On the Head of a Pin: A Novel from Crosstown to Oblivion
Author: Walter Mosley
Date: 2012-05-08T07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery; Science Fiction; Fiction
Description: In Walter Mosley's On the Head of a Pin , Joshua Winterland and Ana Fried are working at Jennings-Tremont Enterprises when they make the most important discovery in the history of this world—or possibly the next. JTE is developing advanced animatronics editing techniques to create high-end movies indistinguishable from live-action. Long dead stars can now share the screen with today's A-list. But one night Joshua and Ana discover something lingering in the rendered footage…an entity that will lead them into a new age beyond the reality they have come to know. At the Publisher's request, this t
Publisher: Tor Books
Rights: All rights reserved

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

In honor of PKD

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Begin Reading

Also by Walter Mosley

About the Author

Copyright

I WAS WORKING AT Jennings-Tremont Enterprises (JTE) when Ana Fried and, I suppose, the rest of us, quite by accident, happened upon the most important discovery in the history of this world, or the next.

JTE’s primary work was developing advanced animatronic editing techniques for film. It was our job, or at least the job of the scientists and programmers, to develop animation tools that would create high-end movies indistinguishable from live action.

Joseph Jennings’s childhood dream was to make new movies with old-time stars. He wanted Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre side by side with Rudolph Valentino, Myrna Loy, Marlon Brando, and Natalie Portman. These new classics, he envisioned, could be made in small laboratories by purely technical means. Had we been successful, the stock in JTE would have been worth billions. Instead, we were secretly vilified, physically quarantined, and warned, under threat of death, not to create documents such as this one. Writing this memoir, my second act of true rebellion, is necessary in spite of the danger because there must be some record of what really transpired in case the government gets to me before the Alto arrive.

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

My name is Joshua Winterland. I suppose you could call me a failed writer. Failed is a harsh word but valid in this case, because all my life I wanted to be a playwright. I’ve written thirty-seven plays that have each been rejected by every theater, playwriting competition, and creative writing school in the country.

I am thirty-nine years old and have been writing since the age of nine.

When I realized that I’d never be successful, or even produced, as a playwright I began work as a technical writer for a succession of various companies and institutions in California’s Silicon Valley. I was the guy who wrote the manuals for new hard- and software. My day’s work was to help consumers figure out what tab to hit and where to look up the serial number, how to register online or over the telephone, and what safety precautions to take before turning on a new system.

My fate was recast when the country went into a serious economic recession and, coincidentally, my girlfriend, Lena Berston, woke up one day to realize that she was in love with my childhood friend Ralph Tracer.

Lena told me one morning, before I was off to work at Interdyne, that Ralph had called because he was coming in from San Francisco that evening and she had offered to cook dinner for the three of us. I thought this was odd because Lena rarely cooked on weeknights, and she had always said that Ralph wasn’t her kind of person.

“It’s not that I don’t like him,” she’d said more than once, “but he just doesn’t interest me.”

I didn’t give it any serious thought. Ralph was a good guy. I’d known him since junior high school in Oakland. He was from a different neighborhood but we made an early bond. We’d talked to each other at least once a week since I was thirteen years old, sharing our boyhood dreams. I planned to be a playwright and he wanted, in the worst way, to lose his virginity.

Our goals alone spoke volumes about the value of reduced expectations.

*   *   *

WHEN I GOT HOME Ralph was already there sitting at the kitchen table. Lena was cooking. I felt proud that she was my girlfriend and that she was wearing her sexy, rainbow-colored, short skirt. Between the two of us Ralph had always been the ladies man. I had spent most of my life between girlfriends, and so being with Lena made me feel very, very good.

Don’t get me wrong … I really liked her as a person. If you had asked me at any time before that last dinner I would have told you that I loved her. But after what happened that love got lost and I can no longer speak for it.

“Lena and I have something that we need to talk to you about, buddy,” Ralph said in the lull between the soup and the rack of lamb.

“What’s that?” the fool asked.

When I glanced at Lena she turned away, but still I didn’t get the message. It’s amazing how human nature creates the feeling of security for itself, believing in a world that might cease to exist at any moment—might already be gone.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Lena said, forcing herself to look me in the eye.

She had come back to the table without the meat. This I took as a bad sign.

“Lena was up in San Francisco,” Ralph was saying. “I’d told her that I knew the curator of modern art at the Freierson Museum.”

“Yeah. I remember.”

“She came by the house and I offered her a drink. That’s all.”

“That was nine months ago,” I said, thinking of all the nights in the last nine months when Lena had been too tired to make love.

“We tried to stop, Josh,” Lena said. “Every time I went to see Ralphie I swore I’d never do it again. But…”

Ralphie.

“We didn’t mean to hurt you, buddy,” my onetime friend said.

They both talked more. I can remember words but not the ideas or concepts they formed. I listened politely for maybe a dozen minutes before standing up. Ralph, I remember, got to his feet, too. Maybe he thought I was going to hit him. I don’t know.

I took my jacket from the hook on the wall and walked out of the house. Lena, to her credit, followed and pleaded with me. I think she said that they would leave the house for me to live in. I’m not sure. I drove off and stayed at a motel that night. In the morning, nineteen minutes after I’d gotten to work, I was informed that Interdyne had gone out of business due to a dip in the stock market the night before.

The motel was called the Horseshoe Inn. It cost sixty-four dollars a night to stay there (plus tax and county fees). I went to thirty-six tech labs in the area over the next five business days; no one was hiring and many were laying people off.

That Wednesday I drove down to L.A., bought a newspaper in Beverly Hills, and applied for a job at JTE Labs in Redondo Beach. Being a California company, and therefore at least partially New Age, they wanted to hire a writer to record the progress of their research, a kind of Have Memoir Will Travel. I was to use video cameras, a computer journal, and even pen and paper in a pinch. Once every two weeks I interviewed all the nineteen employees, myself, and the boss—Joe Jennings.

That’s really why I’m risking my life creating this document; just in case my plans fall short. It was my job, my only purpose, to record this story. And seeing that the content is of monumental importance I cannot allow special interests, government institutions, and/or religious bodies to stop the advancement of science.

*   *   *

I STOPPED WRITING for a while after the last word of the previous sentence because I can’t vouch for its veracity. The idea that we’re dealing with science was at best an assumption on our part. And not all of us at that. Cosmo Campobasso believed that the Sail (which is as much his creation as anyone else’s) was a window to God. He wouldn’t have used those words—he called the Sail the Blank Page and believed that he saw Mother Mary standing next to me on a Santa Monica rooftop.

Cosmo was an unschooled immigrant from the Sunnino Mountains of the Molise region of southern Italy. A craftsman, he wove the nine-by-twelve-foot fiber-optic tapestry that is the Blank Page, the Sail. The millions of spiderweb-thin strands were meticulously interlaced by the barely educated artisan over a six-year period.

Every morning when I got in, big, lumpy Cosmo had already been there for hours pulling the nearly invisible strands across the broad loom. The Page, as it grew, was a gossamer, semiopaque, and diaphanous fabric that rippled and flowed on its cherry wood, lead-fretted frame. The care that Cosmo exhibited was more than any man of the modern age would have been able to sustain. His assistant, Hampton Briggs of Watts, took the ends of each strand and connected them to one of the sixteen motherboards that were suspended around the growing tapestry. These millions of connective strands glistened in the space around the floating, nacreous Page.

The Page Room, as it was called by some, was an old airplane hangar from the 1930s set on property that JT Enterprises bought at auction when the previous owners, inept real estate speculators, went into bankruptcy. The Blank Page looked to me like the sail on a small schooner, picking up breezes that seemed to come from another dimension, hovering above the corroded concrete floor like a mortal’s unconscious dream of divinity. I’m no scientist but I’ve been told that the places where the minute fiber-optic strands intersected cause an entry in the computer system that it was connected to. This entry is a bit of data that could be manipulated as far as hue, intensity, and texture. And even though very little energy passed through the Page, a strong light from behind was designed to bring out the images wrought by JTE’s copyrighted software.

These tiny intersections were created not only by their proximity but also by Cosmo’s impressing them with two tiny silver rollers that he created after being told by Ana Fried what was necessary for the computer system.

There was some speculation toward the end there that the frets of lead and silver rollers had an impact on the final outcome of the Sail. This conjecture reveals the underlying spiritual questions about the project and its miraculous output.

*   *   *

“WHAT WE ARE doing here,” diminutive, sixty-one-year-old Ana Fried told my camera at an early stage of my position as Company Scribe, “is re-creating reality. Within ten years I will be able to generate a film of you at the battle of Appomattox, or among the onlookers at Caesar’s assassination. No one will be able to tell the difference between reality and our images.”

“What will be the applications of this new software?” I asked, sitting, as always, off camera.

“We will be one step down from the Creator,” she said, her olive-hued face tightening into an expression that she considered dramatic. “Imagining a world and then making it.”

*   *   *

TODD PINKUS SAID to my camera that “Everybody from schoolteachers to forensic investigators will be able to use these tools to enhance their jobs.”

“What about criminals and propagandists?” I asked.

I didn’t like Todd.

Pinkus frowned at the question. He was a thin, very white man with wire-rimmed glasses that were too big for his face. His walnut and gray hairline was receding and his lips had no thickness to them at all.

“Questions like that are designed to retard growth, not augment it, Josh. The question you should have asked was how would these tools benefit the policeman and the lecturer?”

“You’re a programmer right?” I replied.

“I’m the senior programmer-analyst on this project.”

“And I’m the project’s memoirist. So I get to ask the questions.”

Pinkus winced as he considered his reply. He didn’t like me from the first day, didn’t like the fact of my job. He was the kind of guy who thought he knew everything—and that the world orbited this knowledge. If he had been a heart doctor and you came to him with the early signs of cancer, he would have prescribed blood pressure medicine and suggested a bypass.

“The problem with your people, Josh,” Pinkus replied, “is that you have never raised yourselves out of the nineteenth century. Slavery is over and all the possibility in the world waits outside your door.”

By my people Pinkus was referring to those that are commonly called African American. I only mention that here because he believed that my dislike of him was a direct reflection of his feelings toward me. He believed that my aversion to him was about race when in actuality I was only disgusted by his arrogance and pomposity—leaving it to him to be offended by skin color.

“So you believe that I and my people are still living in slavery?” I asked.

“What does that have to do with the project?”

“My job is to record, for Posterity, the moods, characters, and jobs of the people that have created this revolutionary system. A hundred years from now you will be some of the most famous technicians in history. Imagine if we could know as much about the designers of the pyramids?”

“I refuse to participate,” Todd Pinkus said. He made a motion as if he were going to stand and leave.

“You know that Joe Jennings views these tapes every month,” I said, my tone just a wee bit threatening.

The hatred in Pinkus’s eyes was a balm to my emotional wounds. For what I couldn’t do to Ralph Tracer, Todd Pinkus would stand in effigy.

He settled back into the chair in my jury-rigged interview room.

“Can we go on?” he asked.

“Will you let me do my job?”

“Of course. I wasn’t trying to take your job I was just … never mind. Go on. Ask me whatever.”

*   *   *

DOCUMENTING THE BLANK PAGE project was just what I needed to get over Lena and Ralph and the impact the recession was having on most Americans. I worked sometimes as much as twelve hours a day, six days a week … and JTE paid time and a half overtime.

My hours were so long because people worked nearly round the clock on the Blank Page project. I could walk in at almost any time of the day or night and have someone to interview. That’s how I, at least in the Band-Aid sense, overcame the last emotional hurdle of Lena’s betrayal.

Doreen Howard was Todd Pinkus’s boss. She was the systems analyst who envisioned the underlying symphony of the animation project. Doreen was a wasp-waisted, bottle-blond, forty-something bombshell. Her lips were too red and her breasts impossible. There was something coarse about her beauty. You would expect to see her slinging pancakes at an IHOP rather than designing the Lifelike Imaging Process at JTE. Regardless, Doreen was some kind of genius. She’d never been to college but she’d worked in computer animation since the age of seventeen.

“I took to hexadecimal like crap to the sewer,” she told me on our first interview.

All of our interviews were colorful like that. I think she could tell how grateful I was for her candid and lively talks.

One evening we were discussing the amount of work she orchestrated using Pinkus and a dozen Indian programmers in Mumbai. She explained how boxes of infinitely reiterated logic appeared in her mind and were then assigned to the appropriate drone.

“I think of my programmers as drones,” she said. “They’re like the boxes of logic and pages of design. And I see myself as queen bee organizing the material into an infinity of images.”

Doreen was looking into my eyes as she spoke. It wasn’t until I felt a bead of sweat rolling down my back that I understood the effect her words were having on me.

Just at that moment of awareness she said, “Turn off the camera, Josh.”

I did so.

“That’s how I see the world,” she said, sitting back in the red lacquer chair I used for my subjects. Her dress was wide and light blue, the hem, when she was standing, came down to mid-calf. It was the classic farm girl’s dress, but it wasn’t dowdy on her.

“How’s that?” I asked, trying to keep myself from choking.

“Drones.”

“Uh,” I articulated.

“Would you like to follow me home so I could show you?”

*   *   *

SEX WITH DOREEN HOWARD was the simplest and most gratifying physical experience I’d ever had. She brought me in, wrung me out, and sent me packing in three hours flat. When I got home I fell asleep without a thought in my head, and the next day, when Doreen and I ran into each other in the small company cafeteria, we smiled and said hello as if there was no last night … or tomorrow.

Doreen, as she said, was queen and so I never initiated with her. Now and again, every few weeks or so, she’d ask me what I was doing that night. If I had plans I canceled them, but usually I didn’t have much to do outside of work. I lived in a two-room bungalow behind a big yellow house at the base of the Hollywood Hills. There I watched TV and slept—never dreaming that I was on the cusp of the enlightenment of the ages.

*   *   *

DON’T GET ME wrong, Doreen wasn’t cold or heartless. She just saw most of the world as building blocks in her playroom. The operant word there is most. Doreen had a heart. And that heart could be pierced.

Langly Banner, lead singer in a Hollywood rock band called Bad Intentions Inc., took Doreen home one night and kept her there for three months. He had long black hair and a thin but powerful frame. He sang full out when he was on stage at the Whiskey or House of Blues. Doreen went to his performances every night and gave her notice when the band decided to take their show on the road.

*   *   *

“I DON’T KNOW what she can be thinking,” Joseph Jennings, senior partner of JTE, said to my camera the day Doreen announced her departure. “Doreen is one of the pillars of our work here. With stock options she stands to make millions if we’re successful. But if she leaves now she’ll get nothing.”

Joe had the perpetual look of someone holding back a secret. He wore blue jeans, tennis shoes, white T-shirts, and an army fatigue jacket—always. His sandy brown hair was longish, but not long, and his eyes were the kind of blue you’d expect to find in exotic bird nests.

“But instead she’s following her heart,” I said.

Joe Jennings leaned forward in the Chinese chair, placed his elbows on his knees, and his small fists on either side of his jaw.

“When every cell in that heart has been replaced with new material she’ll be broke, living in a trailer somewhere, and my kids will be booking first-class passage to the moon.”

*   *   *

JOE DIDN’T HAVE TO WORRY about Doreen’s wealth. Six days after giving notice she withdrew it. Langly, it seems, met another, much younger, groupie one afternoon while Doreen was at work. The lead singer realized that he shouldn’t pull a middle-aged woman out of her life and told her so.

That’s how I became one of the first to witness the miracle.

*   *   *

BY THE TIME Doreen had found love, JTE was well on the way to realizing its goals. The system was beginning to work. Three days after Doreen’s heart was broken the tapestry was completed and we were ready to do the first full test of the software on that undulating, diaphanous screen. The image read in was of the secretary/receptionist Susan Liu. Donny Parthe, one of the few American programmers under Pinkus, had a video snippet of Susan from our company barbecue at the beach the summer before. She was doing a silly dance at the edge of the water. Working from this brief video the system data banks made her stand up and had her doing the twist upon the rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean.

After sixteen minutes of Miss Liu frolicking, Todd had her read a prepared sentence into the system microphone.

“My name is Susan Liu,” she read. “I was born in Lansing, Michigan, and raised in Iowa City, Iowa. I have three brothers, two sisters, one dog, four cats, and a boyfriend who can’t remember to put the seat down on the toilet. I’d love to own a miniature zebra but they don’t make them anymore.”

After the reading Todd hit a couple of keys and the huge image of Susan on the Blank Page said, “I will not help you with your homework, Farmer McGee. You have to learn to rely on yourself,” re-creating the tone and most of the inflections of the real girl.

“That’s amazing,” Susan said.

We were, all twenty-one of us, standing under the gossamer sail that promised to change the world of entertainment. I felt, at that time, that this was the most important moment of my life. I was there when reality had been shifted from the tangible to make believe.

Doreen was standing alone toward the back of our little audience. People were cheering and clapping as Todd made his image of Susan do more and more tricks. She read the Gettysburg Address and sang “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal,” did a somersault with only two visual glitches, and was suddenly blessed with a third eye in the middle of her forehead.

“You okay?” I asked Doreen while everyone else celebrated.

“Thanks,” she replied, shaking her head.

“Can I help?”

“Don’t you hate me?”

“Why would I?”

“I stopped seeing you.”

“Before that I had a girlfriend who broke my heart. You stitched it back up again. I could never hate you.”

“You wanna come stitch me?”

*   *   *

WE LEFT THE LAB and went to my place in Hollywood. When Doreen made love to me that night I realized how much she’d been holding back in our previous encounters. She cried and thanked me and did other things beyond my ability, or maybe my sensibility, to describe. Not long after midnight she asked me just to hold her and I did—for two hours.

“You’re very kind, Josh Winterland,” Doreen whispered.

I had dozed off. Glancing at the clock I saw that it was 2:16 in the morning.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you held me when I asked for it, because you didn’t let go.”

She kissed me with unexpected emphasis and for maybe thirty seconds I was in jeopardy of falling for her. Then she smiled.

“What do you want to do now?” she asked.

“Um…”

“Let’s go back to the lab,” Doreen suggested. “Maybe they’re still partying.”

Like so many seminal events, that one passed without me realizing its significance. How could I?

*   *   *

WHEN WE GOT to the hangar everyone was gone except for Ana Fried. She was asleep on a cot in the observation deck set twelve feet above the floor. The deck presented a great view of what I came to know as Cosmo Campobasso’s Sail.

The screen had taken on the soft staticky texture of a TV at the end of the transmission day.

Both Doreen and I knew what had happened. Ana had left the image of Susan Liu on the system with a randomizer to see what the autopilot would come up with. One of the intentions of the system was for the computer to make up its own stories once characters and relationships had been arrived at. Built into this logic loop was a self-editing system that would reduce the redundancies of dramatic interaction, thereby keeping the stories interesting. When the system had found itself repeating a logic stream over and over it would have turned itself off, leaving the filler transmission of electronic snow.

“Josh,” Doreen said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you see an image in that static?”

Looking closely, squinting a little, I saw what seemed like a salt-and-pepper half of a face in deep anguish. The single eye was rolling around looking for an exit or an end.

“Not really,” I said, dismissing the vision.

Doreen went to the screen’s stand-alone console and began entering codes. As she did this the background became a yellowy sheet with the sienna and brown image its foreground, revealing what really seemed like a long, partially constructed face. The creature was howling silently, maybe because half of its skull had been torn away.

“Oh my God!” Ana Fried cried from her aerie, awakened by our voices, no doubt. “What is that?”

“Is it a projection?” Doreen asked.

“My computer has turned off,” Ana replied, looking down on us.

“Is there a backup system?” I asked.

Ana ignored my question, instead electing to clamber down the ladder to join Doreen at the console. She was wearing a white smock over blue jeans—the classic apparel of a JTE researcher.

Fried was the senior scientist on the project. She had been a pioneer in modern fiber optics and helped to design the theory behind the weblike strands that Cosmo had so patiently woven.

Ana took the console over from the taller Doreen, flipping through systems at a furious rate.

“This makes no sense. What did you do?”

“We came in a few minutes ago and saw this image in the haze of static,” Doreen said. “I just clarified it like we did on the early test photographs.”

By this time Ana was slamming her hammer-like fingertips on the keys of the console.

“You must have done something else,” the senior scientist accused.

“What’s he trying to say?” I asked.

The women both turned to me.

“His mouth is moving,” I explained. “Is the volume on?”

Ana turned to the console and hit a few keys. Then she said, “Dammit!” and balled her small fists.

“Let me,” Doreen said, easing Ana aside. “I can get us back to the main menu.”

While she worked at the keyboard, crowded by an evermore anxious Ana Fried, I stared at the manic face. It was dark brown in color. There was material falling or maybe oozing from the missing part of its skull. This material was darker still and seemed to dissipate in the yellow atmosphere of the Sail. His mouth was moving, and if I was a superstitious man I would have said that he was looking at me, addressing me with his distress.

“Ara gurum talahahdrimum,” he whispered.

“That’s it,” Ana Fried said. “Make it louder.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Doreen muttered.

“Ara gurum talahahdrimum,” the half-head brown man said.

“More,” urged Ana.

“Ara gurum talahahdrimum!” the partially decapitated man screamed.

He was a creature of few, if oft repeated, words. Ara gurum talahahdrimum, came from his lips hundreds of times; the emphasis changing with each utterance. His single eye moved from one of us to another, imploring us with his apparent agony.

“We have to call Joe,” Doreen said after a dozen minutes of this diatribe. “It’s his project.”

“It’s probably a practical joke by Todd,” Ana said.

“Can you prove that?” my sometime lover asked.

“What else could it be?”

“What matters is that it’s there right now,” I said. “Joe will want to see it for himself. We wouldn’t want to lose it and then tell him what we saw.”

*   *   *

JOE JENNINGS—BLUE JEANS, T-shirt, and all—came in at about four-thirty that morning. He looked at the image and played with the console, changed the color of the background from yellow to red to blue. These changes seemed to enrage the brown man. He yelled even louder, “Ara gurum talahahdrimum!”

“How do you turn off the volume?” Joe asked Ana.

Doreen took his place to mute the speakers.

The tortured man continued his rant—silently.

“What is it?” Jennings asked.

“Ana thinks it might be a practical joke,” Doreen said. “Maybe some image hard coded into the basic system.”

“But his face,” Joe countered, “it’s never in the same position twice.”

“It could be a simple form that was somehow fed through the randomizer,” Fried said.

For some minutes Joe watched the screen. Then he nodded and said, “Well then, let’s reboot the system and see what we get.”

“We might lose any possibility of finding where the glitch is,” Ana warned. “What if we can’t repeat it?”

“If that’s true I’ll be a happy man.”

*   *   *

DOREEN WENT TO THE SYSTEM console in her office. She was gone for five minutes and then returned.

The head, which was sienna and yellow again, was still yelling.

“Oh my God,” Doreen said.

“What’s wrong?” Joe asked. “Why didn’t you reboot?”

“I turned the whole system off,” she said. “There’s no data going to or coming from the screen.”

We stood there in absolute silence while the brown man raged. His face was getting closer and closer to the surface of the screen. For a few moments I felt as if he might be trying to come through. Then he was struck by something like a powerful wind. You could see tiny motes of his brown image being blown from right to left. He turned his attention to something—maybe that wind—coming from his right. We could see into the cavity of his skull, its dark brown bleeding and pieces of what might have been desiccated brain tissue. Then, suddenly, he was carried away on that strong gale, which blew for maybe thirty seconds and then calmed.

After a while new movement began. A multitude of green images began to migrate across the now-blue field of the Sail; saber-toothed tigers and long-tailed monkeys, huge shambling bearlike creatures and flying insects larger than condors.

Thousands, tens of thousands of creatures journeyed from right to left—moving with certainty and animate agility.

“We haven’t programmed animal motions into the system,” Ana Fried whispered.

“The system is off,” Doreen snapped. “There is no software running, only the light from behind.”

A small, four-legged creature like a miniature deer noticed us as it passed. It pranced to the foreground of the Sail moving this way and that in an attempt to reach us—or so it seemed. The closer it got the more of the Blank Page it took up until all we could see was its bright green eye. That eye blinked and a new image appeared.

A squat, naked man was running through a forest of loosely spaced sapling trees, yelling for all he was worth. A large creature, like a rat the size of a greyhound, was chasing him. The rat-thing suddenly jumped and the man threw himself out of the way. He picked up a branch and started swinging it at the slavering snapping beast. The rat-thing nipped the man’s arm. He was dripping blood but still he fought.

Finally, after long tense minutes, the man was able to jab the end of his stick into the huge rodent’s eye. The creature hesitated, clawing at the wounded orb, and had its skull staved in by its desperate prey.

When the beast was dead the man sat back against a slender tree trunk and opened his mouth in a piteous howl. The volume was still off but it felt as if I could hear the prehistoric wail. Holding his injured forearm he stood up and began walking. I had not seen the man walking before, but there was something wrong with his gait, that much was obvious. He stumbled and staggered, stopped every dozen steps or so. His breathing seemed labored. He wasn’t traveling in a straight line.

After fifteen tentative minutes the plainsman stumbled down onto his knees. He tried to get up, failed, tried again, and then fell to the ground.

I could feel a heart, not my own, throbbing slowly and then fast. The rhythm vacillated. The air around my head seemed to sing with some kind of transitory promise—and then the screen went black.

No one spoke. We had witnessed a primordial contest between Man and his environs. There was no question as to the authenticity of the drama. There was no concern about its possibly fabricated origin.

Light.

The screen was no longer green and blue. The colors were vibrant and natural. The man we had seen struggle and die was walking in the sapling forest of ash bark, green leaves, and sun.

A creature, maybe a bird, sang out loud.

I realized that Doreen—Doreen, I’d almost forgotten that she existed—had turned the sound back on.

The man was carrying a pale spear with a black stone tip. He was moving with intention, looking for something, hunting for something.

“It is as if,” Ana Fried uttered, “he was imagining himself as he walked, or maybe remembering.”

For an instant there I hated Fried, hated her verbal intrusion into this holy (holy?) experience. The passion in my breast didn’t seem to be mine, but I didn’t think about its origins because the feeling passed so quickly and the brown-skinned squat man took up all of my attention.

After a dozen minutes he stopped to defecate next to a tree that was somewhat larger and darker than the rest. The whole while he looked around to make sure nothing would attack him.

After the bowel movement he moved more quickly, and closer to the ground. Traveling now with intention he came to a dark green bush that flourished in a clearing. This plant sported three bright white flowers. The man plucked a blossom and ate it hungrily.

For a moment there a vision of the blue, blue sky and then the man jerked his head toward a nearby snuffling.

I realized that the sounds coming through the system were being heard by the man.

He crouched down and began to move toward the noise. The snuffling got louder as the man approached a rise. He got down on his stomach and suddenly the scene changed. Down in the slight depression below the rise were two rat-things sitting back on their tails nibbling at pieces of flesh from what was obviously a human child. The limbs and head of the thin girl were pretty much untouched, but the chest and abdomen had been ripped out. The creatures were feasting on her vital organs.

Then one of the things jerked its head as if it were seeing into the airplane hangar. It let out a loud squeal and the scene changed again.

The man, spear held in both hands, ran toward the closest creature, skewering it. The man was crying as the mortally wounded rat-thing howled. The creature wrenched away from the man taking the spear with it.

The man, realizing that he was unarmed, picked up a fair-sized rock and threw it at the remaining beast. The thing squealed and fell, but was soon on its feet again. It showed its yellow fangs and hissed.

The man turned and ran.

Again we saw him running through the forest of sapling trees. This time we could hear his yelling. It was language. He was obviously calling for help. And the rat-thing was yowling behind him. They moved at a furious pace until getting to the place where we had first witnessed the drama.

The battle repeated itself, blow for bite. The beast died ignominiously and the man wandered off to be slain by the rat-thing poisons in his blood.

“Where’d you get that?” Cosmo Campobasso said in his musical, peasant tenor.

We all turned as if being interrupted in some religious ceremony. For my part, I had to hold myself back from yelling at him.

“What time is it?” Joe Jennings asked.

“Ten to six,” Cosmo said. “Where’d you get all the material?”

“I’m going out to wait at the front door,” the boss said to Ana, Doreen, and me. “You fill Cosmo in. I’m sending everybody else home for the day. We have to figure out what’s going on. We have to check all the connections to see where this data stream is originating.”

“Did you feel it?” I asked before Joe could turn away.

He hesitated before saying, “Yes. Yes, I did.”

*   *   *

HE KNEW WHAT I MEANT. The images on the wavering silken screen were not wholly separate from us. There was a pull … something that tugged our hearts, maybe our souls. We felt the rage and fear of the prehistoric man and even the migratory movement of the thousands of creatures across the wide screen of undocumentable history.

The images we saw were not a hoax, not the nerdly dream of some jokester in our midst. The prehistoric man had run that final race, fought that last battle … was still running and still fighting as we watched.

*   *   *

ANA TOOK COSMO aside to explain to him what had happened. We could hear them talk while watching the naked plainsman’s drama unfold and repeat itself again and again.

After a while Cosmo and Ana came to join Doreen and me. Maybe a dozen times the man and rat-things lived out their destiny. And then, as the sun shone through the skylight of the hangar, the man died, and when light once again shone on the Sail it was upon an airborne vision of a broad plain.

The huge shadow of a bird moved across the sun-flooded landscape. And we could see the minutiae of the ground in its passage. Tiny rocks and small thickets of grass jumped up at us from impossible distances. Animal prints and skat, strange blues and iridescent tobacco hues seemed to shift upon the same items in the bird of prey’s keen sight.

There appeared a flat sign with writing on it. But the writing didn’t make sense. It seemed like forms trying to come to life and failing. The bird was interpreting, I thought, the anthropomorphic origins of the letters and words, trying to see the life that imbued their intentions.

Then the shadow of a motion and shift of wing.

It was a hare racing, no doubt, toward shelter. The feeling of speed blossomed at my back and in my chest. The feeling of joyous gliding flight shifted to weightless freefall—from exuberance to cold fright. And before I could scream the ground leaped up for real this time and the talons clutched deeply into the warm blood of their prey. There was a croaking sound and the fast beating of two hearts, then one. There was blood and flesh and then flight.

A feeling of satisfaction I had never imagined crawled from my core out to each limb, filling my head with notions that could not have been human—at least not for a very long time. I had the urge to take off my clothes. I wanted to scream out a complex emotion that I couldn’t exactly apprehend. Then came the chatter-like squawking of a nest full of ugly chicks singing “Hunger” in a high aerie that I wanted to remember. They jabbed into the corpse their mother offered, pushing each other aside and swallowing greedily.

“The hunter has no concept of itself,” Ana Fried whispered to no one. “She is one with her environs. That is why we never see her.”

I was sitting on the cold concrete staring up at the wavering Sail. The images put before me were monumental, dwarfed galaxies that seemed to take up the entire universe and, more than that, they were like the intentions of poetry—the meaning of a world that I often witnessed but never actually entered.

Law receded from mind into sinew and grief. Hope had an endpoint and love blended with greed and strife to make a perfect sun over an unblemished, unending plain.

The bird of prey caught that rabbit and fed her chicks many times over. I lost count. I lost the ability or desire to count. I was well on my way to losing my humanity when I felt someone shaking my shoulders.

“Wake up, Winterland. Wake up!”

It was Cosmo, his powerful fingers digging into me.

“What!”

“Come on,” he said gruffly. He smelled of garlic. “We’re having a meeting in the boss’s office.”

Pulling my arm, the Italian craftsman dragged me to my feet. My head felt empty and as large as the sun-flooded world of the vicious mother and her hungering brood.

Following Cosmo (who was wearing odd scarlet overalls, a long-sleeved dark blue shirt, and white tennis shoes), I felt as if I were walking on the path of evolution or, more accurately, biological change. I was morphing from master of all I surveyed into a rusty cog in a failing machine. The visions I’d seen had humbled me, completely.

Cosmo led me from the hangar into the brick building that was once a factory of some sort. There the ceilings were low and the halls narrow. We ascended a slender staircase until reaching the top floor—Joe Jennings’s office.

Ana, Doreen, and Todd were already there.

“What’s he doing here?” Todd Pinkus asked upon seeing me.

“He’s part of the discovery crew,” Joe said. Joe was always coming up with terminology to explain the ways of the world. If he had been the first alien to discover human marriage he would have called the couple X and Y cohabiters.

I stared at Pinkus detesting his feeble arrogance like the most powerful of those baby chicks despised the weakest of the clutch.

“We’re here to decide what to do,” Joe continued. “There’s data showing up on the Blank Page that we cannot account for. Cosmo has chained the doors to the buildings and I’ve called all our employees and vendors, telling them that a possible hazardous waste situation has caused an informal quarantine.

“The only person I brought in was Todd here because he can decipher the code that fed the Page before we turned off the system.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ana Fried said. “The Blank Page has no memory. And computer code is not the source of this material.”

“Then what is?” Joe asked.

She opened her mouth but no words came out. I heard the cry of a distant bird, a possible rival, and closed my eyes.

“I understand myself,” Todd said, “Doreen and Ana of course, and even Cosmo had at least something to do with the construction of the Page. But what can Winterland offer? He doesn’t even have a BA. Do you want him here to record us thinking?”

“That wouldn’t be a bad idea, Mr. Pinkus,” Joe said.

“Listen, you wormy shit,” Cosmo said, surprising us all with his vehemence as well as his language. “You’re no scientist. You know how to make Pac-Man eat some cheese, that’s all. You’re the one we don’t need. So shut your face or I’ll break it for you.”

“No need for that, Cos,” Joe said as Todd stared, amazed at what he just heard.

“Aren’t you going to do something?” Todd asked Joe.

“No, Pinkus, I’m not. Until we find the reason for these images we’re staying in here—all of us. Do you understand that?”

Now Pinkus’s mouth was agape.

“Do you understand?” Joe repeated.

Finally the coder nodded.

“So, Josh,” Joe said then.

“Yeah?”

“Tell us what you saw?”

“What I saw? The same things you guys did.”

“No.”

“What do you mean no?”

“The rest of us…” Joe began. “The rest of us saw images and heard sounds like you do on a television. We conversed and discussed, but you were sucked up into the images like you were there with that bird, that man.”

Everyone, even Pinkus, was looking at me. I couldn’t remember ever being the subject of scrutiny so close.

“Um … I didn’t realize I was different,” I stammered. “I mean, uh, after a few minutes between the blanks I felt like I was there. The dead girl was one of my people. The hungry chicks echoed in my mind. I wasn’t really in the hangar anymore and there wasn’t any Sail … just sailing.”

“Maybe it’s the drugs you took last night,” Todd suggested.

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Todd,” Doreen said. “Josh was with me all night and we didn’t have to do any drugs.”

Pinkus was more bothered by Doreen’s claim than he had been by Cosmo’s threats. I always knew, by the way he would look at her, that Pinkus was attracted to his boss. But she had never given him an in.

“What else, Josh?” Joe asked.

“I felt things, Joe,” I said. “You said that you did, too.”

Our millionaire boss stared at me. His grimace told me that he was having some kind of internal battle, but I couldn’t have identified its source.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, I did feel … something. I couldn’t tell what it was exactly. You know, it was like a mosquito that wakes you up. The zipping is there in your ear and it’s gone, and then you wake up. Something out of the corner of your eye that disappears before you can look.”

Ana and Doreen were nodding. Cosmo held his shoulders high like a retired soldier remembering his fallen comrades.

“But looking at you I could tell that you went deeper. Somehow you experienced more than we did.”

“You don’t know that, Mr. Jennings,” Pinkus said. “Maybe he’s just got a wild imagination.”

“I told you to be quiet,” Cosmo said.

“No, Mr. Campobasso,” Joe Jennings intoned. “We cannot, in this group, ask for silence. We need a doubter among us. But I tell you, Mr. Pinkus, you haven’t seen the Blank Page in its glory yet. There is something miraculous about the images we saw … something holy.”

One of the few good things about Todd Pinkus was what I like to call his facial honesty. He couldn’t hide his contempt for the pious words coming from Joe’s mouth. He grimaced but did not speak because Joe was the boss and, if nothing else, Todd Pinkus knew his place.

“We can’t stay in here forever,” Ana Fried said. “What are we going to do?”

Ana was the oldest and best educated of us. In her career she’d studied at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. She’d been a lecturer at MIT and it was common knowledge that she was on the radar of the Nobel committee. She wasn’t impressed by wealth or ownership … or references to the deity.

“My congressman, Dak Zintel, is in Washington,” Joe said. “I called his office and asked him to come here as soon as possible. He can’t get away for a few days or so and that’s good … because we have to monitor this, this thing day and night so that when he does get here we’ll know for certain whether or not we have some kind of unique phenomenon or just a hoax.”

“Maybe,” I said, “maybe we should build a screen to cover over the Sail if the feelings get too intense. I mean, Cosmo had to drag me away.”

“I’ll build a rolling shade,” the Italian said, not looking at me. “I’ll take the truck to get the materials. I’ll get food and drink, too. I guess we’re gonna be here awhile.”

*   *   *

THINGS FELL INTO PLACE over the next day. It was agreed that Cosmo would be the only person to leave the compound. He bought food and supplies, special items for the women, and the materials needed to make a shade for the Sail.

Pinkus and I avoided each other and Ana Fried returned to the Sail, examining frets, frame, and connections.

“The only metals used are nonconductive,” she said to me that afternoon. “They cannot carry the impulses necessary for these images.”

“Maybe we can disconnect the fibers from the computer,” I suggested.

“They are already turned off,” Ana countered.

“But … they’re still linked physically.”

“But they are unable to transmit images.”

“And yet there are those children.”

A group of black and brown children were playing in an abandoned construction site. Barely adolescent boys and girls shouting and playing, smoking cigarettes and kissing now and again. A jet passed over and one of the children, a broad-faced girl, looked up, and for half a minute all we could see was sky.

When she looked down again a lanky boy was staggering toward her. He was bleeding from a gash in his shirt. There was a scream that felt like it came from me but it didn’t.

In the distance another boy was running away.

“Leon!” the broad-faced black girl screamed. “Leon!”

“Maybe,” Ana said. “Yes. When Cosmo comes back we will begin disconnecting the fibers. There should be some perceptible affect with only ten percent cut away.”

The girl was kneeling next to the mortally wounded boy. Some of the children stood around her while others ran away. Tears flowed from her eyes and mine, and I wondered who was looking at this scene, remembering it?

*   *   *

TWO DAYS PASSED. We took shifts watching the Sail. Pinkus had set up a video camera to record every moment, but the images didn’t come out well on the digital medium; they were faded and fleeting, certainly they evoked no emotional response.

Cosmo disconnected all of the fiber-optic strands from the specially designed I/O computer ports, but the images still appeared. The light behind was dimmed and then shut off, but still we could make out the visions of dying children and nature’s beasts.

“Everything we see surrounds the dramas of life,” Ana Fried said on the afternoon of the third day. “It makes no sense. What could be causing it?”

“Maybe it’s God, like Joe said,” Cosmo suggested. There was no awe or even reverence in his voice. Cosmo’s relationship with his Creator wasn’t much different from the chicks hollering at their mother. In Cosmo’s world everything had a place—the man, his God … everything.

*   *   *

MY SHIFT WAS FROM NINE at night until two in the morning. After that I went to my makeshift bedroom on the second floor of the office building next door. I looked forward to coming to my room because Doreen had been waiting for me the first two nights.

I hadn’t had sex with anyone but Doreen in a long time and we had that layoff because of her rock-and-roll boyfriend. Sex with Doreen was the best I’d ever known.

I was thinking about her while watching a strange hominid creature—part reptile, part bird—picking its way down a nearly dry riverbed in what seemed like either twilight or the early hours of the morning. There was intelligence burning in the eyes of the thing. Its clawed hands were surely capable of wielding tools, and its glances and head movements appeared to be more contemplative than instinctual. The scaly gray skin and white feather back, the amber beak and long skull drew in my curiosity.

“Homo reptilicus,” a young woman said.

I leaped out of the chair I was in, knocking it over. I would have yelled if my windpipe hadn’t closed from fear. Somehow my body responded to the invader as if I were drowning.

“Who? Who, who, who?” I said.

She managed to smile and look worried with a single expression. This air of concern immediately calmed me. I righted the chair and then turned my attention to her.

She was human but not like any human being I had ever seen. Her skin was golden and her hair lustrous blond. Her eyes were an intense North Sea blue while her lips were thick and her nose quite broad. The brown body suit she wore was nearly see-through, but the minute details of her body were illusive.

“Thalla Threndor Bat-Sool,” she said in a throaty and musical voice.

I watched her lips moving. They didn’t quite contain the words I heard.

“Yes,” she said. “I am speaking, but the words you hear are in your mind.”

“Oh,” I said.

Thalla smiled and shifted upon the invisible platform where she reclined.

I was sure that she was very far away; farther than any distance ever imagined by Einstein.

She cocked her head to the side and asked, “Who are you?”

“Josh. Josh Winterland.”

She smiled and shivered, sharing the humor of my name.

“And why are you examining Homo reptilicus?”

“Man lizard?”

“You are unaware of the origins of the rare being that you espy?” There was both pity and wonder in her blue dark eyes.

“What am I looking at?”

“In the pre–Hyperion Age there was an island in the southern sea, almost a continent, that bore the life of the descendants of the dinosaur. This being was the first human-like creature on the planet. In many ways she was more intelligent than her mammal counterpart, who didn’t appear for another seventeen million years.”

“There was intelligent life on earth before Man?”

“Twice. And one of those beings, the Londorians, in many of the myriad iterations, outlives the sad human travesty.”

“Who are you?”

Thalla smiled.

“Your portal is so primitive,” she said, looking up at the Sail. “I almost didn’t pick it up while watching this being on her Lure.”

“Lure?”

“It’s a rite for the passage into womanhood. For eight months this young one must travel the backwoods of her people looking for tokens of the gods. These she will make into her totem and offer it to her first husband before they mate.”

I was flummoxed by the visions and words. What Thalla told me about the Homo reptilicus was amazing, but no less than her sitting there on invisible cushions next to me.

“I intuited you watching the same thread of being,” she said. “This alone is a momentous, nearly impossible coincidence. The odds are, in best circumstance, a trillion to the trillionth power that two threads might be observed at the same U. Moment.”

“You moment?”

“Universal time.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about or who you are or where you are.”

Thalla smiled.

“What year is it?” she asked.

“Two thousand twelve. August.”

She nodded and smiled again.

“I am of an earth that may be descended from yours at a time somewhat beyond your own. I am of the Alto race, descendants of humanity, rulers of the three continents.”

“What year is it where you are?”

“Twenty-three eighteen by your reckoning, also August. But we call our year two-twelve and the month Five-Ascendant.”

“Josh?” Doreen called.

Thalla disappeared in an instant.

“Huh?”

“Who were you talking to?”

“Uh, um … myself.”

I heard a hiss and looked back at the Sail. The female reptilian was staring up at a branch where a catlike blue lizard was making ready to jump.

Doreen gasped and pulled a chair up next to mine.

The lithe lizard’s leap was incredibly graceful and dreadfully fast. But the young female rolled away, coming up with a broad stone cutting tool in the fist of her left hand. The lizard jumped again, but reptilicus went down on all fours, flat to the ground. She turned in an impossible motion and cut open the belly of the predator. It howled and limped away, still at a good pace. The white-feathered killer rose to her knees, dipping her talons into the blood and then bringing it to her beak. A blue tongue darted out to taste the kill and her yellow and brown eyes opened wide.

I shivered all the way down to a place I had never suspected.… The next thing I knew I was kissing Doreen and pulling off her clothes.

I’m pretty sure she enjoyed what we did. She was calling out my name, pounding my back and thighs with the sides of her fists. I had the metallic taste of reptile blood on my tongue and an ululation of victory trilling in my blood.

I don’t remember any tactile sensation nor did I feel the release of climax. All I knew was the certainty of my actions and the undeniable desire to be with Doreen.

When we were done she moved a few feet away from me. For a long time she watched me either in fear or from desire—I could not tell which.

After some minutes she asked, “What happened to you, Josh?”

“Isn’t, isn’t that why you came down here?”

“But you’re usually so sweet, so tender.”

“It was the blood,” I said.

I expected her to run from the room screaming. But instead she crawled over to me and gave me a kiss that anchored me to a world that I was never before a part of.

Doreen gathered her clothes and left, promising to be waiting for me in her room when I got off shift.

The feelings I had for our connection filled every part of my mind, but when I looked up again toward the Sail I was lost to that adolescent reptilian and her hunt for the cat lizard that had tried to make her his meal.

The evolved dinosaur followed the trail of blood until coming upon the corpse of her would-be killer stretched out in a last attempt to reach a powerful river not fifteen paces away. Homo reptilicus ate from the blue flesh until her belly bulged. Then she swam like a fish through the fast currents. She returned and used a stone tool from a sack that hung at her waist to pry loose two of the cat-lizard’s longest teeth.

“These she will give to her lover and he will, in turn, submit his seed to her,” Thalla said.

“Where’d you go?”

“When you were interrupted you no longer had the focus to perceive me.”

“Why didn’t Doreen see you?”

“She is not attuned to the Portal. It is rare among normal humans to find harmony with the wider world.”

“Aren’t you a normal human?” I asked. I thought I should be doing something else; warning Joe Jennings or running for my life, but, as in a dream, all I could do was to sit and converse with the exotic beauty.

“I am Alto,” she replied with odd emphasis. “We are the descendants of Homo sapiens.”

“You evolved from Man?”

“We were created … by Man as you call yourself.” There was some disdain in her tone, but I did not feel that it was for me.

“I don’t understand.”

She stood up and I, in spite of my upbringing, stared.

“You find me attractive, Josh?”

“I must be going crazy,” I said.

“Insanity is a term that can only be defined by subjective points of view,” she said. “In your old south the slave was insane who hungered for freedom. A man who sees a golden woman floating before him in a room that should be empty is most definitely out of his mind.”

“What am I looking upon when I see the Sail?” I asked. “Who are the Alto and why aren’t you up there instead of here next to me?”

There were a hundred other questions in my mind. I think Thalla perceived them all.

Homo reptilicus hissed and I looked back at the screen to see her, once again, enter battle with the predator lizard.

“What is that?” I asked. “A memory? A reenactment?”

“It is a thread of experience seen through a series of interconnected planes.”

“Is it a memory?”

“An impression of living things upon the soul-matter that surrounds us.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“One does not need to understand to know something, Josh. You perceive less than a tenth of a tenth of a percent of just the material world around you, but still your life is influenced by the totality of that existence. Your children do not understand the rhinovirus and yet they sneeze.”

“Do you sneeze?”

“Sometimes.” She smiled and then laughed. I’m pretty sure that was the moment I fell in love.

“What is an Alto?”

She opened her mouth and began speaking but I didn’t hear a word.

“Winterland,” Todd Pinkus said.

Thalla disappeared again.

My fists clenched and my molars ground together. I have never in my life been closer to killing someone.

“What do you want?” I said.

“I came down early to relieve you,” he said. “Were you talking to somebody?”

“I don’t need relief.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And I don’t care to help you, either. But I got a question.”

At that moment Homo reptilicus let out a loud cry of victory over her opponent’s bloody corpse.

“What?” I asked.

“Just to get this straight,” he said. “I don’t have anything against black people in general. It’s just they’re always feeling that they’ve been given a hard time when I’m workin’ just as hard to survive as they are.”

“Who are? Me?”

“Yeah, you. Here you’re taking up a job that doesn’t even mean anything, getting all upset with me just because I have what I worked for.”

“I don’t want your job, man. And I didn’t make up the position I have. I read about it in the paper. The only reason I ever give you any grief is that you’re always talking about me like I’m a card-carrying member of some group that’s in your head. If you stopped talking about my people I would never give you a hard time again.”

“So now you want to limit my freedom of speech?”

Talking to Thalla I realized the breadth of a universe I hadn’t suspected, and talking to Pinkus I understood that there was also a smallness that could not expand.

“What was it you wanted to ask me, Pinkus?”

“Mr. Pinkus.”

“From the day you call me Mr. Winterland.”

“I always call you mister.”

I stood up.

“You’re here to relieve me so I’ll be on my way.”

“I had a question,” he said.

“So?”

“You haven’t answered it.”

“I haven’t heard anything from you except how stupid a man can be.” I figured that insult would cut me loose, but whatever was on Pinkus’s mind it was more important than his pet prejudices.

“What do you see when you’re alone with that thing?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Scenes like the one here. Strange things and new views of the mundane. Why? What do you see?”

“Ten minutes after you leave here the scenes will shift,” he said. “It’ll become something weird.”

“Weird like what?”

“I don’t know. It’s different each time. But it’s almost always about a family and someone or something is being beaten or, or, or abused … sexually.

“One time it was these two male deer killing a fawn and raping its mother. Another time it was a man beating his son with a stick while the boy’s sister or maybe girlfriend was bloody on the barn floor.

“It got so bad the first night that when it started to repeat I rolled down Cosmo’s screen and turned the sound off. It wasn’t till after Joe got here that I rolled it back up.”

“What was the scene then?” I asked.

“It was a, a group of apelike creatures living in a valley. It was a paradise.”

“So the story that day was okay,” I suggested.

“No. Maybe an hour before Joe got here I peaked behind the screen. It was a basement with a naked man surrounded by prepubescent children, all of them tied up. He was … he was … I vomited and almost passed out.”

Pinkus had taken the seat next to me. His breathing was hard and shallow.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“They say you see deeper into that thing than the rest of us, that you understand more about it.”

“Maybe I do,” I said. “I really can’t tell.”

“Why do I see those things?” Pinkus asked, for the first time without contempt for me in his tone.

“I’m not nearly an expert on this stuff, Todd. I mean, I just look up like everybody else. But I think that it’s some kind of meeting of energies that causes what we see, and that part of those energies emanate from our lifeforces, our minds. In a small way any one or group of us will call out to certain images.”

Pinkus’s face: it was a map of the inner man. His nostril flared and his lip curled.

“What do you think you are?” he asked. “Some kind of fucking academic? I asked you what you saw not for some ghetto church philosophy.”

I smiled, then laughed.

The image behind Pinkus had changed. No longer was it homed in on a prehuman Utopia; instead, in a bloody room a man was slaughtering children one after the other.

“You better put down that screen before turning around, my friend,” I said.

Fear crossed Pinkus’s face like a cloud over barren countryside at midday. I stood up and walked off.

Before I left the room I could hear the squeaking of the lever Cosmo put in place to lower the covering shade.

*   *   *

I WENT TO DOREEN’S ROOM and told her that I was going to the library to think for a while.

“Are you tired of me?” she asked playfully.

“Tired after being with you but always wanting to wake up to that face.”

She kissed me and I lumbered up to the library of the fifth floor of the annex. There I reclined on one of the chaise lounges. I could lie down and close my eyes but sleep was another matter. Pure consciousness was racing through my mind: words and images, Todd Pinkus’s child molesters and a golden woman with blue eyes so dark that in certain light they must have been seen as black.

“I am here,” Thalla said.

She was sitting next to me, not quite on the backless sofa.

“What is the soul matter?” I asked.

“You get right to the question. Aren’t you interested about my family? My people?”

“Yes,” I said.

I reached out to touch her and, though my finger went through her arm, I felt something that sent a thrill through me. I could see by her face that she had a similar experience.

“This is the closest I have ever been to an other-being,” she said before I could get my mouth working again.

“I, I want to get to know you, but we keep getting interrupted, and every time we do I worry that I may never get to confer with you again.”

“Confer?” she said with a smile.

“You know what I mean.”

“There are twelve known discreet co-existing aspects to any of the myriad planes of existence,” Thalla said. Again I noticed that her mouth moved but the words I heard did not match the motions.

“There is Dark Matter and Stabler Waves, Soul Matter and a sea called The Particles of Inversion where anything can become its opposite; there is inert matter, where you and I originate, and the veil of shrouds that moves between all planes and forms the physics of this thing you call the Sail.”

“That’s only six,” I said.

“I am forbidden under sentence of ending to reveal the six higher planes to humans. They are too dangerous for mortal men.”

“So you’re saying that you’re not human.”

Her deep blue stare delved into mine and she touched my forehead with two fingers, causing the electric thrill of contact.

“We,” she said, and I entered a different plane of existence. It felt as if I were up on the screen of the Sail being watched by myself and everyone else in the world—and beyond.

“We,” she continued, “were built from genetic materials harvested from what our creators thought was the best of humanity.…”

I was in a room, a man-made cavern really, lined with thousands of multitiered gurneys. On each platform lay a naked man or woman who looked almost exactly like Thalla. They were all asleep in the humid atmosphere of the huge chamber.

“We were brought into existence in secret, filled with instincts and knowledge that made us what our masters thought were the perfect fighting machines. We were different from each other in profound ways, but the Alto started out of the same mind due to the machinations of our creators.”

“Who created you?” I asked, standing alone in the enormous hall of what I knew to be Thalla’s prelife.

“European scientists and technicians, philanthropists and rogue government officials,” she said.

A flood of mostly male and all white faces passed before me. They were serious and compassionate, anything but evil.

“They had decided that the world was being taken over by the sludge of what they called the Third World.”

“But you don’t only have Caucasian blood in you,” I said.

“The philosophers helped to separate DNA traits from race in the doctrine of the Masters. The geneticists performed a cleansing process on our molecular structure, or so they said. We were deemed Caucasian by our creators and expected to act in accordance with that definition.”

In the room, thousands of Thalla’s brothers and sisters arose from their hard plastic boards as one. They all stood up—naked and perfect. Looking around at each other, seeing things I knew would forever be beyond me, they all shared a silent smile. Then they began to move in concert, filing out of the hall of prelife. They passed through a chamber filled with clothes and took a long time choosing their raiment. They joked and laughed, some made love in the corners or helped others decide on their dress. After an hour or more they filed into a large armory where every kind of weapon was stored. They moved through this room quickly without touching a thing. The next room was a library replete with computers, books, file cabinets, and microfiche machines. Again the Alto moved swiftly through to a wide miles-long hallway that could have been called a tunnel.

For many minutes, maybe even an hour, the thousands of newly born Alto walked. They conversed, smiled knowingly, and seemed to share knowledge and a certainty that bordered on fanatic.

Finally the new race entered a stadium-like room filled with scientists and screens and soldiers. The Altos moved quickly and, unarmed as I have said, they killed every man and woman in the room. A few of them died from the soldiers’ bullets, but no Alto seemed very worried about that.

My vision became abstract and timeless. I saw snatches of activity among Thalla’s newly created people. This staccato vision leapfrogged through the next few days in which the golden-hued people sought out and destroyed every human being on the island, and then they went to work in the laboratories.…

“In the first days we thought almost as one,” Thalla said, removing the two fingers from my forehead. “It was a golden age where the world for us was perfect and safe.”

An image of the slain Alto came into my mind.

“No,” she said in answer to a question I had not even formulated. “We did not feel death, because we lived inside each other back then.

“We took over the secret island laboratories and designed a gen-bomb that was detonated six years later.”

“How large a range?” I asked.

“Its range, as you call it, covered the entire planet.”

“You killed everyone?”

“In a way it was worse,” she said.

“How can that be?”

“We were designed to save the planet from human self-destruction. We achieved this end by sterilizing, on the genetic level, all humanity. A switch was flipped in human DNA and procreation was rendered impossible among Homo sapiens. Even the possibility of cloning was denied. The time of Man, as you call it, began to run down. It was not for another decade, when we began to particularize, that we realized the paradox of our actions.

“You see,” she said moving closer to me, “we were children endowed with superhuman ability. We were born with an inbred contempt for humanity, and by the time we’d learned compassion the slow death sentence had already been carried out.”

There was a feeling of sadness about the words in my mind.

“What did you do?” I asked the woman I loved.

“The next phase of our development was worse, I’m afraid. There were, at that time, thirteen thousand six hundred ninety-one Alto. We formed into seventy-one military units. These units attacked and overran small towns and villages, capturing the inhabitants. On-site we harvested the contents of their minds.”

“Harvested?”

“Yes.” Thalla touched my hands with hers and a thrill of pleasure so powerful passed through me that I thought I was going to pass out.

An image of struggling people, swaddled like babies, appeared before me. They were being operated on by Alto. Their skulls were opened and presented to a scarlet orb that drew out something ethereal from the brain while turning the gray matter into dry and desiccated flesh.

Thalla pulled her hands away and the image suddenly disappeared, leaving me breathless. I was overwhelmed by the immensity of the Alto’s crimes and at the same time bereft at the loss of contact with Thalla.

“We were not yet mature,” she said as if that were explanation for absolute genocide and torture. “We didn’t understand the trauma visited upon those we tried to save.”

“Save?” I said, unable to keep the indictment out of my tone.

“The sterilization process could not be reversed,” she said, “at least not soon enough to save the cultures of Earth. So we sought to capture small communities from around the planet and store their knowledge and experience in Father Time—an advanced, laser-based, computer storage system.”

“But those people looked so frightened,” I said. “It looked like you cut open their heads while they were still conscious.”

“They had to be conscious for the mind transfer to be effective.”

“But it must have felt … it was their deaths.”

“There is no excuse for the arrogance of youth,” Thalla said. “We looked at humans as their scientists saw test animals. We felt that our acts were justified because our intentions were to preserve as much of humanity as we could.”

“And how many minds did you finally store?”

“One hundred sixty-two million three hundred nineteen thousand eight hundred sixty-nine souls.”

“You kidnapped and murdered that many and were never stopped?”

“The world of Man was in disarray,” she explained. “The psychic trauma of species sterility broke down the primary systems of defense. Cynicism and despair trumped the survival instinct. World leaders were aware of our actions but they had seemingly more pressing concerns; others looked inward.”

“And what of Father Time?”

“For a century, while we matured, we forgot the great computer—at least we never spoke of it. The human race passed from existence and our time was taken up repairing the damage our creator species had done to the planet. But at night we began dreaming of Man’s perfect world without humanity. The irony of our actions put a pall over everything we did.”

“You’re a hundred years old?” I asked.

“Two hundred and twelve.” When she smiled I was reminded of the pain inside her.

“You don’t age?”

“Slowly,” she said, “over the centuries.”

“What do you do about population control?”

“Propagate rarely.”

“Oh.”

“When we came back to the island where we’d left Father Time we were met by a great crystal city that referred to itself as Refuge—”

“Referred to itself?”

“Yes. The city was sentient. The spires and buildings were thousands of meters high and the clear material glinted every color in the spectrum of light. It was heavily defended and we could not land without causing Refuge damage. Humanity had formed itself into an architectural masterpiece where the memories of the human race glided effortlessly through the walls and floors, between great gardens and under the ground.

“We were told to stay away from them, that they had set ecobombs inside their perimeter that would destroy everything we were trying to preserve if we set foot on their self-proclaimed sovereign domain.”

“Did they try to rebuild their bodies?”

“They no longer considered themselves human. Using the technology inherent in Father Time they built large automatons used for mining, building, and defense. But humanity was now a collection of bodiless identities hardly related to the species we’d slaughtered.”

Thalla looked into my eyes, showing me the guilt of her people. She opened her mouth and her mind but no communication came forth. Thalla disappeared and I realized that someone was knocking on the door.

“Who is it?”

“Joe.”

“Come on in.”

There he was—T-shirt and jeans, khaki jacket and tennis shoes—the richest man in the room; the boss and saint of the Capitalist religion; a member of a race that was destined to be the architectural husk of what was once defined by human bodies and misplaced arrogance.

“Dak Zintel is here,” he said.

“Who?”

“My congressman.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He wants to meet you.”

“What time is it?”

“Two in the afternoon,” Joe said. “You don’t look like you got any sleep.”

*   *   *

DAK ZINTEL WAS NOTABLY THIN wearing a white summer suit with light blue pin-striping. He wasn’t tall or particularly short and had dark skin for a white man. He was standing among the first guardians of the Sail, looking up at a herd of thousands of huge quadruped dinosaurs stomping across a seemingly endless plain. The great beasts’ coloring was emerald, scarlet, and canary yellow. They were both beautiful and awe-inspiring.

Ana Fried, Doreen, and Pinkus were standing with the slight congressman. Cosmo stood a few paces away, glowering at the group.

Something was happening in my mind. There was a feeling … much milder but still similar to what I felt when Thalla and I connected across time and space; a vibration that felt like a tooth that would soon begin to ache.

“Here we are, Dak,” Joe said as we approached the Sail. “This is the guy I was telling you about.”

The politician’s smile was immediate and engaging. He’d had good dental work and hours of practice with his expressions.

“Mr. Winterland,” he said. “Joe here tells me that you and Mr. Campobasso are the experts on this doohickey.”

My last experience with Thalla had turned my thoughts inward. I had witnessed the death of humanity in one final, unsuspecting generation.

“Um,” I managed to say, “I guess.”

“It looks like a Disney movie to me,” he said, “like that new animation magic.”

It was an insinuation. Zintel didn’t believe in the Sail. He was a troglodyte in a suit like that commercial on TV.

I, on the other hand, had reached out into a different dimension and, I suddenly understood, had been irrevocably changed.

“Come with me, Congressman Zintel,” I said.

I put a hand on his shoulder and guided him closer to the migrating beasts. I stood with my back to the Sail and moved him by the shoulders until he was looking up at me.

“Tell me something that you remember from your childhood,” I said.

“How do you mean?” His face creased into the question, showing me that the real man had crawled out from under the politician’s persona.

“Just a memory,” I said. “A time, a place … a feeling that resonates with you.”

There were flecks of ochre and green in Zintel’s brown eyes. They became more pronounced with his wariness.

He pulled a bit and I realized that I was still holding him.

“When I was a child,” he said at last, “my father used to take me to a stream just a little south of Venice Beach. It wasn’t so built up back then and there were crayfish that you could catch with your hands…”

I closed my eyes and concentrated on the dandy’s words.

“… or by net,” he continued. “And, and … Oh my God…”

I didn’t have to turn around to know that the memory he was experiencing was being represented on the screen.

I opened my eyes just in time to see Cosmo hurrying from the room.

“How did you do that?” Zintel was asking.

“It’s the Sail,” I said, exhaustion moving through my limbs. “It, it … Everything that ever happened, everyone and everything that ever lived has left an impression. This screen can connect with those impressions.”

“Like ghosts?” Zintel asked. There was no vestige of the official left. A deep experience had yanked him by the roots of his mind and he was moved.

“Yes,” I said. “I believe so.”

“How can that be?”

Joe and the rest of the employees from JTE had gathered around us.

“Their souls are carried, enveloped in another co-existing dimension. These spirits do not dissipate when the body dies. Vestiges of memory and self-memory live on, kept in place by yet other aspects of an unseen world.”

“Horseshit!” Pinkus proclaimed.

No one responded to him.

“How do you know this, Josh?” Joe asked.

Thalla appeared in my mind. It was her touch that gave knowledge, awareness. We had shared something that neither of us realized at the time.

“It was Pinkus,” I lied.

“What?” the thin-lipped racist uttered. “I didn’t say anything like that.”

“Sure you did,” I said. “You said that you saw … certain images when you were alone with the Sail. I realized that there is a two-way communication between that realm and this—that there’s something beckoning to us, calling out beyond what we know.”

I could almost feel the hatred coming off the programmer. He despised me more than my girlfriend, Lena Berston, had ever loved me. The intimacy of this revelation sent a mild spasm through my nervous system.

*   *   *

FOR THE NEXT SEVEN HOURS Joe and Ana, Dak and Doreen, and even spiteful Todd Pinkus tested my theory. Cosmo returned after a couple of hours and joined in.

At first we approached the Sail one at a time imagining moments in our lives. This method only worked with Pinkus. Every time he approached the Sail alone it began to show different ways in which children were tortured and killed. Finally he fled the room, unable to face the demons his presence called forth.

After the general failure of the one-on-Sail approach we tried the interaction method. First Joe stood with his back to the screen like I had and was approached by each of us concentrating on a particular memory. This method only worked when I was the focal point.

Once, when Doreen was remembering a time in her youth when she was the singer for a band, I looked up and saw Thalla watching me from an impossible distance. Her stare was chilly and disapproving.

*   *   *

“I DON’T KNOW what you’ve got here, Joe,” Dak Zintel said that night over pizza and red wine brought in by Cosmo from Pizzaland down the way, “but it’s important. I called the head of the defense committee an hour ago and he’s sending down a team from the Pentagon.”

“Defense?” Doreen said.

“Yes. This is certainly a weapon. It may help us to spy on other countries or interrogate terrorist suspects without them even knowing it. We’ll all stay here tonight and tomorrow the military will evaluate the plausibility of the device.”

*   *   *

AFTER THAT WE WENT our separate ways within the compound. Zintel said that he’d stay with us and Cosmo promised to work on streamlining the screen for the Sail. Pinkus hadn’t been with us since fleeing his monsters and I was disturbed, wandering.

I guess I was waiting for Thalla to show up and advise me, but I had no glimmer of her.

I went to the hangar thinking that proximity to the Sail might summon her, but Cosmo was still there working on the scaffolding above the gossamer weave.

“What you doin’, Cos?” I called.

“Just making sure everything’s ready for the government,” he said. There was an odd tone in his voice, but I ignored it.

That was late at night. I decided to go to Doreen, not for sex but for the comfort of friendship.

I pushed her door open. They didn’t see me. Dak Zintel was standing with his pants down around his ankles, while naked and on her knees, Doreen was adoring the congressman’s extraordinarily large erection. They were both making moaning sounds that together made a kind of music.

Before either one of them saw me I backed out of the room and closed the door.

*   *   *

ON THE ROOF of our office building I was looking out at the stars, dimmed as they were by the bright lights of L.A.

“How did you do that?” Thalla asked.

I turned and she was standing there beside me, naked as Doreen had been.

“What?” I asked.

“I’ve been trying to get away from you,” she said. “I have used every technique to block our connection. No human has ever overridden an Alto mind.”

It was all very clear to me: witnessing the sex between Doreen and Zintel, added to the sudden acquisition of multidimensional knowledge, had sent an exponential wail through my system. Indeed, my heart was calling out for Thalla; a yearning came from me like a howl from a wolf under the spell of a full moon. Thalla’s blue-black eyes saw these thoughts like words written across my face.

I was, as I said, standing in darkness under the late-night L.A. sky. She, wherever she was, stood in bright sunlight.

“You’ve changed,” she said, her tone softening.

“This place you call Soul-matter,” I said. “That’s where we are. I mean the connection between us.”

She smiled and held out a hand.

I flinched away.

“You called to me and now you’re afraid?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“You have never known love.”

“I never suspected that it would, it could be like this,” I said. “It’s in my mind and my past. Our connection is like everything else has been cut loose. I honestly feel that I could float away with the slightest push.”

“The rare human that is attuned to Otherworld events is open in ways that few beings can imagine. Even the Alto cannot fully comprehend what you are feeling now.”

“Does that mean you don’t…”

Thalla smiled under that distant sun and I was filled with a feeling that might have killed me a day before.

“We are joined,” she said, holding out a hand.

I reached for her. When we touched ecstasy flared from my spinal column and I think I hollered. Trembling, I fell to my knees. Tears ran down my face and I understood the entire history of religion.

Certain men and women down through the millennia had reached through the veils of existence and delivered unto Man the possibility of purity and the Divine. These prophets and saints, witches and devils touched peoples’ hearts the way I touched my fellow workers, the way the Sail touched them.

“It’s all right,” a man said.

I looked up and found that Cosmo was on his knees, holding me. I tried to speak but my throat clenched down on the words.

“I understand,” Cosmo said, and I passed out.

*   *   *

WHEN I CAME BACK to consciousness I was in a bed in a musty room. Images of Christ in dozens of different styles and media adorned the walls. There were paintings and sculptures, frescoes and pages torn from books. Candles flickered at the corners of the room and subtle, roseate incense flavored the air.

I levered up on my elbows and saw Cosmo over by the door. He was sitting in a straight-back wooden chair, leaning against the door and reading what looked like a big, leather-bound Bible.

Cosmo was a lumpy man, going prematurely bald. The hair he had was black with only a few strands of gray, and his eyes were what he called Sicilian green.

I tried to speak but had to clear my throat first.

Looking up Cosmo said, “You’re awake.”

He smiled and I tried to remember him doing that, smiling at me, but could not conjure the image.

“What happened?” I managed to say.

Cosmo frowned. “You don’t remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Mother Mary.”

That was the moment my desire to be a playwright fell away. Cosmo was the human comedy, the eternal tragic hero. He embodied the impossibility of understanding and the courage to act, to believe regardless of the limitation.

“She was golden, right?” I said.

“And naked like purity itself,” he added. “And rainbow lights flared out of you like a sun right there on the roof, in the middle of the night.”

“You saw that?”

Cosmo was wearing cranberry-colored overalls and a long-sleeved cotton shirt decorated with deft drawings of yellow carnations and red poppies.

I suppose I frowned.

“What?” he asked.

“I was just thinking that, aside from a few interviews, you and I have rarely talked.”

To my surprise the big peasant fell down on his knees, his head bowed to the floor.

“Forgive,” he uttered.

“What?”

“Forgive me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Spite came from the devil and I hated you,” he said.

“Why?”

“I thought black men were evil monkeys that came from Satan to pollute our women and degrade our people.”

“Really? You thought that about me?”

“Forgive.”

“Please get off your knees, man. It makes me feel very uncomfortable.”

He didn’t stand but at least he looked up at me.

“When I saw what I saw on the roof I realized that I had been blessed by the presence of a saint. You speak with God. His mother blessed you with her own hand.”

I sat up in the bed and patted the place next to me.

“Sit down, Cosmo.”

He obeyed averting his eyes.

“I don’t know what happened,” I said. “I just know that since the Sail has been activated my mind has opened up to things beyond this world.”

“Amen,” the big Italian said.

“You really hated me for being black?”

“I was wrong.”

“I never knew it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t understand, Cosmo. It’s not that I’m angry or even shocked that someone hates another because of race. It’s that I didn’t know that worries me. It’s, it’s like this Mother Mary thing you’re talking about. Before the Sail I didn’t know that we’re living in the confluence between many realms. I didn’t know that my soul, which I had never believed in, existed on another plane and was immortal along with the souls of dragonflies and synthetic humanity.”

Cosmo leaped from the bed and got back down on his knees.

“What now?” I asked.

“I must kneel to hear these words.”

“Either sit back down or I won’t say anything.”

Hesitantly the craftsman got up and sat on the bed. He was a big man but I couldn’t even feel the pressure of his weight—he perched so lightly.

“Is government good?” he asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“That man,” Cosmo said, “that Zintel. He’s going to turn the Blank Page over to the Pentagon. I do not believe that God was not meant to reside in the halls of politicians.”

I understood what he was saying. It wasn’t just because of Doreen that I began to have misgivings about Zintel’s motives. The idea of the Sail as a weapon was anathema, but I was a law-abiding American citizen. I hadn’t even articulated this distrust (and cowardice) to myself.

“He’s going to try to use the Blank Page for the rich and powerful, but it belongs to the people,” Cosmo said. “Like Jesus does.”

I understood the basis of religious fervor, but that didn’t make me religious. God, for me, at that moment, was the Intersection between contradictory forms of existence. To Cosmo there was the irrefutable truth of let there be light, where my spirituality was more like a child registering the sunrise for the first time in his growing awareness of the world.

None of that mattered. I wasn’t going to fight against the government. I wasn’t that kind of man.

Cosmo tried to talk to me about resisting Zintel, but I didn’t see what we could do.

“Joe owns the Sail and the building,” I said. “We’re just employees.”

“This is more than just some product,” Cosmo objected. “The Blank Page is like a leaf of the original scripture. It’s the word of God.”

What could I say to that? Cosmo was twice as strong as I was and his blind faith was more powerful still.

“I’m going back to my room now,” I said. “Let’s wait and see how it goes in the morning. We’ll hear what the Pentagon folks have to say then.”

Cosmo nodded conspiratorially. It was as if he were hearing a whole other set of ideas.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll see what they say and then, if it’s blasphemy, we’ll know what to do.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Be ready, my brother,” said the man who less than an hour before believed that all I represented was racial pollution.

*   *   *

I LEFT COSMO’S BASEMENT ROOM at two in the morning, wandering over to the hangar. There I found Ana Fried sitting in front of a vast colony of blond monkeys that had made their home by the side of a deep and placid lake. The volume was turned up and the din of the gibbering primates was overpowering.

I touched the chief scientist’s shoulder and she turned to me unfazed by my appearance.

“Sorry, Ana,” I said. “I missed my post.”

“It’s okay, Josh,” she said. “I want to spend as much time here as I can. Who knows what the government will do tomorrow?”

“Cosmo thinks this is a religious artifact and that anyone working for government is an agent of the devil.”

“He’s a fanatic and a racist,” Ana said. “But he may be right about the good congressman. All I was trying to do was to design a tool, and now they will use it to bring down governments.”

“Who knows what they’ll do?” I said. “I mean, all we see are beasts.”

“Don’t help them,” Ana said to me.

“What do you mean?”

“They are the ones who carry out the orders of madmen. They built the ovens and the guns and then set them loose on the people.”

“But we, we have to do what the government says,” I argued.

“The extermination camp guards used that excuse.”

I had not seen Ana Fried in this light before. The rest of my time around her she carried the mantle of science like a shield, or maybe a religion. But the entrance of the government had rattled her, too.

She wanted to stay with the Sail and so I left for the office building.

I had almost walked all the way to Doreen’s door before I remembered that Zintel was in her room. I went to the second-floor office that I had converted into a bedroom.

Cosmo had brought in mattresses for all of us. I fell down on mine and was immediately enveloped in a deep sleep.

*   *   *

“… NO,” SHE WAS SAYING, “I cannot bring anything but my essence into your realm.”

“But I could feel you,” I said.

“What you felt was the transparency of our beings—invisible, intangible, and undeniable.”

Thalla and I were sitting across from each other at a rough-hewn stone table on top of a mountain that had no counterpart on my Earth. It soared over a great ocean teeming with life that I knew was there but could not see.

We’d been talking for hours before I woke up. I remembered how, in my reverie, she explained that humanity was like the blind fish that evolved in underground caves.

“Your people have lost the vision and vitality of your ancestors,” she said. “Your world consists of licking algae off walls that you bump into quite by accident. Your heavens are dark and unrevealing.”

“And cavemen were more sophisticated?” I said, a sneer on my lips.

“So-called primitive man felt the connection and possibilities in the greater world. Through their totems and rare seers they became one with the spirits that live within them, all around them.”

“Like ghosts?”

“The human acme of wisdom was the question, ‘How many angels can sit on the head of a pin?’ This world is crowded into its stratosphere with the spirits and souls of the physically departed. Humans and insects, fishes of all kinds amid the flickering glitter of trillions upon trillions of single-cell beings.”

“Amoebas have souls?”

“Even so-called inert matter has the gleam of the divine in it. Humanity once knew this. But in my world and in yours they have forgotten. Modern man worships anthropomorphic deities rather than the ether of their being.”

“But what about technology?” I asked.

“Banging two rocks together and calling the noise science,” she said with contempt.

“But, but I see it,” I said.

“There is power in you,” she agreed, “but without the Sail you would have spent your entire life in darkness like those cave fishes.”

*   *   *

FULLY AWAKE, I REMEMBERED the question I wanted to ask.

“When the men from the government come today what should I do?”

“What men?”

“Don’t you know everything that’s happening around me?” I asked.

“No, darling, no. I only see you. The world around is unclear. Unless you’re looking right at something the only impression I get are swirling mists.”

“But I can see your world—clearly.”

“Your abilities are obviously stronger than mine.”

I explained about Zintel and Joe. The image of Doreen and Zintel’s sexual romp came unbidden to my mind and I was ashamed.

“Why are you trying to hide your pain?” Thalla asked.

“I guess I feel I shouldn’t be jealous now that I know how I feel about you.”

“Me?” her smile lit up the surrounding ocean. “I have three husbands. If any of them betrayed me in the way of the Alto I would be devastated and I would bring that pain to you.”

“Three husbands?” A question passed through my mind but I tried to squelch it.

“Now and again they serve me together. Alto women have great appetites and little shame. But what needs to happen on your world, in your time, is for you to act on your beliefs.”

“About women?”

“About these men trying to appropriate the Sail.”

“I don’t even know what my beliefs are.”

“Then you must discover yourself.”

“I can’t go against the United States government.”

“Why not?”

“They are so much more powerful than I am.”

“There is no power anywhere in the megaverse greater than another. This is a truth that the Alto have learned by bitter experience. Even the First Being is only one among the many.”

“There is a first being?”

“There is always a first and an again. And if that ideal being is your equal then this thing you call government is nothing … less than nothing.”

“They could kill me,” I argued.

“No,” Thalla said, and I took it in as absolute truth.

A door opened in my mind and I understood that who I was, what I was, was immortal. I had existed before my body and would continue on a journey beyond its destruction. I had no proof of this conviction but still it vibrated in my heart.

“Josh,” she said.

I felt someone shaking my shoulder.

“Josh.”

Doreen was there perched at the edge of my mattress.

“Wake up, honey,” she said.

I got a sudden flash of Lena and Ralph rutting on Ralph’s couch; the place where I sat so often drinking wine and getting high with my ex-friend. The image was fleeting but it felt different from jealous fantasy. I wasn’t jealous and the details seemed … real.

“What’s wrong?” Doreen asked.

“Nothing. I was just asleep.”

“Come on,” she said. “Get up. They’re waiting for us in the hangar.”

“What’s the rush?”

“It’s ten-thirty.”

“What?”

I jumped up off the floor. All I had to do was put on my shoes because I had fallen asleep fully dressed. From there I blundered out into the hall and headed for the stairs.

“Don’t you need to brush your teeth or something?” Doreen called after me.

“No. I’m late. Are they already there?”

“Yes.”

*   *   *

DOREEN’S HIGH HEELS CLICKED and tapped after me as I rushed toward the most important meeting of my life. I could feel my body moving through space; my strength working against gravity. The air was scented with the subtle odor of Doreen’s perfume. She had come this way to get me.

As we neared the door to the hangar I felt her hand on my arm.

“Wait,” she said.

There was urgency in her clenching fingertips so I stopped and turned. She was wearing a light blue dress-suit with a nacreous blouse underneath. Fashionista as she was, Doreen always had a change of clothes close at hand. Her face was made-up. Only her eyes showed any vulnerability.

I gazed at her fabricated beauty feeling extraordinarily calm.

“Yes, Doreen.”

“Did you come into my room last night?”

“I did.”

“Did you see, um, Dak?”

Nodding I said, “He’s got a really big dick, huh?”

The pain in her face took me by surprise. I was trying to ease the tension by being nonchalant but, like the newborn Alto, I acted when I should have taken things slowly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, I’m sorry,” Doreen said. “I didn’t realize until I heard the door closing how deeply I felt about you, Josh. But now I see I meant nothing to you.”

She hurried past me through the doorway before I could stop her.

I followed. The space before the Sail was unfamiliar to me. There were three extra men (not including Dak Zintel) standing among my cohorts of the past three years.

The men wore dark suits and seemed imposing. The oldest was maybe fifty and the youngest thirty-five, but age was not a factor in their presence. Still, the oldest among them was the senior officer. He was a white man with silver hair that gave the impression of being a natural color sprouting from birth. Of his two aides, one was white and the other black, but, again, their race bore little meaning. They were all around six feet tall and hale in their bearings. I instantly disliked them.

“Josh,” Joe Jennings called from the center of the mob.

I took in the expressions of my fellow JTE employees. Ana’s face was drawn and wary, Doreen’s heart was broken by a pain much deeper than her relationship with me, Joe was open and hopeful, Cosmo’s air was indecipherable, and Pinkus looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. There were dark rings around his eyes and his thin lips were moving slightly, like dying worms.

“This is him, General Llan,” Joe was saying. He walked up and guided me by the arm to the steel-headed blue-eyed representative of the Pentagon.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, wondering where those words came from in the field of my mind.

“Mr. Winterland,” General Llan said. “I hear that you have a certain rapport with this device.”

“So it seems,” I said.

“Would you like to show us?”

Everyone in the room was looking at me.

“On one condition,” I said.

“What’s that?”

I turned my gaze to Doreen and said, “If you promise to have a private conversation with me right after the test is over.”

“Josh,” she said, chiding me with her tone.

“That’s my one condition.”

I had seen passion in Doreen’s face before but never had I witnessed that scarlet hue rise under her skin. She looked down and away, but when she turned back again I was still there.

“All right,” she said. “I talk to you all the time anyway.”

“Give me your hand, General,” I said then.

“What?”

“I said … give me your hand.”

“Is this part of the condition or the test?”

Instead of answering I held out my right hand.

It was a pleasure to see the discomfiture in the Washingtonian’s face. I hated him and his aides at first sight, their arrogant bearing and military pomposity.

He took my hand as if he was going to shake it again but I didn’t allow him to go through with the motion.

“Tell me about your mother,” I commanded.

“What?” he said, but it was already too late.

On the Sail a woman appeared as seen through a nearly closed door. She was naked, leaning up against a kitchen table with an adolescent boy on his knees in front of her. Her orgasm was something more than I had ever experienced. The reed-thin teenager stood up exhibiting an equally slender erection. The woman leered at what her nakedness had wrought.

General Llan blanched under the image. He jerked his hand away and yelled, “Turn that off!”

“It’s not on, sir,” I said. “For the past few days the Sail has been powered only by the sun filtering in from the skylight or, at night, from the lamps.”

“I said turn it off!” he hollered.

He grabbed me by my wrinkled shirt and I allowed myself to be swung around.

“We don’t know how to turn it off, General,” I said.

By this time Joe was lowering the screen that Cosmo had built.

“Don’t you see,” Pinkus said under labored breath. “It’s an abomination. It should be destroyed.”

The ragged pain in the programmer’s voice demanded attention. He was standing at an odd angle as if there was a spasm twisting his spine. When he spoke spit leaped from his mouth.

“It finds evil and throws it at you. It’s, it’s a devil in there. It wants to crush everything good in the world. I feel it. I feel it calling to me in the night. There are men on top of boys, women with knives getting their revenge on babies. There’s blood…”

Pinkus fell to his knees blubbering so uncontrollably that the rest of his diatribe was lost to us.

Doreen hurried over and knelt down, taking the broken man into her arms.

In the meantime General Llan was on his cell phone, muttering.

Soon after the door to the outside opened and two armed soldiers in fancy dress uniform entered. One was a man and the other a woman. They were young and intent.

“Marley, Thringold,” the general said. “These people are to be kept here until I return. Secure them in a holding area and keep them there until we return.”

The man saluted while the woman leveled her rifle at us.

“What is this?” Ana Fried demanded.

“If anyone tries to escape,” the general said, “deadly force is authorized.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” the man-soldier said.

I wondered how often the general had seen the woman and the paperboy or teenaged gardener. Was it his mother or some other caretaker? Had the Sail registered the memory or had it somehow found the woman’s soul and dragged it back to relive the future soldier’s torment?

“Move it,” the man-soldier ordered.

*   *   *

WE WERE TAKEN to the subterranean shower room beneath the hangar. Joe had told Zintel where it was. The congressman was not under arrest. In his defense, he tried to get the general to leave us under our own cognizance, but that idea was shot down. Then Dak tried to get Joe released into his custody, but one of the aides talked the general out of that.

We were trundled down the metal stairs into the hollowed-out concrete cube that had three wooden stalls for showers and two long redwood benches. There were no windows and only one door. The soldiers sat outside guarding us, imprisoning us.

“I can’t believe this,” Joe Jennings said. “I just can’t.”

I thought this crisis of belief was brought on because they kept him down with us. After all, he was a rich man who owned the property that so frightened the general.

“Believe it,” Ana Fried said. “They would kill each and every one of us if they believed we were a threat to their dominance.”

“They’re trying to protect the people, Ana,” Joe said.

“Are we not the people?” the scientist asked.

For the most part the rest of us were quiet. No one knew how long we’d be there or where the general had gone.

Pinkus sat hugging his knees on the floor in the far corner, mumbling to himself and nodding now and again. The Sail had taken its toll on him.

After maybe an hour Doreen sidled up beside me.

“Well?” she asked.

“What?”

“You said you wanted to say something to me?”

I gazed into Doreen’s walnut-colored eyes, remembering all the years I had been bereft and never known it, all the love I’d missed and the life I hadn’t lived.

“Well?” she asked again.

“I misspoke before. I wanted to put you at ease, to say that I wasn’t angry. Instead I came off as cold, diffident. I want you in my life, Doreen.”

I could see the shift in her body language. She leaned toward me and exhaled through her nostrils.

“I don’t know what it is about me and sex, Josh. I mean, I’ve slept with so many men, and women, too, but I don’t know why. Sometimes it feels like it’s not even me. I usually don’t know what I feel about someone until long after the relationship or one-night stand is over.”

She kissed me and then stared into my face.

“You’re different,” she said.

I’d heard those words before … from Thalla when last we met. Where was Thalla? Would I see her again?

She kissed me again and then drifted away toward poor Pinkus. He was drooling steadily by then.

“Sir,” Cosmo said. He’d been waiting for Doreen to leave my side.

“Come on, Cos, call me Josh.”

“I’ve taken care of everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am your soldier, like those outside the door. I serve you like they serve evil. I would die for you, sir. That is my meaning on Earth.”

“No one’s gonna die, Cosmo.”

“I am ready to die … for you.”

He grabbed my left shoulder and squeezed. Cosmo was a powerful man. I had to grind my teeth to endure the pain of his adoration.

*   *   *

HOURS PASSED. AT ONE POINT, after Doreen had been cradling Pinkus for some time, he stood up and pushed her away.

“Get away from me, harlot!” he yelled.

Doreen fell to the floor and Cosmo clocked Pinkus. The madman fell to the floor ranting and bleeding from a cut on his forehead.

“Cunts and bitches! Pimps and thieves! Little demons that claw me raw and feast on the meat of my genitals!”

He said more and I wished that I hadn’t understood him. But as he spoke I glimpsed transparent images of the demons that assailed Pinkus. He was a living man in this inert dimension, but he was also connected to a vast plane of suffering and carnal desires thirsting for blood and rape and death over and over.

I was nearly overcome by the pain he experienced. The Sail had brought this out in him but it had always been there.

No wonder Man had moved away from Knowledge.

*   *   *

NOT LONG AFTER PINKUS’S outbreak General Llan returned. His aides were not in evidence but the soldiers were with him, leveling their semiautomatic rifles at us.

We were, I imagined, moments away from death.

“I have conferred with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president,” Llan said. “They agree with me that this device, this artifact, is too dangerous to be left to the open market.”

“This property is mine, General,” Joe said. He took a step forward to indicate his rights and his willingness to fight for them.

“The screen and all of you will be brought to Washington,” Llan told Jennings. “This is a matter of national security and falls under the province of the Patriot Act.”

I was stuck on the idea of the Sail being anyone’s property. The notion was ridiculous. It would be like a small-town bank claiming ownership of the air we breathe.

“You can’t do this,” Joe Jennings said.

“You called them,” Ana told our boss.

He turned to her, a look of utter confusion on his face. A lifetime of self-certainty and an ironclad belief system had fallen apart for Joe.

“Gather them up and bring them with us,” the general said to his soldiers.

*   *   *

MAYBE IF WE had been criminals we would have stood up against the injustice of our captors. But as it was we were chattel. Ana, Doreen, Joe, myself, and even Cosmo showed his hands when ordered to and filed up the stainless-steel stairs. The man-soldier forced Pinkus to his feet and kept him aloft by the arm while still pointing his rifle at us.

They herded us back under the covered Sail. Two other soldiers, one of them on a tall ladder, were trying to work the mechanism that Cosmo jury-rigged to cover the sacred mechanism.

“General,” the man-soldier on the ladder said.

“Tyler,” Llan replied.

“We can’t get the screen off, and that’s keeping us away from the device itself. Do you want us to break it?”

“If you do that you’ll tear the sheet,” Cosmo said. “The screen gets stuck sometimes. Let me get up there and I can fix it.”

The general turned his dominant gaze upon the fanatic Italian. Their eyes met in what I imagined to be an unwanted, unrealized kinship.

“All right,” the general said. “Tyler.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get down from there and let this man do his job.”

I remember every word spoken because, later on, they all seemed so prophetic. I was partially aware of all the intersecting dimensions around us and the various mental dimensions among us in that room.

What I didn’t remember was any problem with the screen sticking.

Cosmo went through a few workman-like motions and then called down, “It’ll work now, Tyler.”

That was when what I call the Final Dance began.

“Don’t raise the screen,” Pinkus said. But no one responded.

Cosmo moved down the ladder with accomplished crablike movements while Tyler’s partner turned the little wheel designed to work the covering screen.

“This is my property, General,” Joe was saying. But no one cared about him, either.

The scene being revealed on the Sail was from the minute point of view of a dark red ant among thousands of its hive members marching up the side of a towering tree. There was no sound but I could almost feel the vibrations coming from the ants. I wondered if this experience was a communication between this world and the next. Was the Sail translating the memories of ants so that I could glean some small part of their high adventure?

Suddenly, as if called up by the fervor of the ants, a flame started at the bottom of the Sail. Quickly the fire rose to envelop the entire scene. I gasped and grabbed at my heart like a bad actor in an old silent movie.

“Yes! Burn it down! Yes!” Pinkus cried.

I was so bereft by the destruction of the Sail that I paid no attention to Pinkus’s screams until the deafening report.

I jerked my head toward the soldier supporting Pinkus. I worried that the distraught programmer had done something to get himself shot. But instead I saw that it was the soldier who had been gunned down by his own pistol. Pinkus had pulled the weapon from its holster; he’d shot the soldier and was now firing at the rest of us under the burning screen.

The general was hit, then Doreen, then the woman soldier. I fell to the ground and rolled up into a ball—not the wisest of moves.

“Motherfucker!” Pinkus yelled.

I looked up and there he was pointing the pistol at my head.

There was a masculine scream, more like a roar, and then Cosmo was on Pinkus, his craftsman’s hands around the programmer’s throat. Three shots were fired and both men fell in a heap.

I tried to get up but a soldier, I think it was Tyler, shouted, “Stay on the ground and keep your hands where I can see them!”

The odor of gunpowder underlain by the tangy scent of spilled blood assailed my nostrils, but I stayed on the ground thinking about the intersecting dimensions of Man and more …

*   *   *

GENERAL LLAN WAS HIT in the shoulder and was back on duty seven days after the shooting. Joe Jennings was shot in the thigh. He took three months off and then went to work on a government project to re-create the Sail for military purposes. I suppose his first hire would have been Ana Fried, but she had a nervous breakdown after the incident and has never completely recovered. Cosmo and Pinkus died in their deadly embrace; Pinkus of a broken neck and Cosmo due to massive internal bleeding and organ damage.

Doreen was shot through the heart and died instantly. I often think of her and the two dead soldiers (Marley and Thringold, I never knew which was which).

Cosmo had set a bottle of some kind of accelerant at the top of the Sail. The liquid caught fire upon drying. When he went up to free the screen mechanism (which he had jammed), he opened the bottle and the accelerant started dripping down. I found all this out later, during my time in military custody.

I was arrested and questioned for over ninety hours without a break.

“All I did was keep the records,” I told them over and over again. “Notebooks and videos. They’re all in the office.”

“Did you know that Mr. Compabasso planned to burn Mr. Jennings’s property?” a dozen different men asked me.

“No.”

“Did you know that Mr. Pinkus was homicidal?”

“Not until he was.”

*   *   *

I WAS KEPT imprisoned for four months in a small gray room on an army base somewhere south of L.A. At the end of that time I was brought before a military and civilian court where I was told that the information I had was vital to national security. I was warned that if I divulged that information I could be imprisoned for an indeterminate period of time under the National Security Act of 1948. After the hearing I signed papers for half an hour and was given bus fare to L.A.

There I found that I had been evicted and that my belongings had been discarded. I couldn’t tell the property manager that I was in military jail because one of the dozens of documents I signed forbade me to say anything that might even refer to the project I had been working on.

I slept at a homeless shelter downtown for three days until I finally got a phone number for Joe Jennings’s new company—Microfibers Inc.

Joe said that he couldn’t hire me and that he couldn’t tell me why he couldn’t but I already knew; he probably signed the same papers I had. He did wire me my settlement check—three months wages.

*   *   *

WHEN I GOT to my mother’s house in Oakland there was no one home.

The front and back doors were locked as were all the windows. I finally had to break in through the glass to clamber into my childhood bedroom. The house was very neat and somehow seemed unlived-in. The sink was empty and my mother’s bed was covered with only the fitted sheet.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon. My mother, Ida Lathea Mackie-Winterland, was always home at that time watching her afternoon talk shows.

I went to the small kitchen and poured water from the faucet into a red plastic tumbler—my favorite glass when I was a child. I was looking through the window over the sink at the withered oak in our backyard when there came a knock.

I went to the door and opened it. Why not? It was my mother’s home after all.

Three policemen and one policewoman had their pistols pointed at my head.

“On the ground,” one of them said in an almost pleasant tone.

My experiences over the past months had prepared me for the militarism of the American legal system. I lowered to my knees, placed the cup gently on the floor, and then got down on my belly with my arms stretched out over my head. Someone jerked my hands back and secured them with a plastic tie. The sure-footed officers of the law passed by me into the house looking for corpses or state secrets.

“Please leave the area,” an official voice said.

“Fine, Officer,” a woman replied. I recognized the tones but forgot the name and even the face. “But first you tell me why you are arresting a man for bein’ in his own house.”

“This is a burglar, ma’am,” the policeman said.

“I’ve known Joshua Winterland since he was a baby swaddled in cotton blankets, Officer,” Lonnie Brighthome replied. “If he’s a burglar then I’m Jack the Ripper to boot.”

“He was seen breaking in a window,” the official countered.

“His window,” my mother’s best friend corrected.

*   *   *

THIS DISCUSSION WENT ON for some time while I laid there on the inner threshold of my family home. The police demanded Mrs. Brighthome’s identification and then they rifled through my pants for mine.

“Where is his mother?” the woman cop asked Lonnie.

“Am I her keeper?” the elderly black woman replied.

Finally I was brought to my feet and released.

“Next time, call the police when you have a problem,” the senior cop told me. They were preparing to leave.

I looked at the tall, balding black officer wondering what he meant exactly. The next time I returned home after almost being murdered and then jailed for the privilege, on that next time should I call the police if I found the door to my own house locked?

I didn’t say those words. I didn’t say anything. There was a familiar and yet strange buzz tickling the base of my skull and a sharp pain in my left shoulder from the way the police had bent my arm.

*   *   *

AFTER THE POLICE LEFT Lonnie Brighthome came in and sat by my side on my mother’s sofa. She took my hands and stared into my eyes.

Lonnie was thin and dark-skinned, maybe seventy years old. I remembered her as being tall, but that was through a child’s eyes. Her face seemed different.

“Didn’t you use to wear glasses, Mrs. Brighthome?”

“Your mother died Sunday last.”

*   *   *

THERE’S A CERTAIN REDUNDANCY to the day or so after I learned of my mother’s death. She had a stroke while praying in church on a Wednesday evening when no one else was around. Peter Flim, long-time church janitor, found her the next morning, still bowing, nearly dead.

I cried and thrashed around, slept on the couch because I was afraid of my mother’s room and mine. I called old friends and had long talks and cried more. I was the only child of a single mother and now alone in the world.

My mother had been alone because I was taken away under the blanket of national security. I began to hate the power exerted over my physical body by government agents who never even apologized.

*   *   *

IT WASN’T UNTIL my third night home that I went into my room. I hadn’t returned since breaking the windowpane.

I lay down on the slender bed surrounded by posters from plays that I’d collected since puberty.

The phone rang. There was an extension in my room and so I didn’t even have to sit up to answer.

“Hello?”

“Josh?”

“Lena?”

“Nathan called me,” she said. “He told me that your mother had died.”

I didn’t say anything. She hadn’t asked a question.

“How are you, Josh?”

“I don’t know. My life seems kind of off.” I laughed as if to prove the point.

“What happened?”

“To my mother?”

“Yes.”

“A stroke.”

“You could have asked me to come to the funeral.”

“I was out of town.”

“Where?”

I saw something out of the corner of my eye and there she was—Thalla sitting on a satin stool under a clear roof revealing an aquamarine sea.

“I have to go, Lena.”

“But I, I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “About what happened.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“When.”

“I don’t know,” I said and then I hung up.

Thalla turned to me and smiled.

“I thought your body had died,” she said.

I rushed toward her and placed my hand on the image of her face. The resultant ecstasy was more than sex could ever be. It was what they write about in popular songs and sacred texts—touching souls.

*   *   *

WHEN I CAME BACK to consciousness she was sitting on the floor of her suboceanic abode, next to me and a universe (or two) away.

“How are your husbands?” was my first question.

“Score-ti is dead,” she said sadly. “Killed in the war.”

“What war?”

“Do you remember Father Time?”

“The machine that contained a hundred million human minds?”

“After two centuries Refuge has decided that the Alto are a threat to their existence. They have been attacking us.”

“Are they more powerful than you?”

“No. But we are hesitant to use our most destructive weapons against them. Their rage at us is valid. We did slaughter their species after all.”

“I don’t want you to die, Thalla.”

“I thought you were dead,” she said. “Long evenings I would sit by my globes hoping that you would call to me.”

I explained how Cosmo burned the Sail.

“But if it is destroyed how can you contact me?” she asked.

“I never used the Sail to contact you.”

“But you were attuned to it,” she said. “The vibrations from the Sail made it possible for us to communicate.”

“And if it was destroyed?”

“Our contact should be impossible.”

We talked for hours about the war and my incarceration; about the impossibility of our communication and the depth of feeling that still linked us. Now and again we’d touch, feeling that connection denied to physical beings.

“Is this how Cosmo and Doreen feel all the time?” I asked my platonic lover.

“Yes.”

“And Pinkus, too?”

“There is no heaven or hell, Josh, Joshua.”

“Could I contact my mother?”

“Not without the Sail.”

*   *   *

THE NEXT MORNING I noticed a brown paper package next to my dresser. It had fallen down, possibly when neighbors were searching my room, trying to find out how to contact me.

There was no return address but the postmark was from more than three months earlier.

When I opened the package I was stunned to see a smaller version of the Sail. It was three feet by two, rife with vibrating colors that I knew were striving to come to life.

There was a note attached, written in a bold hand.

Dear Josh,

I’m writing this to you after seeing the Vision of Mother Mary.

When I started working for JTE, weaving the Blank Page, I also started bringing home strands of the fabric to practice with. I built a loom and went over the process I’d use at work. I didn’t know why at the time but I kept this a secret. Now I realize that the piece I’ve woven was meant for you. Tomorrow I will destroy the Page at work and you will receive this package from your mother. Take it and do what you think best.

Cosmo

I hugged the fabric to my chest and face. Thalla was there instantly, in my arms, almost real.

Her shock and delight were obvious. I rubbed my lips on the Sail and she closed her eyes in sensual pleasure.

“Joshua.”

“Yes.”

“You can’t just grab me out of time like that. What if I were with one of my husbands, or worse, in battle?”

“I just grabbed the thing when I saw it,” I said. “I didn’t know it would connect to you … like this.”

She was a woman in my arms pulsing with a life force stronger than any human.

“We are attuned to each other, Joshua. In this life and the next our souls shall always be drawn together.”

“Your husbands don’t know about me?”

“No.” She didn’t need to say anything else.

*   *   *

THE NEXT FEW MONTHS were sublime and limitless. Thalla was with me during most of the waking hours of every day. We talked and communed. She taught me how to make a deeper connection with the Sail; how to speak to it and how to enter its dance. I stood upon Paleolithic plains and swam among huge sharks in the prehistoric seas of Earth. I actually flew through the skies with predators and hummingbirds, winged lizards and swarms of bees.

“How can there be room for every life that has ever lived?” I asked maybe three weeks after I’d found her again.

“How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?” she replied.

“Every human?” I asked.

“And more.”

“Birds and flies and viruses?”

“And that is only the beginning.”

“What else can there be?”

“Alien life forms,” she said. “Breathing mountains and fire that minds itself; unique manifestations of consciousness and even the heart of black holes scintillated by unaffected streams of dark matter.

“There is so much life in the next world that it makes our sterile existence akin to the barrenness of space by comparison.”

“Aliens?” I said softly. “Murderers and rapists and … and…”

“All,” she said. Then she touched me with her lips and I didn’t care.

*   *   *

I WAS WITH THALLA when giant underwater ships attacked her oceanic lair. They were the size of small cities sending barrages of depth charges and torpedoes at the seemingly sheer glass protecting the small colony of Alto.

Thalla’s people responded with weapons that sent out rainbow-like rays at the monolithic machines. These weapons seemed to have no effect on the attackers. I said this to Thalla.

“These are specially designed radiations that are aging certain metals that hold the ships together,” she told me. “After a while the living machines inside the shells will have to leave for the surface because we are too deep for them to survive the crushing atmosphere.”

“Then what?”

“We will seek a new home. We will hide until they find us again.”

“And the same thing will happen?”

“By then they will have solved the problem of our accelerated time rays and we will have developed another defensive device.”

“What if they find ways around all your defenses?”

Thalla reached out almost touching my face. Then she withdrew the hand.

“The residents of the Crystal City have decided to reclaim their humanity. They have the DNA structures and have been experimenting with synthetic humans such as ourselves. So far these experiments have been failures.

“The humans inside the machines worry that if they regain their corporeal selves that we will attempt to destroy them again. They remember the dying of humanity and the way we ripped them from their bodies.

“But our philosophers believe that this war will hone an attitude toward us that will end in a treaty where the humans will no longer try to destroy us and we, human and Alto, will be able to live in peace.”

“But you don’t believe that,” I said with conviction.

“The humans stored in Father Time will never regain the humanity they once knew. They are now only faulty memories of what they once were.”

“You destroyed their souls?”

“No. We severed their memories from their connection to their humanity.”

“That’s like killing God,” I said.

“The war will go on,” Thalla averred. “The memory of humanity will finally make machines so big and so powerful that we will not be able to resist. We’ll have to escape this world.”

“But you said that you could destroy these machines.”

“None of us have the heart to destroy humanity again.”

“Then come here,” I said. “Come to me. Come to my Earth.”

The blue-black of Thalla’s eyes made me forget the battle raging outside her windows.

“But we committed genocide on your race,” she said.

“But you’ve realized that you were wrong.”

“Our scientists have speculated that the strongest emotion in the human breast is the desire for revenge. This is why your species has survived for so long.”

“Come to me,” I said again, and for the first time I saw an Alto cry.

*   *   *

TIME PASSED. THALLA MET with her people and they began the long parliament on the proposed egress from their Earth. This meeting would take at least seven years she told me. After that they would have to concentrate their great communal intelligence on how to navigate the dimension in order to leave one home for another.

I was designated as the representative of Earth. I would make up the rules and set out the limitations that would govern the relationship between Alto and human.

I suppose that this was a great responsibility but I didn’t feel the weight. I was in love with Thalla and would have done anything to have her in my arms.

Once a day for fifteen minutes that felt like a dozen years I stood in the Golden Chamber of the Alto, a hundred miles beneath the Gobi Desert. Above, huge machines steered by the remnants of remembered humanity searched for us.

The content of these meetings was obscure, abstract, and indecipherable in all but the most esoteric human terms. I would try to describe it here, but other problems arose that drew me away from the Alto’s Exodus Hearings.

*   *   *

I KEPT COSMO’S miniature Sail with me at all times. I slept with it and carried it around in a leather satchel whenever I went anywhere—even if only from the bedroom to the kitchen. That thin weave of synthetic fabric meant more to me than anything or anyone in my mortal life. If I went to the store or on a rare trip to the bank I carried the Sail with me.

So on one Thursday when there was no food in the house I trundled up my magic sheet and walked six blocks to a small supermarket where I bought four cans of tomato soup and a five-pound bag of white rice. My mother had left a bank account with sixty-two hundred dollars in it. I was a signatory on that account and so could survive for at least a while without working.

I was walking home half in this world and half in the Golden Chamber listening to words I had spoken into a dream.

Half a block from my mother’s house I saw six black cars parked on the sidewalk, in the driveway, and even on my mother’s lawn.

Men and women in suits and uniforms milled around like ants invading a rival hive.

The memory of those four days of questioning and the small gray room where I didn’t even have a book came back to me. The Sail in my satchel wailed in my mind and I turned away.

*   *   *

SIX YEARS LATER, after changing my name to Herald Riley, I’m living in New York City; in a one-bedroom apartment on a block that’s still inhabited by mostly working-class black people. I make my living as a therapist. The couch my patients lay upon is undergirded by the Sail. They lie back and I can see into their conflicts and miseries, their crimes and losses. No one lies to me on that couch. They pay twenty dollars a session and I have never had a dissatisfied customer.

I have a girlfriend named Dolores and my life-mate Thalla who lives further away than Mercury could run in a god’s lifetime.

The government is looking for me, I’m sure. The Alto are settling the finer points to their migration to Earth.

Sometimes at night I dream that Thalla’s people see my world and decide to destroy my people. I imagine the loneliness and desolation of an entire species rendered barren. But I wake up to the conviction of saving my beloved’s race.

At night I hang up the Sail and talk to my mother and Cosmo, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth, to the young huntress of the early reptilian race. And in the morning I see my fellow human beings like children thinking that all the world is close at hand.

ALSO BY WALTER MOSLEY

LEONID McGILL MYSTERIES

All I Did Was Shoot My Man

When the Thrill Is Gone

Known to Evil

The Long Fall

EASY RAWLINS MYSTERIES

Blonde Faith

Cinnamon Kiss

Little Scarlet

Six Easy Pieces

Bad Boy Brawly Brown

A Little Yellow Dog

Black Betty

Gone Fishin’

White Butterfly

A Red Death

Devil in a Blue Dress

OTHER FICTION

The Tempest Tales

Diablerie

Killing Johnny Fry

The Man in My Basement

Fear of the Dark

Fortunate Son

The Wave

Fear Itself

Futureland

Fearless Jones

Walkin’ the Dog

Blue Light

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

RL’s Dream

47

The Right Mistake

NONFICTION

Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

This Year You Write Your Novel

What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace

Life Out of Context

Workin’ on the Chain Gang

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WALTER MOSLEY is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than thirty-four critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young-adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City. Visit his website at www.waltermosley.com.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ON THE HEAD OF A PIN

Copyright © 2012 by Walter Mosley

Artist Credit: Greg Ruth

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

e-ISBN 9781466816145

First Edition: May 2012