struck hardest. It was back and forth in waves, first in passionate heat then in passionate words of distrust. She was using forms of manipulation he never understood, things which simply and plainly caused him to doubt reality itself.

There were times he had to test the floor under his feet to make sure it was solid, and then still not too sure. The technology and tricks she used literally drove him insane.

So on that one last test at the end of the term, when he was assigned to visit a distant planet system which had an assortment of old mining equipment, she demanded he not go. Of courses, it was impossible. After another session of twisting reality around him, Rez was ready to flee to the ship just to hide from her.

Things did not go well. The ship grabbed a hyperspace anchor point and spun the space past herself. Upon entering real time and space again, they encountered one of those incalculable accidents. A rather small bit of rock bounced off the hull at precisely the moment between coming out of the anchoring point and before the shields went up. It wasn't too awfully bad, the crew thought, just a dent in the skin showed in the exterior cameras.

The cameras lied. While it was no more than a simple dent, it was in the ship's skin adjacent to the cargo bay airlock. When a crewman entered the bay to inspect, the airlock cycled automatically. Someone back at academy dispatch forget to include a minor detail regarding the area they were visiting: It had been mined for heavy metal crystals formed in ways no one could comprehend. That bouncing rock had left microscopic slices in the hull. Upon cycling the airlock, the whole dent suddenly became a gaping hole with loose shards of skin flying around the bay. The crew had to evacuate quickly.

They waited for a bot to clean up the mess but none of the standard temporary seals would work. They had the raw materials for custom patch, but not enough for large holes. It required calculating for the microscopic details of the damage, something not typically available on a ship's computer. It meant someone using a handheld camera, and the image would have to be transmitted back to the academy. They tried repeatedly, but between the signal issues from all the clutter in the area and the unusual nature of the damage, Rez's instructor simply could not get a proper scan. The calculations came back too imprecise.

Naturally, Rez demanded a chance to try. Viewing the screen display in his suit helmet, he was able to estimate the precise location for the camera on a half-dozen views. But there was still the issue of transmission. The captain decided to risk using their small store of slow propulsion fuel and backed away just a bit from the asteroid belt. It was all entirely too risky, especially for a training mission. So while Rez managed to save the day and they finally got it all patched and were able to limp back to the academy port, no one could save Rez. The entire experience offered a stress level few space veterans handled well, but Rez was still a bewildered student from a backwater colony.

He never remembered exactly what it was; no one else saw it. His girlfriend had managed to plant a message on his personal device. As soon as he touched it to record something for her, it came to life. Whatever it was, it pushed him over the edge. During the routine check on the personnel before coming out of hyperspace, they found Rez curled up in a ball, his personal device shattered on the floor beneath his bunk.

The actual electronics of such devices were microscopic. The whole thing was done by automation, designed and built by computers, and consisted of various strands of exotic artificial molecules. The most recognizable part was the display, which still had to produce an image which was human readable. The ship included an analyzer for most common electronic devices, standard equipment on such voyages. When Rez's device was scanned, the computer suggested there was a high probability someone had added a 3D projection module. This would explain why so much of it was burned, since it would have drawn almost all the battery power in a single flash for just a few moments of projection.

All they knew for sure was it had something to do with his fellow students at the academy. The automated medical scanning showed a comatose young man who did not respond to any of the array of things they could do to him. Whatever was there at the academy was a threat to him, so taking him back was out of the question. After some back and forth with academy officials and some others on the planet, the only reasonable hope was to see if the Brotherhood could help them recover their huge investment in one very promising student and hero.

The ship switched to another anchor point in hyperspace and took Rez back to the same star system they had just left, because it happened to be where the Brotherhood had their hospital.

##

The Brotherhood claimed they held no secrets. They had always been willing to teach anyone interested in their stuff. However, the vast majority of those who came in from the outside to learn decided it was either incomprehensible or just hokum. Yet a few seemed to understand, but were unable to enlighten anyone in the majority who didn't get it. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood turned out a lot of patients who were made sane again, albeit always with some curious changes in their personality.

According to the Brotherhood, they simply restored the humanity most of mankind had lost. They weren't arrogant or snide about it, but made no secret they regarded most of human space with strong cynicism, and a measure of disgust. They had never tried to take over anything and had always been content to live in relative isolation. The one thing everyone knew for sure was the Brotherhood could not be bought. This was the primary reason they were so often hounded from one place to another. What the almighty corporations could not buy was a threat when things were unsettled.

Still, they could never be stamped out. Just when it was presumed they had been isolated to a single planet, and that planet was destroyed, they suddenly popped up all over the galaxy again. Whatever it was they did and taught always seemed to outlast everything which came against them. So it was when Rez was brought to them, there had been a time of relative peace and they were doing their unique work, much to everyone's admiration.

Rez didn't remember the first few weeks, and the Brotherhood didn't seem to think it mattered. At some point, the pain in his soul ebbed just enough for him to realize he was scared to live and equally afraid to die. He worried if he died he wouldn't be able to escape the nightmares which haunted his shredded mind. Some part of him knew he was never alone in the room, not for long, but there was not enough difference between the healers for him to tell them apart at first. That is, they all seemed to have the same intensity of caring while never invading his space.

His first conscious awareness was of music. It was soothing, seemed to resonate in the deepest corners of his mind. As best he could describe, it was almost as if the music squeezed on the darkness and nightmares, folding up small areas like an accordion wall and letting him see just a tiny glimpse of light. The atmosphere of peace and isolation helped more than anything else. Between the music and gentle presence of the attendants, always the same few faces, always quiet and trustworthy, he began finding the few bits of himself he could recognize. Eventually he emerged painfully from the dark place where he had been hiding.

That peace was expressed in immeasurable patience, as if those attending his needs really didn't have anything else to do. Eventually he managed to notice the physical differences, but for a time it was the same small group in rotation. They spoke rarely unless he spoke first. It was both disconcerting and yet reassuring when they seldom answered his queries directly. Often he felt they were answering some other question entirely. Yet, it always seemed to be the answer he needed.

At some point, the questions brought longer and longer answers. The initial focus was for Rez to find himself. There seemed a lot of rooting out the mythology of others, only because it was necessary for him to write his own mythology. They didn't seem to think reality needed to be so solid and trustworthy as was his self-concept. He learned not to trust perception and reason, but to dig for something much more substantial, to grapple with what was bigger than himself. The nightmares became silly little lies. They weren't gone, but had no power.

None of this followed the methods of psychology which were part of his education, yet all of it was recognizable. It was recovery by paradox, something he had scarcely heard about. It was considered a joke in his classes, but he wasn't laughing now.

"You can live only when you are ready to die. You can't win until you no longer care." And so it went. He never was unsure how or why, but it made sense. Some part of him was absorbing all this, turning it into something solid and permanent. They helped him understand what had shaped his past. He didn't have to blame himself for what happened yesterday, but it was completely up to him to decide if there should be a tomorrow.

It completely reshaped all his expectations. Not simply the facts about the wider universe of which he was ignorant as a colony boy, but the moral significance of things. The whole universe was just a gauzy film which could hide things, but could never make anything clear. Clarity was to learn how to pull back the wispy curtains and see what was behind it all. The Brotherhood didn't rehash with him the details of what the girl had done to him. Instead, they helped him see what she really was deep inside, a desperate soul without a bottom, an endless need he could never have filled, nor would anyone else. She was a moral black hole, sucking the life out of everything and everyone near her.

During one of the teaching sessions, it occurred to him to ask about the fabled Big TD and if they knew what The Boundary meant. "Rez, our human conscious minds can only exist within a certain perceptual space. We experience the passage of time and the existence of space as limits on our consciousness. Even when traveling in hyperspace, we have to carry a cocoon of awareness or we'll go utterly and fatally insane. Yet there is a part of us which belongs outside those boundaries. Mere intelligence is unable to fathom that, so AI can't cross The Boundary, because it's merely an extension of human intellect. Intellect belongs inside the time-space limitations. But the human soul is much bigger than the mind, and is designed to cross that boundary. If, during your human existence, you don't choose to start reaching across The Boundary, you won't like what happens when the end of your life drags you there."

Eventually, he recognized why he had survived. He came to see how she had in some ways done him a favor. Never again would he be a sucker that way for anyone. Having been to the bottom of that dark pit of human fear, he would never fear on that level again. He had nothing left to lose, but he was sure he had something left to do before things came to any kind of end. Not precisely something to accomplish, but there was something he needed to put his hands to, something which called his name. The Brotherhood denied he owed them anything, but they had given him the one piece of sanity which justified facing the insanity of the cosmos one more day.

Rez had his own imperatives, not thrust upon him by any other human.

##

It was when the academy went through the process of adding their accreditation to his identity that he realized his implant was a little unusual. It was as if he could section off that part of him and not reveal it. Standing next to the implant reader, he noticed he could call up the accreditation or push it back into some unreadable part of the memory in the thing. A little more experimentation and he discovered he could change his ID reference code and some other interesting registers in the implant.

He chuckled, then realized, while the cause was technological and randomly in his favor, it was an appropriate metaphor for what he had gained from the Brotherhood. The odd features in it made it possible for him to alter his official identity to match what he might feel was his imperative for that moment in time. He reset everything to the standard defaults, but savored the train of thought it introduced.

One of the first things he needed to do was get a job and visit somewhere else in the galaxy. The listings revealed several jobs, but something in the most mundane of them spoke to him. There was a refurbishing project in some obscure old merchant complex, and the workmen kept uncovering odd devices which required someone capable of making and processing images of these things. Some of them were from several centuries in the past, performing functions mechanically which had long since been turned over to electronics and energy fields. Rez had a knack for knowing how to capture the best angles for quick analysis.

A little research told him the place was one endless maze of building and passages housing the widest array of niche market players in the galaxy. It was no longer a big player in the primary markets, but a huge collection of fiercely independent survivors among the various specialties from a large number of star systems densely packed in that area. He wasn't fully conscious of why it seemed so important to him, but at least a part of him was aware it would be hard to find something which would broaden his experience with humanity more than that.

And while he doubted he was anywhere near ready for another romance, he was quite certain he knew what it would take for someone to draw his interest again. The Brotherhood helped him understand he had no business investing any emotional energy in someone so needy. It would require at the very least someone be driven by what drove him. He was not going to be a sucker for plain animal attraction again. He needed a partner, not a distraction.

The job contract provided lower class travel, a circuitous route and much more time consuming than usual. He was glad for the opportunity to become better acquainted with himself. It was the first time in his life he wasn't bored by delays and inconveniences. Life itself had become quite an adventure, and there was always something that required just a little more time to understand. He doubted he would ever have the talent or skills with vocal communications so prevalent among the members of the Brotherhood, but he was absolutely certain he could live what they taught him. He was the message himself, as it were, and he was quite happy for the unseen forces outside the universe to steer him wherever they wanted him.

Oddly, all of this didn't radically change his behavior too obviously. When things got crazy, he still presented a placid front. But whereas in the past it had been the blank face of utter confusion, now it was the blank face of unconcern. He didn't rely quite so heavily on physical memory and his implant to get him through a crisis. His choices now had purpose, and he actively tried to hide the advantage his implant gave him. Only once did he turn off the implant signal to get past an automated gateway, which was designed to lock in the presence of an identifying code, but allowed freight to pass. He really didn't want some bureaucratic ass making him miss his connection and losing a whole week waiting for the next ship heading back toward the galactic core where his job waited.

The backlog of work orders wasn't too big when he finally arrived; he was able to catch up in just three days of working intensively and longer hours than usual. He was contented and enjoyed something which allowed him to ignore people for the most part as he went quietly about the chores. The imaging device was decent and allowed him a full range of adjustment to make the most of enhanced shots. Once he caught up, the dead time between assignments could be rather long. Rez was glad he had three days of observation to measure how people generally behaved in the place. With just a minimal interaction with the technicians disassembling parts of the structure, he was able to save them time by not requiring the odd pieces of equipment be fully exposed. They only had to be accessible to his hand.

The one thing most changed by his time with the Brotherhood was learning not to laugh so quickly when something struck him as funny. Some of these workmen and other functionaries were surprisingly easy to offend, and it required constant watching and evaluating to keep track of it all. But because of what he learned, he was able to keep a rather Stoic demeanor which seemed to work pretty well. Still, he often caught himself wanting to stare, and had to learn to use his camera and heads-up display surreptitiously.

##

His quarters were tiny. The contract placed everyone in his class of independent operators in a decommissioned hotel of sorts, itself waiting renovation. It needed it badly. Someone in the room next to his was making an awful racket during one sleep cycle, so he was not at his best the next day. He found himself waiting for a wall to be cleared and the workmen were struggling with corroded fasteners. That's when he caught himself, too late, looking at the woman.

He had turned off his camera, and was staring aimlessly into the space above door level on a store front. Seated on a folding chair, when a figure passed close to him, his eyes followed when it stopped just a few steps away. The wild coloration of her hair was what got his attention, rather like exotic bird plumage.

She was tall, but he saw right away part of it was from prosthetics. Apparently she either used an implant for the purpose, or had been wearing this stuff a long time, because she moved quite easily and comfortably. An awful lot of people around this place had different types and configurations of such prosthetic devices, and some were clearly not yet accustomed, but this gal was the exception. He estimated some portions of her figure were also artificial but the overall effect was surprisingly pleasant to see. As his eyes swept up her body, he froze when he realized she was looking back at him.

Their eyes locked for an instant, just long enough for him to decide there was nothing behind hers, no soul. Instead, he detected that same bottomless hunger he had seen before. Inside, he shivered. Perhaps some tiny measure of his disappointment registered on his face, but he closed his eyes and turned away. He knew that very thing would be taken differently by different people. He was hoping she would be turned off by it, perceiving she had failed to impress him, which was the truth.

He was wrong. She must have taken it as challenge, but he didn't know until later.

The workmen had finally removed the wall section exposing yet one more inexplicable device with wires running to it. He made quick work of it because his display indicated under penetrating wavelengths it wasn't too complicated. Just a half-dozen shots, and it was transmitted almost immediately over the uplink with time and location. He turned to check if the transmitter showed another assignment yet, and found her standing right in front of him.

Her prosthetics probably offered variable height, because while he was sure she had walked past slightly taller than him, she was now facing him at eye level. She held out what appeared a human hand, and introduced herself as Kehli, spelling it for him. The flesh of her hand was a little unnaturally soft, he decided. With the absolute minimum of words, he offered a pseudonym for himself. He maintained full eye contact simply because he refused to let her intimidate him, despite the black feelings lurking at the edges of his mind.

Over the centuries, various corporations had explored just how far they could go with prosthetic enhancements of their mercenary troops. Eventually such large scale modifications became too unprofitable. Given most warfare could easily be confined to machines and AI warfare, there was always a place for assassins, people who were expensive to train and equip, but highly effective with carefully selected prosthetics. However, the only barrier to finding other applications for such technology was simply costs. Someone who could earn enough pay could easily purchase whatever level of enhancement pleased them. However, most of the people who did this were the same empty souls as any assassin or torturer -- psychopaths with no conscience at all. She might as well have been a demon possessed robot.

Rez was like every other young man growing up in the colonies, having passed through the same mandatory military training for defense purposes. He could never be as fast or strong as someone using prosthetic enhancements, but he understood with an absolute certainty he would probably have to use his one advantage some day in physical conflict. During his recovery with the Brotherhood, he had added back some of the martial arts practice to his regular pre-breakfast workouts. He wasn't thinking about whether he could defend himself against a raging prosthetic enhanced psychopathic bitch, but was calculating how he could avoid finding himself in need of trying.

All of this went through the back of his mind while he was listening to her explain she was a senior executive in the management of the facility in which they stood. He was tempted to run down that hall at that moment to escape. She was theoretically in his chain of command, as it was, someone who had access to his contract. Instead, he thought of a way to rebuff her suggestion he join her for dinner after his shift.

It wasn't lying to say he had other plans. His actual habit had been to climb the access shaft to the huge curved surface which served as a roof on the place. The wind was just about strong enough most evenings to keep him from hearing too much else. The workmen had a long pause in working on the roof waiting for materials, so he was usually able to find an isolated spot to be alone and virtually invisible to the rest of the people on this planet. He would eat a simple meal up there as he continued exploring the landscape of his newly healed soul.

Perhaps in a previous era of human society she would not have dared be so forward as to make such an invitation, but the ebb and flow social fashion here and now made it common for women to be pushy. She said with a clear note of coldness, "You need to reconsider your answer. I'll be back later."

As she turned and walked away, he could swear he saw her rise a few centimeters in height.

##

Taking full advantage of his control over the identifying code in his implant, it was cat and mouse for the next two days. If she was using the tracking system in the building, she would always know where he was just before he left, because he would send the images from an inspection as he was walking away. That was the only time his ID was reported with a location. He also wired a second camera to his head mount and used a split screen on his display, always watching what was going on behind him. Twice during that time he spotted her brightly colored hair, a fairly unique plumage visible over the heads of the crowd, and took evasive action.

The bulk of his work was done. More importantly, he'd had enough of the game, and was about to close the contract and leave the planet. She caught up with him down at the loading dock.

One of the most interesting inventions of his time was the Neutron Bubble. Not that anything could actually be constructed purely from subatomic particles having no charge, but there was a peculiar substance found in one star system which, when carefully processed, produced an extremely strong, light material, transparent only in the visible light spectrum. The "neutron" nickname came from the highly nonreactive nature of the product. Its first use was on tourist ships which left the atmosphere with passengers to show them some visual spectacle somewhere. They could see it in real vision without having to worry about other forms of shielding from particles and radiation.

Because it was incredibly light weight, it quickly found use in freight containers. The stuff was insanely expensive, and the cheapest and quickest process was to form it as rounded orbs of different sizes. Most common was about a meter in diameter. This became the predominant means of handling freight which came in quantities too small to justify landing a ship on a planet. Simply pack it into one of these orbs, all of which had a hyperspace tracking device embedded on the inside, and let the ships pull them in from an anchor point as it passed nearby. Then they were approved as a means of moving single passengers, and many of the bubbles came with an embedded seat of sorts and an air re-generator.

After paying for the equipment he wanted to keep, Rez figured he could just about afford to pay for himself to be sucked up onto one of the next ships passing through that part of space if he could find a spare passenger bubble. He logged into the terminal in the shipping bay, hoping he could finish the business before that fembot could find him.

She must have had someone tailing him, because in his reflexive glance at the heads-up display, he caught sight of her plumage. It was the first thing he noticed as she strode quickly toward the doorway. That's when he noticed she was not wearing her normal social prosthetics. What he saw was obviously military grade hardware.

He estimated the time factor. He had already spotted an empty passenger bubble, and had just enough time to finish booking his departure. It had been pre-logged on his personal device, and it was simply a matter of transferring the data and electronic credits. As soon as the terminal made the tone to signal it was confirmed, he sprinted past the random clutter of devices, equipment and so forth, making maximum use of his enhanced coordination. He pulled a muscle when making one totally unnatural move, landed next to the bubble and opened it all in one swift motion. She burst through the doors behind him just as he closed the lock. There was no external latch handle on this bubble.

Not a moment too soon, because she simply jumped over all the clutter, landing right in front of him. It was so completely inhuman that he caught his breath seeing it. She raked the surface near the seal with her prosthetic claws, but to no avail. The voice in her frustrated howl also seemed inhuman, as was the apparent rage. He spotted on her upper arm a device he had only heard about, and believed until that moment to be a mere legend. It was a highly specialized torture implement. When used properly, it forced a male erection, even while rendering him immobile. Guys called it the Man Rape Tool; feminists had hailed it as the great equalizer.

Hidden in his left hand was a laser cutter. He was praying he wouldn't have to use it, but knew he would if anything happened to expose him to her fury.

Something nibbled at the edge of his awareness. As the noise and fury of her assault on the bubble only intensified, he found it strange he would recall at that moment the schedule for his departure. It was only a few seconds. Then he remembered what happened when people stood too close to something yanked into hyperspace. The sudden vacuum was no big deal, but the energy exchange was generally fatal at close range. Somehow he didn't regret it when everything outside the bubble, including the mad clawing monster, faded into darkness.

##

There were other jobs, and none of them were half as complicated as his first. He ended up spending a lot of time working ship and equipment recovery. Things could be uncomfortable working with difficult people on some of the longer assignments, but nothing compared to the fembot. Still, it was good for his own sanity he was able to go right back and face the same monster within him which nearly devoured him the first time. It helped him learn to be much more careful about subtle cues which could send the wrong message.

Recovery work was time intensive only in the sense it tied up the entire team of specialists, each member doing relatively little in short spurts, and everyone had to be on-site the whole time. Rez found himself volunteering to assist anyone whose job held up everyone else, and learned a great deal about the whole recovery process. He also had a knack for moderating squabbles. Despite his utter lack of ambition, he was often treated as de facto team leader on missions, where he was typically the youngest member of the team.

At the end of three standard years, his devotion to recovery missions left him financially set for a visit home. He signed on as standby crew for the first ship headed toward his home planet. To his utter surprise, the steward escorted him past crew quarters to the junior officer's cabins. When he turned to ask if the crew quarters were full, the steward was gone. Once inside his cabin, he checked over the routine messages most people ignore and discovered the Recovery Operations Chief on his last job had added an Operations Management cert to his file. He echoed out loud one of the most commonly heard refrains: "A management cert opens a million doors." There was also an efficiency bonus added to his earnings account.

Upon arriving home, Rez found Randell Colony had changed some, as the charter was contingent on turning a profit. Where humans could live without any actual wholesale modifications to the ecosphere were planets which could also support agriculture of one kind or another. There had been an increase in demand for "real food" sources and Randell was a fish and land animal producer initially. The colony was built on a coastal shelf with lots of native grassland supporting something resembling earth cows and fish which had been found edible, if requiring a bit of processing. Meanwhile, testing for the possibilities of raising more favored animal species brought in from elsewhere was almost complete.

However, the social life of the colony was pretty much the same, though there were more people, both locally born and immigrating from elsewhere. One family was starting from scratch out on the edge of the currently occupied area, having more or less escaped another colony where things had fallen apart. They had escaped a situation where some conflicts which had devolved into a bloody feud. The family seemed quite happy being isolated for their first few months, and everybody understood that well enough. Rez added a supporting voice to the administration's decision to leave them alone while keeping an eye out for their safety. Besides, there was too much work at hand without poking around in other people's lives.

Still, it was time for this new household to report progress toward something profitable. Rez volunteered to go, for which everyone else was grateful.

He quite enjoyed the long hike across the rolling grasslands. The native animals didn't herd together at all. They seemed to prefer isolation from each other, yet at the same time appeared to totally ignore humans. As he walked closely past a few here and there, he could have been a mere gust of wind for all the reaction he got. At the edge of the rising hills, he could see a covering of some sort of scrub vegetation. The family in question had been exploring these hills and cataloging the flora and fauna for future testing as food sources. Rez had been told the man was a PhD in one of the life sciences.

Taking a look around the place as he approached, Rez spotted an exposed framework with thin lines strung throughout. Hung from the lines were the carcasses of several different kinds of animals, as far as he could tell. Some distance away was a similar structure with various types of vegetation drying in the wind. As he drew closer to the dome which most families used as living quarters, he saw other types of testing equipment standing on the other side: an incinerator, a greenhouse, several cages and pens, and a couple of enclosed small buildings.

He stopped some distance away in the open, waiting to see if anyone would spot him and signal or greet him in any way. A message had been sent to their communication device, but there had been no response.

Some movement off to one side caught his eye. Coming down off the slope, threading the brush, were a half-dozen figures. They were carrying tall slender objects, which turned out to be baskets, apparently woven from the local grasses. They must have spotted him, as the largest of the figures handed off a basket and came toward Rez, while the others disappeared behind the dome.

Rez had never seen a man who appeared more rustic. Even the videos and images of ancient history back on earth could not prepare him for a man who looked weathered and brown, wearing overalls of blue fabric and a button front shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Rez had learned by now to suppress any visual reaction, and simply offered his right hand, hoping it would be grasped in the standard form of greeting.

Sure enough, the man stopped a full stride away, smiled and leaned forward with his own hand. They shook and Rez introduced himself as a wandering son returned for a visit home. The man answered with a dialect which matched his appearance. "Nice to meecha, Rez. I'm Henry Checkers."

The man seemed to sense Rez's unasked questions and began explaining they had discovered edible berries in season just over the other side of the nearest ridge line. He tried, but decided he could not explain the taste to someone who lacked a common background in fruits of other worlds. So he invited Rez to follow him and taste for himself.

Rez was amused to see they had added a covered porch on the back side of the dome. It was made of local materials \-- scrub wood lashed together with woven grasses in a fairly random pattern rather like an ornate blind on each side, and open on the side facing out from the dome. The roof seemed made of grass matting. The baskets stood in a row, each nearly full. Rez sampled a few and agreed it was impossible to describe, familiar and alien at the same time. Nonetheless, they were utterly captivating in taste, and he had to restrain himself to keep from eating any more.

Henry laughed when he saw Rez's reaction. He drawled, "That right there could make a lot of money!"

##

For all his primitive act, Henry was a formidable exobiologist. From a small desk near the back door, he picked up a computer display device roughly twice the size of those most people carried. A couple of strokes and he presented Rez a data dump showing an unusual nutritional profile for the berries. A human could survive on them alone for a while without suffering any harm. When Rez looked up with a nod, Henry stroked the screen again and a new note of pride came over his face. The display showed the berries also possessed some surprising rare medicinal qualities, too.

He grinned at Rez and spoke softly, "Think what an extract of them berries would offer to someone trying to colonize a marginal planet." Rez saw it immediately. Those berries would easily pay a year's keep for the entire Randell Colony with just a couple of metric tons.

Rez couldn't suppress the smile. "Henry, what would it take to collect a ton of them?"

The old man slapped himself on side of his thigh. "We done got a quarter ton by ourselves in the past two weeks! That shed nearest the house is full of `em. They don't hardly go bad and we've had time to dry a whole bunch, make preserves, juice, everything. They grow so thick we ain't had to move out of that first draw yet, but we can see `em running plumb up the next ridge."

As gently as he could, Rez suggested, "You should have told someone, Henry. We'd have been glad to help and get some samples sent out for confirmation of your findings."

Henry looked just a bit abashed. "That's probably the one thing I never learned too well. I always kinda kept to myself. If Ma hadn't latched onto me herself, I'd probably never got hitched. I jest get so wrapped up in what I'm doing, I almost forget why I'm doing it." He paused a moment, then added, "You don't seem to have no trouble communicating, though."

Rez tried to be reassuring. "No harm done, Henry, and thanks. Frankly, everyone else in the colony is busy, too. Had I not volunteered to come out, you might not see anyone face to face for another few months or so. Let me take some of the berries and a copy of your data. We'll organize the exploitation of this stuff pronto!"

With that, Henry called for his girls to come help him get "a right good sample" ready for Rez to haul back to the administration building. Rez noticed there was one young boy watching, and three older daughters doing the work. None of them were especially pretty at first glance. Rez busied himself making sure his personal device had a copy of the data, then looked up to discover the eldest girl was holding a small knapsack out for him. In the background, Henry announced, "This here's Delia."

He reached out for it with a smile, but almost froze. Delia might have been a rather plain girl, but her eyes were extraordinary. Best of all, Rez was utterly certain she had a very deep soul flourishing behind those eyes. He held her gaze until she blushed and turned her face downward with a smile. Yet she did not move until he thanked her verbally.

On his hike back, the aroma of fresh baked pastries made from the berries pestered him all the way home. For Rez, the most valuable prize was not the berries, nor any of the baked goods made from them. Something stirred which he had feared might have died long ago.

##

Routine traffic from corporate headquarters:

Administrative recommendation to hire Restas E. Ziskel as new manager of Randell Colony is approved by the Board of Controllers, based on unanimous vote of colonists. Please note the contract attached to this message. Convey our congratulations to Mr. Ziskel, and also on his recent marriage to Cordelia Checkers. Finally, we congratulate the entire colony for being the most profitable in the division two years running.

###

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Email – eddie@soulkiln.org

Blog – Do What's Right

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