ave you met Princess Saxe-Coburg?
She's chief of special effects at NLM."
     "We've met."
     The  Princess  frowned at me, then recognition dawned. She
got off her stool and came toward me, a  little  unsteady.  She
put her nose inches from mine.
     "Sure.  You pulled out on me a few minutes ago. Not a nice
thing to do to a lady."
     At that range, I could see what was odd  about  her  eyes.
She  was  wearing  a pair of antique projection contacts, small
round flat-TV screens that floated over  the  cornea.  I  could
make  out  the  ring  of solar cells that powered them, and the
flyspeck chip that held the memory.
     They'd been introduced just before the  Invasion  under  a
variety  of  trade  names,  but  the one that stuck was Bedroom
Eyes. After all, though they could reflect quite a  variety  of
moods,  if you were close enough to see the little pictures the
mood you were looking for was probably sexual arousal. The more
modest models would show a turned-back bed,  a  romantic  scene
from  an  old  movie, or even, god help us, waves crashing on a
beach.  Others  made  no  pretensions,  getting  right  to  the
erection  or spread thighs. Of course, they could reflect other
moods, as well, but people were seldom  close  enough  to  make
them out.
     I'd  never  seen projection contacts worn by someone quite
as stoned as the Princess was. What they were projecting was an
interesting illusion: it was as if I were looking  through  two
holes  into  a  hollow head. Remnants of an exploded brain were
collapsed at the bottom. Cracks in the skull let in light.  And
swinging  from  stray  synapses  like  vines in a jungle were a
menagerie of cartoon characters,  from  Mickey  Mouse  to  Baba
Yaga.
     The  image  disturbed me. I wondered why anyone would want
to do that to their brain. From wondering why  she  would  want
to,  I quickly got to why I would want to, and that was leading
me quickly to a place I didn't want to go.  So  I  turned  away
from  her  and saw Andrew MacDonald sitting at the other end of
the bar like a carrottopped Hibernian albatross.
     "Did you know she's the Princess of  Wales?"  Cricket  was
saying. "She's first in line to the throne of England."
     "And  Scotland,  and Wales," said the Princess. "Hell, and
Ireland, and Canada and India. I might  as  well  re-claim  the
whole Empire while I'm at it. If my mother ever dies, it'll all
belong  to  me.  Of  course,  there's  the little matter of the
Invaders."
     "Up the British," Cricket said,  and  they  clinked  their
glasses together.
     "I  met  the  King  once,"  I said. I drained my drink and
slammed it down on the bar. Deep Throat caused  it  to  vanish,
and began concocting another.
     "Did you really?"
     "He  was  a  friend of my mother. In fact, he's a possible
candidate to be my father. Callie has never told me  and  never
will,  but they were friendly together at about the right time.
So, if you apply modern laws of bastardy, I might have a  claim
that   supersedes   yours."   I  glanced  at  MacDonald  again.
Albatross? Hell, the man was more than a  bird  of  evil  omen,
more  than  a  stormy  petrel  or  a  croaking  raven.  He  was
Cassandra. He was a tropical depression, bad  breath,  a  black
cat  across  my  path. Everywhere I turned, there he was, a dog
humping my leg. He was a ladder in the stocking of my life.  He
was snake eyes.
     I hated him. I felt like punching him in the nose.
     "Watch  what  you  say," the Princess cautioned. "Remember
what happened to Mary, Queen of Scots."
     I punched her in the nose.
     She walked backward a few rubber-legged  steps,  then  sat
down on the floor. In the ensuing silence, Cricket whispered in
my ear.
     "I think she was kidding," she said.
     For  a few moments the whole place was quiet. Everyone was
watching us expectantly; they love a good brawl  at  the  Blind
Pig. I looked at my clenched fist, and the Princess touched her
bloody  nose  with  her  hand, then looked at her palm. We both
looked up at the same time and our eyes met. And she  came  off
the  floor  and launched herself at me and started breaking all
the bones in my body that she could reach.
     My hitting her had nothing to do  with  anything  she  had
said or done; at that moment in my life I would have hit anyone
standing next to me. But I'd have been a lot better off hitting
Cricket.  In  the  Princess  of  Wales,  I'd  picked  the wrong
opponent. She was taller than me and out-massed me.  There  was
probably a ten-centimeter difference in reach between us, and I
was on the short end of it. But most importantly, she had spent
the  last  forty  years  staging cinematic fights, and she knew
every trick in the book, and a lot  that  never  got  into  the
book.
     I'm  tempted  to  say  I got in two or three good punches.
Cricket says I did, but it might have been  just  to  raise  my
spirits.  The  truth is I can't remember much from the time her
horrid white teeth first filled my vision to the time I  ripped
a meter-long gash in the carpet with my face.
     To  get  to  the  carpet  I'd first had to smash through a
table full of drinks. I used my face for that, too. Before  the
table  I  had  been flying, rather cleverly, I thought, and the
first real fun I'd had in many long minutes, but how I came  to
be  flying  was a point I was never too clear on. It seems safe
to say that the Princess hurled me in some manner,  holding  on
to  some part of my anatomy and then releasing it; Cricket said
it was my ankle, which would  account  for  the  room  whirling
around  so  quickly just before I flew. Before that I had vague
memories of the bar mirror shattering, people scattering, blood
spattering. Then I crashed through the table.
     I rolled over and spit out carpeting. Horses were  milling
nervously  all  around  me. Actually it was the centaur extras,
whose table I'd just ruined. I resolved to buy them all a round
of drinks. Before I  could  do  that,  though,  there  was  the
Princess  again,  lifting me by the shoulder and drawing back a
bloody fist.
     Then someone took hold of her arm  from  behind,  and  the
punch  never  landed.  She  stood  up  and  turned  to face her
challenger. I let my head rest against the ruins of a chair and
watched as she tried to punch Andrew MacDonald.
     There was really no point in it. It took her a  long  time
to  realize  it,  as  her  blood was up and she wasn't thinking
straight. So she kept throwing  punches,  and  they  kept  just
missing,  or  hitting  him harmlessly on the elbows or glancing
off his shoulders. She tried kicking, and the kicks were always
just a little off their target.
     He never threw a punch. He didn't have to. After  a  time,
she was standing there breathing hard. He wasn't even sweating.
She straightened and held up her hands, palms outward.
     I  must  have  dozed off for a moment. Eventually I became
aware of the Princess, Cricket, and MacDonald, three indistinct
round faces hanging above me like a pawnbroker's sign.
     "Can you move your legs?" MacDonald asked.
     "Of course I can move my legs." What a silly question. I'd
been moving my legs for a hundred years.
     "Then move them."
     I did, and MacDonald frowned deeper.
     "His back's probably broken," said Wales.
     "Must have happened when he landed on the railing."
     "Can you feel anything?"
     "Unfortunately, yes." By that time most of the drugs  were
wearing  off, and everything from the waist up was hurting very
badly. Deep Throat  arrived  and  lifted  my  head.  He  had  a
painkiller in his hand, a little plastic cube with a wire which
he  plugged into the socket at the base of my skull. He flicked
the switch, and I felt a lot better. I looked down and  watched
as  they  removed the splintered chair leg which had pierced my
hip.
     Since that wasn't a particularly diverting sight, I looked
around the room. Already cleaning robots were picking up broken
glassware and replacing shattered tables;  Deep  Throat  is  no
stranger  to brawls, and he always keeps a supply of furniture.
In another few minutes there would be no sign that I had almost
destroyed the place  five  minutes  ago.  Well,  I  had  almost
destroyed  the place, in the sense that it was my hurtling body
that had done most of the damage.
     I felt myself being lifted. MacDonald and Wales had made a
hammock with their arms. It was like riding in a sedan chair.
     "Where are we going?"
     "You're not in  any  immediate  danger,"  MacDonald  said.
"Your  back  is broken, and that should be fixed soon, so we're
taking you across the corridor to the NLF Studios. They have  a
good repair shop there."
     The Princess got us past the gate guard. We passed about a
dozen sound stage doors, and I was brought into the infirmary.
     Which  was  jammed  like  Mainhardt's  Department Store on
Christmas Eve. It seemed NLF was doing a big  scene  from  some
war  epic,  and most of the available beds were taken by maimed
extras  patiently  waiting  their   turn,   counting   up   the
triple-time salary they drew for injured downtime.
     The  room  had  been  dressed  as a field hospital for the
picture,  apparently  doing  double  duty  when  not   actually
treating   cinematic  casualties.  I  pegged  it  as  twentieth
century--a vintage season for wars--maybe World War Two, or the
Vietnam conflict, but it could easily have been the  Boer  War.
We  were  under  a canvas roof and the place was cluttered with
hanging IV bottle props.
     MacDonald returned from  a  conference  with  one  of  the
technicians and stood looking down at me.
     "He  says  it'll  be  about half an hour. I could have you
taken to your own practitioner if you  want  to;  it  might  be
quicker."
     "Don't  bother.  I'm  in  no hurry. When they patch me up,
I'll probably just get up and do something foolish again."
     He didn't say anything.  There  was  something  about  his
demeanor  that  bothered me--as if I needed anything else about
him to bother me.
     "Look," I said. "Don't ask me to explain why I did  it.  I
don't even know myself."
     Still he said nothing.
     "Either  spit  it  out, or take your long face and park it
somewhere else."
     He shrugged.
     "I just have a problem  with  a  man  attacking  a  woman,
that's all."
     "What?"  I  was  sure  I  had misunderstood him. He wasn't
making any sense. But when he  didn't  repeat  his  astonishing
statement, I had to assume I'd heard him correctly.
     "What does that have to do with anything?" I asked.
     "Nothing,  of  course.  But  when  I  was  young,  it  was
something you simply didn't do.  I  know  it  no  longer  makes
sense, but it still bothers me to see it."
     "I'll be sure to tell the Mean Bitch you feel that way. If
they've put her back together after your last bout, that is."
     He looked embarrassed.
     "You  know, that was a problem for me, early in my career.
I  wouldn't  fight  female  opponents.  I  was  getting  a  bad
reputation  and missing a lot of important match-ups because of
it. When some competitors started getting sex changes simply so
they could have a go at me, I realized  how  ridiculous  I  was
being.  But  to  this  day  I  have  to  psych myself something
terrible to get into the  ring  with  someone  who's  currently
female."
     "That's  why  you never hit . . . does the Princess have a
first name?"
     "I don't know. But you're wrong. I wanted to stop her, but
I didn't want to hurt her. Frankly, you had it coming."
     I looked away, feeling terrible. He was right.
     "She's feeling bad about it, though.  She  said  she  just
couldn't seem to stop, once she got going."
     "I'll send her the repair bill. That should cheer her up."
     Cricket   arrived   from  somewhere.  She  had  a  lighted
cigarette which she placed in my mouth, grinning.
     "Got it from the prop department," she said. "They  always
used to give these to wounded soldiers. I can't imagine why."
     I puffed on it. It wasn't tobacco, thank god.
     "Cheer  up,"  Cricket  said. "You tore up her fists pretty
good."
     "I'm clever that way; I pounded them to hamburger with  my
chin."
     I  suddenly felt an alarming urge to cry. Holding it back,
I asked both of them to leave me alone for a while.  They  did,
and  I  lay  there  smoking, studying the canvas ceiling. There
were no answers written there.
     Why had the taste of life turned so bitter for me  in  the
last weeks?
     #
     I  had  sort of drifted away. When I came back, Brenda was
bending over me. Considering her height, she had a long way  to
bend.
     "How'd you find me?" I asked her.
     "I'm a reporter, remember? It's my business to find things
out."
     I  thought of several cutting replies, but something about
the look on her face made me hold them back. Puppy love. I  had
vague  memories  of  how  badly that could hurt, when it wasn't
returned.
     And to give her her due,  she  was  improving.  Maybe  she
would be a reporter, some day.
     "You  needn't have bothered. It's not like I'm badly hurt.
The head injuries were minimal."
     "I'm not surprised. It would  take  a  lot  to  hurt  your
head."
     "The  brain  wasn't injured at . . ." I stopped, realizing
she had just taken a jab at me. It had been pretty  feeble,  it
hardly  qualified  as  a joke -- -- she might never master that
skill--but it was something. I grinned at her.
     "I was going to stop by Texas and bring that doctor . .  .
what was it you called him?"
     "Sawbones.  Pillroller.  Quack.  Caulker. Nepenthe. Leech.
Lazarmonger."
     Her smile grew a little glassy; I could see her filing the
terms away for later research.
     I was smiling, but the truth is, even with current medical
practices, being paralyzed from the waist down is a frightening
thing. We have an entirely different attitude toward our bodies
than most humans down the ages, we don't fear injury and we can
turn off pain and we generally treat flesh  and  bone  as  just
items to be fixed, but when things are badly wrong something in
the  most  primitive  level  of our brain stands up on its hind
legs and howls at the Earth. I was having a  galloping  anxiety
attack  that  the  painkiller  plugged  into  my medulla wasn't
dealing with at all. I have no idea if  Brenda  realized  this,
but  her presence at my bedside was strangely comforting. I was
glad she was there. I took her hand.
     "Thanks for coming," I said. She squeezed  my  hand,  then
looked away.
     #
     Eventually  the  planned  casualties stopped streaming in,
and a team of medicos assembled around me. They plugged  me  in
to   a  dozen  machines,  studied  the  results,  huddled,  and
murmured, just as if what they thought really mattered,  as  if
the  medical  computer  was  not  entirely  in  control  of  my
diagnosis and treatment.
     They came to a decision, which was  to  turn  me  onto  my
stomach.  I  surmised  they had concluded it would be easier to
reach my broken spine  that  way.  I'd  better  not  ever  hear
medicos called overpaid blood-monkeys again.
     They  began to carve. I couldn't feel it, but I could hear
some  really  disgusting  sounds.  You  know   those   wet-muck
special-effect  sounds  they  use  in the movies when someone's
being disemboweled? They could have recorded them right over my
broken back. At one point something thumped  to  the  floor.  I
peered  over  the  edge  of  the bed: it looked like a raw soup
bone. It was hard to believe it had once belonged to me.
     They pow-wowed again,  cut  some  more,  brought  in  more
machines.  They  made  sacrifices  to  the gods of Aesculapius,
Mithradates, Lethe, and Pfizer. They studied the entrails of  a
goat.  They tore off their clothes, joined hands, and danced in
a healing circle around my prone carcass.
     Actually, I wished they had done any of those  things.  It
would  have  been a lot more interesting than what they did do,
which was mostly stand around and watch the automatic  machines
mend me.
     All  there  was  to look at was an antique machine against
the wall, a few feet from my face. It had a glass screen and  a
lot of knobs on it. Blue lines were crawling across the screen,
blipping into encouraging peaks now and then.
     "Can  I  get  you  anything?" the machine asked. "Flowers?
Candy? Toys?"
     "A new head might do the trick." It was the CC talking, of
course. It can throw its voice pretty much  where  it  pleases,
since  it  was  talking  directly  to  the hearing center of my
brain. "How much will this cost me?"
     "There's no final cost-estimate yet. But Wales has already
requested the bill be sent to her."
     "Maybe what I meant was--"
     "How badly are you hurt? How shall I  put  it.  There  are
three  bones  in the middle ear, called the Malleus, the Incus,
and the Stapes. You'll be happy to hear that not one  of  these
six bones was broken."
     "So I'll still be able to play the piano."
     "Just  as badly as ever. In addition, several minor organs
emerged unscathed. Almost half a square meter of epidermis  can
be salvaged."
     "Tell  me.  If  I'd  come  to  this  place . . . I mean, a
hospital like this one is pretending to be-- "
     "I know what you mean."
     "--with only primitive surgical techniques . . .  would  I
have survived?"
     "It's  unlikely.  Your  heart is intact, your brain is not
badly damaged, but the rest of your injuries are comparable  to
stepping  on  a land mine. You'd never walk again, and you'd be
in great pain. You would come to wish you had not survived."
     "How can you tell that?"
     The CC said nothing,  and  I  was  left  to  ponder.  That
usually doesn't do much good, where the CC is concerned.
     We all deal with the CC a thousand times a day, but almost
all of  that  is  with  one of its subprograms, on a completely
impersonal level. But apart from the  routine  transactions  of
living,  it  also  generates  a  distinct personality for every
citizen of Luna, and is always there  ready  to  offer  advice,
counsel,  or  a shoulder to cry on. When I was young I spoke to
the  CC  extensively.  He  is  every  child's  ideal  imaginary
playmate.  But  as  we  grow  older  and  make  more real, less
tractable   and   entirely   more   willful   and   frustrating
relationships,  contacts  with  the  CC  tend to fall off. With
adolescence  and  the  discovery  that,  in  spite   of   their
shortcomings, other people have a lot more to offer than the CC
ever  will, we cut our ties even further until the CC is just a
very intelligent, unobtrusive servant, there to ease us through
the practical difficulties of life.
     But the  CC  had  now  intruded,  twice.  I  found  myself
wondering, as I seldom had in the past, what was on its mind.
     "I guess I've been pretty foolish," I ventured.
     "Perhaps  I  should  call  Walter, tell him to tear up the
front page."
     "All right. So it isn't news. So I've  had  things  on  my
mind."
     "I was hoping you'd like to talk about that."
     "Maybe we ought to talk about what you said before."
     "Concerning  your  hypothetical suffering had you incurred
these injuries in, say, 1950?"
     "Concerning your  statement  that  I  might  prefer  being
dead."
     "It  was merely an hypothesis. I observe how little anyone
today is equipped to tolerate pain, having never experienced an
appreciable amount of it. I note that even the  people  on  Old
Earth,  who  were  no strangers to it, often preferred death to
pain. I conclude that many people today would not hold life  so
dear as to endure constant, unrelenting agony."
     "So it was just a general observation."
     "Naturally."
     I  didn't  believe  that, but there was no point in saying
so. The CC would get to the point in its own way,  in  its  own
time. I watched the crawling lines on the machine and waited.
     "I   notice   you're  not  taking  notes  concerning  this
experience. In fact, you've taken very few notes  lately  about
anything."
     "Watching me, are you?"
     "When I've nothing better to do."
     "As  you  certainly  know, I'm not taking notes because my
handwriter is broken. I haven't had  it  repaired  because  the
only  guy who still works on them is so swamped that he said he
might get around to mine this coming August. Unless  he  leaves
the business to start a career in buggywhip repair."
     "There  actually  is  a woman who does that," the CC said.
"In Pennsylvania."
     "No kidding? Nice to see such a vital skill  won't  vanish
completely."
     "We  try to foster any skill, no matter how impractical or
useless."
     "I'm sure our grandchildren will thank us for it."
     "What are you using to write your stories?"
     "Two methods, actually. You get this soft clay brick, see,
and you use a pointed stick to impress little triangles  in  it
in different combinations. Then you put it on the oven to bake,
and  in  four  or  five  hours there you are. The original hard
copy. I've been trying to think of a name for the process."
     "How about cuneiform?"
     "You mean it's been done? Oh, well. When I  get  tired  of
that,  I  get  out  the  old  hammer  and chisel and engrave my
deathless prose on rocks. It saves me carrying those ridiculous
paper sheets into Walter's office; I just lob them  across  the
newsroom and through his window."
     "I don't suppose you'd consider Direct Interface again."
     Was that what this was all about?
     "Tried it," I said. "Didn't like it."
     "That  was  over  thirty  years  ago," the CC pointed out.
"There have been some advances since then."
     "Look," I said, feeling irritable and  impatient.  "You've
got  something on your mind. I wish you'd just come out with it
instead of weaseling around like this."
     It said nothing for a moment. That moment stretched into a
while, and threatened to become a spell.
     "You want me to  direct  interface  for  some  reason,"  I
suggested.
     "I think it might be helpful."
     "For you or me?"
     "Both  of us, possibly. There can be a certain therapeutic
value in what I intend to show you."
     "You think I need that?"
     "Judge for yourself. How happy have you been lately?"
     "Not very."
     "You could try this, then. It can't  hurt,  and  it  might
help."
     So  what  was  I  doing  at the moment so important that I
couldn't take a few minutes off to chin with the CC?
     "All right," I said. "I'll interface with  you,  though  I
think  you  really  ought  to  buy  me  dinner and some flowers
first."
     "I'll be gentle," the CC promised.
     "What do I have to do? You need to plug me in somewhere?"
     "Not for years now. I can use my regular connections  into
your  brain.  All  you need to do is relax a little. Stare into
the oscilloscope screen; that could be helpful."
     I did, watching the blue lines peak and trough,  peak  and
trough.  The screen started to expand, as if I were moving into
it. Soon all I could see was one crawling line,  which  slowed,
stopped,  became  a single bright dot. The dot got brighter. It
grew and grew. I felt the heat of it on my face, it was blazing
down from a blue tropical sky. There was a moment of vertigo as
the world seemed to spin around me--my body staying  firmly  in
place--until  I was lying not on my stomach but on my back, and
not on the snowy white sheets of the repair shop at North Lunar
Filmwerks but on cool wet beach  sand,  hearing  not  the  soft
mutterings  of  the  medicos  but the calls of seagulls and the
nearby hiss and roar of surf. A  wave  spent  its  last  energy
tickling my feet and washing around my hips. It sucked a little
sand  out  from  under  me. I lifted my head and saw an endless
blue ocean trimmed with white breakers. I got to  my  feet  and
turned  around,  and saw white sandy beach. Beyond it were palm
trees, jungle rising away from me  to  a  rocky  volcanic  peak
spouting  steam.  The  realism  of the place was astonishing. I
knelt and scooped up a handful of sand. No  two  grains  looked
alike.  No  matter  how  close  I brought the sand grains to my
eyes, the illusion never broke  down  and  the  endless  detail
extended  to  deeper  and  deeper  realms. Some sort of fractal
magic, I supposed. I walked down the beach for a bit, sometimes
turning  to  watch  the  cunning  way  water  flowed  into   my
footprints,  erasing  the edges, swirling, bubbling. I breathed
deeply of the saline air. I like this place already. I wondered
why the CC had brought me here. I decided it would tell  me  in
its  own  time,  so  I walked up the beach and sat under a palm
tree to wait for the CC to present itself. I waited for several
hours, watching the surf, having to move twice as the sun crept
across the sky. I noticed that my skin had reddened in my brief
time in the sunlight. I think I drifted off to sleep from  time
to  time,  but  when  you're alone it's hard to be sure. In any
event, the CC didn't show. Eventually I got thirsty.  I  walked
down  the  beach  for several kilometers before discovering the
outlet of a small stream of fresh water. I  noticed  the  beach
kept  curving  off to the right; probably an island. In time it
got dark--very quickly, and one part of my mind concluded  this
simulacrum  that  really  existed only as a set of equations in
the data banks of the CC was intended to be  somewhere  in  the
Earthly tropics, near the equator. Not that the information did
me any good. It didn't get cold, but I soon found that when you
haven't  any  clothes or bedding, sleep can be a sandy, chilly,
thoroughly uncomfortable project. I woke up again and again  to
note the stars had moved only a little. Each time I would shout
for  CC  to  show  itself, and each time only the surf answered
back. Then I awoke with the sun already high above the horizon.
My left side had the beginnings of a painful radiation burn. My
right side was chilled. My hair was full of sand. Little  crabs
scuttled  away  as  I sat up, and I was appalled to realize I'd
been thinking about catching and eating one. I was that hungry.
But there was something of interest down by the water.  In  the
night,  a  large,  steel-banded wooden trunk had washed ashore,
along with a lot of splintered wood and some tattered pieces of
canvas. I concluded there had been a  shipwreck.  Perhaps  that
was  the justification for my presence here in the first place.
I dragged the chest across the sand to a place where  it  would
be  in  no danger of washing back to sea, thought about it, and
salvaged all the wood and canvas, as well. I smashed  the  lock
on  the  trunk and upon opening it, found it was waterproof and
contained a wide variety  of  things  useful  to  the  computer
castaway:  books,  tools,  bolts  of  cloth, packages of staple
foods like sugar and flour, even some bottles of a good  Scotch
whiskey. The tools were better than the things I had been using
in  Texas.  At  a  guess,  they  might  have been made with the
technology of the  late  nineteenth  century.  The  books  were
mostly  of  the  how-to variety--and there was the man himself,
Robinson Crusoe, by DeFoe. All the books were bound in leather;
none had a copyright date later than 1880. I used  the  machete
to  lop the ends off a cocoanut and munched thoughtfully at the
delicious white meat while paging through books  that  told  me
how  to tan hides, where to obtain salt, how to treat wounds (I
didn't like the  sound  of  that  one  very  much),  and  other
vigorous pioneer skills. If I wanted to make boots, I'd be able
to  do  it. If I wanted to build an outrigger canoe and seek my
fortune on the blue Pacific (I was assuming this was the  south
seas),  the  information  was  at my fingertips. If I wanted to
chip  flint  arrowheads,  construct  an   earthen   dam,   make
gunpowder,  fricassee  a  monkey,  or battle savages, the books
would  show  me  how,  complete   with   cunning   lithographed
illustrations.  If I wanted to stroll the Clarkestrasse in King
City, or even Easter parade down Fifth Avenue in Little Old New
York, I was shit out of luck.  There  seemed  little  point  in
lamenting this fact, and the CC wasn't returning my calls, so I
set  to work. I explored the area for a likely spot to use as a
campsite. That night I slept under  a  canvas  awning,  wrapped
loosely  in  a  length of flannel from the chest. It was a good
thing, too. It rained off and on most  of  the  night.  I  felt
oddly  at  peace,  lying  in  the moonlit darkness (there was a
charming notion: Luna looked tiny and dim compared  to  a  full
Earth) listening to the rain falling on the canvas. Perhaps the
simple  pleasures  are  the  best. For the next several weeks I
worked very hard. (I didn't seem bothered by the gravity, which
was six times what I had endured for a century. Even  the  fact
that  things  fell much faster and harder than I'd been used to
all my life never bothered me. My reflexes had been adjusted by
the Almighty Landlord of this semi-conducting realm.)  I  spent
part  of  each day working on a shelter. The rest of the time I
foraged. I found good sources of bananas and breadfruit to  add
to  my  all-cocoanut  diet.  I  found  mangos  and guavas, many
varieties of edible roots, tubers, leaves,  seeds.  There  were
spices  available to one equipped with the right book to use in
their identification. The little scuttling  crabs  proved  easy
enough  to  catch, and were delicious boiled. I wove a net from
vines  and  soon  added  several  varieties  of  fish   to   my
bouillabaisse.  I dug for clams. When the shelter was completed
I cleared a sunny spot for a vegetable garden and planted  some
of  the  seeds  I'd  found  in  the  trunk. I set snares, which
promptly  trapped  inedible  small  rodents,   fearsome-looking
reptiles,  and  an  unidentified  bird  I  came  to call a wild
turkey. I made a bow and arrow, and a  spear,  and  managed  to
miss every animal I aimed at. Somewhere in there, after about a
month,  I  started  my calendar: notches on a tree. I estimated
the time before that. Infrequently I wondered when the  CC  was
going  to check up on me, or if I was in fact stranded here for
the rest of my life. In the spirit of exploration,  one  day  I
prepared a backpack and a straw hat (most of me was burned dark
brown  by then, but the noonday sun was still nothing to trifle
with) and set out along the beach to determine the size  of  my
cage.  In two weeks I circum-ambulated what did indeed prove to
be an island. Along the way I saw the remains of a ship  washed
up  on a rocky part of the shore, a week-old beached whale, and
many other wondrous things. But there had been no sign of human
habitation. It seemed I was not to have my  Friday  to  discuss
philosophy  with.  Not too upset by this discovery, I set about
repairing the  depredations  wild  animals  had  worked  on  my
shelter  and  garden.  After  another few weeks I determined to
scale the volcano that sat in the center of the island, which I
had named Mount  Endew,  for  reasons  that  must  have  seemed
excellent  at  the  time. I mean, a Jules Verne hero would have
climbed it, am I right? This proved to be  a  lot  harder  than
walking on the beach, and involved much swinging of the machete
at  thatches  of tropical vines, wading of swamps infested with
flying insects and leeches,  and  barking  of  shins  on  rocky
outcroppings.  But one day I came to stand on the highest point
in my domain and saw what I could not have seen from sea level:
that my island was shaped something like a boot. (It took  some
imagination,  I'll  admit. One could just as well have seen the
letter  Y,  or  a  champagne  class,  or  a  squashed  pair  of
copulating  snakes.  But  Callie would have been pleased at the
boot, so I named the island Scarpa.) When I returned to my camp
I decided my traveling days were at an end. I  had  seen  other
places  I  might  have explored from my volcanic vantage point,
but there seemed no reason to do anything  about  them.  I  had
spied  no  curls  of  smoke,  no  roads,  no  airports or stone
monuments or casinos or Italian restaurants. Scarpa Island  ran
to  swamps,  rivers, jungles, and bogs. I'd had quite enough of
all of those; you couldn't get a decent drink in any of them. I
decided to devote my  life  to  making  life  as  easy  and  as
comfortable  as  possible,  at  least until the CC showed up. I
felt no urge to write, either  journalism  or  my  long-delayed
novel, which seemed in memory at least as awful as I had always
feared  it  was.  I felt very little urge for sex. My only real
drive seemed to be hunger, and it was easy  enough  to  satisfy
that.  I discovered two things about myself. First, I could get
totally involved in and wonderfully satisfied by  the  simplest
of  activities. Few of us today know the pleasure of working in
the soil with our own  hands,  of  nurturing,  harvesting,  and
eating  our  own crops. I myself would have rejected the notion
not long before. But nothing tastes quite  like  a  tomato  you
have  just  picked  from  your  own  garden.  Even rarer is the
satisfaction of the hunt. I got rather better with my  bow  and
arrow  (I  never  got  good),  and  could lie in wait for hours
beside a watering hole,  every  sense  tuned  to  the  cautious
approach  of  one  of  the  island's  wild pigs. There was even
satisfaction in pursuing a wounded creature; the pigs could  be
dangerous when cornered, enraged by a poorly-aimed arrow in the
hams.  I  hesitate to say it in these peaceable times, but even
the killing thrust of the knife was something to take pride and
pleasure in. The second thing I learned was that, if there  was
nothing that badly needed doing, I was capable of lying all day
in  my  hammock tied between two palm trees, watching the waves
crash onto the reef, sipping pineapple juice and home-distilled
rum from a hollowed cocoanut shell. At  such  times  you  could
take  your  soul  out  into  the  fresh air, hang it out on the
line--so to speak--and examine it for tears and thin  spots.  I
found  quite  a  few.  I mended a couple, set the rest aside to
talk over with the CC. Which I even began to doubt was going to
come at all. It got harder and harder to remember a time before
the island, a time when I had lived in a strange  place  called
Luna,  where  the  air  was  metered  and  gravity was weak and
troglodytes hid under rocks, frightened of the vacuum  and  the
sunlight.  There  were  times when I'd have given anything just
for somebody to talk to. Other times I had cravings for this or
that item of food that Scarpa was  unable  to  provide  me.  If
Satan  had come along with a brontoburger, he could have had my
freshly-patched soul in trade cheap, and hold the  onions.  But
most  of the time I didn't want people around. Most of the time
I was content with a wild turkey sizzling on  the  spit  and  a
slice  of  mango for dessert. The only real crab in my codpiece
were the dreams that started  to  plague  my  sleep  about  six
months  into  my  sojourn. At first I had them infrequently and
was able to shrug them off easily enough in  the  morning.  But
soon  I  was  having  them  every  week,  then every other day.
Finally I was being awakened every night, sometimes  more  than
once. There were three of them. Details varied, and many things
about them were indistinct, but each always ended in a horribly
vivid scene, more real than reality--assuming that word had any
meaning  for  me anymore, dreaming my dreams within a dream. In
the first, blood was  pouring  from  deep  gashes  in  both  my
wrists. I tried to stop the flow. It was no use. In the second,
I  was  consumed  in  flames. The fire didn't hurt, but in some
ways this was the most frightening of the three. In the last, I
was falling. I fell for a long time, looking up into  the  face
of  Andrew MacDonald. He was trying to tell me something, and I
strained to understand him, but before I could make  any  sense
of  it  I  was  always  pulled  up short--to wake up, bathed in
sweat, lying in my hammock. In the manner of dreams,  I  always
had  the  sense  there had been much more to it that I could no
longer remember, but there was that last image right  there  in
the  front  of my mind, obscuring everything else, occupying my
mind for most of my early morning hours. Then one day I noticed
by my rude calendar that I had been on the island for one year.
I suddenly knew the CC would appear to me that day. I had a lot
of things to talk to it about. I was seized by  excitement  and
spent  most  of  the  day  tidying  up,  preparing for my first
visitor. I looked on my works with  satisfaction;  I'd  done  a
pretty  decent job of creating something out of the wilderness.
The CC would be proud of  me.  I  climbed  to  the  top  of  my
treehouse,  where  I  had built a look-out tower (having an odd
thought on the way up: how and when had I built it, and  why?),
and  sure enough, a boat was approaching the island. I ran down
the path to the beach. The day was as close  to  dead  calm  as
those  waters  ever  got. Waves eased toward the shore to slump
onto the sand as if exhausted  by  their  long  trip  from  the
orient.  A  flock  of  gulls  was sitting on the water, briefly
disturbed by the passage of the boat I had seen. It was made of
wood. It looked like the kind of boat whalers used to  use,  or
the launch from a larger ship. Sitting in the boat, back toward
me,  rowing at a strong steady pace, was an apparition. It took
me a moment to realize  the  strange  shape  of  his  head  was
actually  a  rather unusual hat. It made a bell curve above his
head. I watched him row ashore. When he hit the beach he almost
toppled from his seat, then stowed the oars and stood,  turning
around  to face me. It was an old gentleman in the full uniform
of an Admiral of the British Navy. He had a bull  chest,  long,
spindly legs, a craggy face and a shaggy head of white hair. He
drew himself up to his full height, looked at me, and said:
     "Well? Are you going to help me beach this thing?"
     And  at  that moment everything changed. I still am unable
to fully describe just how it changed. The beach was the  same.
The  sunlight  streamed  down  just as it had before. The waves
never missed a beat.  My  heart  continued  to  meter  out  the
seconds  of  my  life.  But  I  knew  something fundamental and
important was no longer as it had been before.
     There  are  hundreds  of   words   describing   paranormal
phenomena.  I've examined and considered most of them, and none
fits what happened when the Admiral spoke. There are many words
for odd states of mind, for moods, for emotions and things seen
and not-seen, things glimpsed, things  incompletely  understood
or  remembered,  for  degrees of memory. Things that go bump in
the night. None of them were adequate. We're going to  have  to
come  up  with  some  new  words-- which was precisely the CC's
point in letting me experience this.
     I went into the water up to my knees and  helped  the  old
man pull the boat onto the shore. It was quite heavy; we didn't
get  it  far.  He  produced  a rope and tied the boat to a palm
tree.
     "I could use a drink," he said. "The whole point  of  this
was so I could have a drink with you. Like a human being."
     I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet. He followed me
up the path to my Robinson Family tree house, stood admiring it
for a  moment,  and then followed me up the stairs and onto the
lower veranda. He  paused  to  admire  the  workmanship  of  my
wheel-and-pulley waterworks, which used the power of the nearby
stream to provide me with drinking and washing water high up in
the  tree. I showed him to my best rattan chair and went to the
sideboard, where I poured us both glasses of the very  last  of
my  best  whiskey.  I paused to wind up the Victrola and put on
one of my three scratchy cylinders: The  Blue  Danube.  Then  I
handed him his drink, took mine, and sat down facing him.
     "To indolence," he said, raising his glass.
     "I'm  too  lazy  to drink to that. To industry." We drank,
and he looked around again. I must have glowed with  pride.  It
was  quite  a  place, though I say it myself. A lot of work and
ingenuity had gone into it, from the dense-woven  mats  on  the
floor, to the slate fireplace, to the tallow candles in sconces
arrayed  around the walls. Stairs led off in two directions, to
the bedroom,  and  the  crow's  nest.  My  desk  was  open  and
cluttered  with  the pages of the novel I'd recently resumed. I
was bursting to tell him of the difficulties I'd had  producing
usable  paper  and  ink. Try it sometime, when you've got a few
spare months.
     "It must have taken a  lot  of  industry  to  produce  all
this," he said.