The Language of Violence
by TK Kenyon

The reporter on the radio was talking about Soviet moles leftover from the Cold War. Bill flipped off the car radio and tapped the dial with the back of his stiff index finger without glancing away from the snarled traffic around him.

All the old, Cold War KGB moles were dead, or drugged on Thorazine, or had gone so native that they couldn't remember what they were. No one could live cut off from his parents, his language, his food, his legends, his religion, and his jokes for so long. Some of those moles had been underground in the U.S. for twenty years, the NPR reporter had said and then droned on and on about spies while Bill drove home from work in Phoenix's creaky traffic, while the air conditioner lumbered against the hundred degree air and the sun slamming in his window. A hundred and fifty-six missing KGB moles, the radio said. Those moles would have become obese from hot dogs and apple pie, decadent from wild-haired, screaming musicians, and sick from meaningless, fraternizing, bestial sex.

And if they couldn't forget who they were, they would deny it. A Dian Fossey special was scheduled to be on television that night. Maybe gorillas had interesting mythology. Bill was tired of studying the war between Rama and Ravan, Valkyries vetting the dead for Valhalla, Set's dismemberment of his brother Osiris, and Prometheus's agony, Launcelot's madness, Romulus and Remus's fratricide, and Abraham, Shiva, angels, and aliens. Yet his thesis still wasn't finished. He parked the car and slammed the door.

Inside, in the living room, Lucy lay sobbing on the couch. The plants in the living room absorbed her hiccups. Ferns topped pedestals surrounded by pathos at the bases. Ivy hung from baskets and climbed the chains toward the ceiling. Potted dieffenbachia sprouted on the floor and end tables. Vines spilled out from behind chairs. Clusters of African violets and arrowhead plants knotted like a tiny jungle under the glass coffeetable. Wall sconces overflowed with tiny-leaved English ivy. Potted trees in the corners filtered the light from the window and overshadowed the couch where Lucy lay weeping again.

Bill sat beside her, stroked Lucy's copper-red hair, and rubbed her back. The ceramic threads that wrapped her spine were nubbly under her skin. Flat wires wound the long bones in her legs and arms. Her joints had been replaced. Her first surgery was when she was six months old, and the last was just before they started their field research. Lucy exhaled more evenly.

Bill stroked her hair. His watch beeped. "Pill break." From a vial in his coat he shook out four pills and dry-swallowed them. The pink triangle was a digestive aid because his stomach was predisposed to chewing itself. The green hex kept his metabolism humming. The blue moon kept him sane. Bill could skip a few, if he needed to. His father had died of self-cannibalism before they got the drugs worked out. The soft orange square kept him looking human.

"I'm pregnant," Lucy finally said. She sucked in another sob.

"But you had the shot."

"It didn't work."

"It's worked for three years," he said.

"But I'm pregnant."

Bill's joints felt motheaten and his skin, abraded, and he put the vial back in his pocket. Those tests weren't foolproof, and Lucy was no fool. She was a biochemist back home. "Rest. I'll pack. We'll figure out what to do." He rubbed her back. "I'm sorry."

Condemned Prometheus arched backward over the rock and watched the bird circle and dip in the air. Unrusting chains scraped the rock when he shifted away from a sharp point that dug into his shoulderblade.

"What are you waiting for!" he yelled.

The eagle screamed and climbed higher to ride the wind again.

Driving to the cabin took six hours, the first hour through desert. Bill veered to avoid a flat, baked-dry roadrunner on the highway. In the distance, mirages of water glimmered on the pavement and reflected oncoming cars.

Lucy leaned against the door, staring.

Bill had admired the desert when they first arrived. Everything adapted. The animals were poisonous or scaled or quick or nocturnal burrow-dwellers. The plants bore spikes. After monsoon rains, the desert plants burst into a frenzied reproduction cycle before the water drained through the sandy clay.

Bill sped through the darkening desert and counted himself lucky that a radar-wielding cop hadn't picked him up. He didn't think, didn't think, didn't think. Soonerau would tell them what to do. They would figure out what to do.

Lucy fell asleep when they got to the foothills. In oncoming headlight flashes, Bill saw that tears still streaked her cheeks. KGB moles. Just another urban legend, along with Kentucky Fried Rats, Mexican dog-rats, and microwaved, exploding cats. And, of course, space aliens in the suburbs.

"For pity's sake," he cried. The spear had pierced his thigh. Clashing, clattering, clamoring swords clanked on shields and rose to crash down again.

The Valkyrie paused, trying to discern whether the spurting wound was in the front of the thigh, a hero's death, or from behind. The spear pinned him to the frozen soil. warm blood cooled under him, but she took her time.

These things take time.

The battle around them roared. Viking slew Viking, and Loki and Thor smiled.

At the cabin, thirty degrees cooler than down in Phoenix but still in the warm eighties, Bill carried in the duffel bags and turned on the lights. Lucy went ahead of him down to the basement and fired up the air conditioner and the computer. She was speaking into the microphone when he came downstairs.

"Yes, I know," she said. "But I haven't yet."

Lucy spoke English. Two of Lucy and Bill's vocal cords had been resected when they'd been accepted for fieldwork, when they'd had the rest of the cosmetic surgery, when Lucy had had extra ceramics twined around her bones. Speaking Y'soolonu was out of the question. Words spoken in one octave had too many possible meanings. Besides, the researchers stationed on Charon spoke excellent English, even if they spoke it in two octaves simultaneously. "Did you use our test?" Soonerau asked.

"Of course, dumbass." Her voice was hoarse.

Bill stood beside her. She leaned against him, and he stroked her hair, which she had dyed red a few weeks ago. Why had she chosen red? It seemed ostentatious.

"Try another one," Soonerau said and sounded like monks singing Gregorian chant.

She pushed the microphone back and went into the bathroom.

"Is she okay?" Soonerau asked Bill.

"She's handling it."

"Are you?"

"I'll be fine." Bill opened and closed his fist. He and Lucy had common recessive alleles for fourteen recessive genetic diseases plus several dominant ones each. The baby wouldn't have Bill's immune disorder or cannibalism predisposition because Lucy had normal genes there. But there was 50% chance that the baby would have chronic ulcers, a 50% chance that the baby would have the same osteoporosis as Lucy, a one in four chance for Molecular Disintegration, Ooaxfloor's Tremblor, cancer predispositions, and diseases akin to muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, Tay-Sach's, others he couldn't remember, and a 25% chance of having an Electra daughter. Bill held the edge of the desk. "God," he whispered.

But it might be a boy. Annanou was a good name, if it was a boy, after Bill's maternal second uncle, once removed.

Static crackled. They could build an ansible but they couldn't get rid of the static.

Soonerau said, "There are some babies born back home that aren't selected, you know. There's a whole movement."

Bill said, "Here, they're called Luddites. They tried to delay the Industrial Revolution by smashing mechanical looms."

"Yes," Soonerau said. "Luddites." He sounded like a chorus, like a man and a boy soprano saying the same thing.

"They didn't win, you know. The Industrial Revolution happened anyway. The Internet happened. Cloned sheep happened."

"Yes, Blooleau."

"Don't call me that. It upsets Lucy."

"Is Looshou back yet?"

"No."

"How's your research?"

"One more book to read before I start writing."

"There always is," Soonerau said.

Lucy opened the door. She wiped the tears with her sleeve. "False alarm," she said. "I guess I'm not pregnant."

Nothing, no baby, no child, no danger to Lucy, the absence of it sickened him after the frantic drive and holding himself together. "All right, then," he said.

Soonerau asked, "What did she say?"

"She said there's no baby."

"Well then, that's all there is to it. You kids get a good night's sleep, and we'll talk tomorrow."

In bed that night, in the bedroom in the top of the A-frame with the pointed ceiling and the triangle window that looked out into the woods where the snowy owls flew by, Lucy fell asleep right away, but Bill lay awake.

If there had been a child, they would have had to go home. They would have had to leave right away, before he'd published a paper, before he'd graduated. His sternum pressed down on his heart, like a small cushion of hope had deflated.

He awoke after a few hours of night sweats and twitch kicks when the ansible honked frantically downstairs. Bill staggered downstairs and slammed the reply switch. "What!"

"Are you guys all right?" Soonerau asked.

"Sleeping," Bill said into the microphone. Lucy stood in the doorway, swaying.

"I raised the folks back home. They send regrets for your close call and recommend that Looshou do some blood work to make sure there's no other problem."

"We need coffee," Bill said and switched the computer off.

In the kitchen, Bill made coffee. It was too normal to grind the beans and measure the grounds and water and set the machine up. There was no reason for him not to make coffee, unless Lucy was pregnant, and in that case Lucy shouldn't eat anything unless it was from home. Too many organic compounds and heavy metals were scarce back home but tinged the water here. God only knew what might be teratenogenic. Cancer risk was nothing because they'd be screened and treated when they went home but the baby, the baby might be all right genetically but something in the damned water might twist and deform it into a limbless, flippered, jawless brain-damaged lump.

But, of course, Lucy wasn't pregnant. If she were pregnant, there would have to be testing. They couldn't give birth to a child and bring it up here. If she were pregnant, she would have told him.

Lucy was leaning on the counter, eating a bowl of berries. "Yes?" she asked.

"We have to go home," Bill said.

"Yeah," Lucy said. "We can drive back after breakfast."

Outside, a bird in one of the pine trees tweeted and another cawed. At home, birds hummed. He said, "Our real home."

"What?" She stopped spooning a raspberry into her mouth.

"For testing," he said, "if the baby is all right, you can't eat this food. And we couldn't raise it here." Outside the window, the pine tree's needles shadowed the ground in cross-hatchings, like a lazy artist had sketched a shadow instead of darkly inking it.

"There is no baby."

"It will be crimson and it'll sound like Tibetan monks lowing in two octaves when it cries."

"I'm not pregnant."

"One test said yes; one said no. Which one do you believe?"

"Obviously, there's something else wrong. If this planet has given me cancer, I'll take a pill. At least cancer isn't a moral choice." She had been thinking about an abortion. No wonder she was so calm. She had already decided. He hadn't decided but she had.

Lucy said, "It's probably just stress."

The water and the food were giving them cancer. The arid air made them sluggish. "We should go home." "You haven't even published a paper," she said. "Journal of Xenoanthropology only accepts papers written in the field. We don't have the funding to come back. We'd be teaching assistants."

"There's Xenobiology. There are other journals. We want children."

Lucy said, "When the time is right, we'll have one selected, and she won't have ceramic-wrapped bones or have to worry if her parents are going to go crazy" -- Bill looked into the black fathoms of his half-cup of coffee -- "or be afraid what will happen to her when her body finally collapses. She'll be like my niece: beautiful, smart, and healthy. And she'll have successful parents who can select all the best traits for her, who won't be crippled financially."

"It's just money. We can raise a family on two teaching stipends."

"But we could live better on two tenured salaries. She could have music lessons and attend good schools. She could have tutoring and prepping, the advantages."

"We didn't."

"If we had, we could have gotten one of the good field assignments, and we wouldn't be stuck here trying to write papers about post-industrialist, post-nuclear, pre-starfaring semi-sapients. Once again, I am disgusted that they haven't made the jump."

Old argument. His response should be about the military-industrial complex and the lack of the development of a world religion and a preponderance of xenophobic mythologies, and then she would lament the lack of a proper asteroid belt or sufficient periodic comets to focus their attention away from each other and toward a greater threat, and eventually Bill and Lucy would agree that it was a shame.

Bill said, "We need to go home, before we forget, before we go native."

She gestured to her pants. She was wearing khaki's, a blue button-down shirt, and loafers: the weekend uniform of the yuppie. "If we went any more native, I'd be wearing feathers and bone beads."

The kitchen was tiled white with light wood cabinets. There was nothing so colorless at home. It looked like an unfinished idea. Bill said, "This is crazy. I can write at home."

"You're not writing now." She always cut to the heart of the argument. She was so damned clinical. Sometimes he thought she was measuring his reactions. He was a transgenic mouse to her. A cloned sheep. A lab rat. Maybe she was measuring now how well he stood up to the stress of being away from home and stuck in a planetwide maze devoid of cheese. "That doesn't matter."

"It's about George again, isn't it," she said.

He didn't want to hear that name. His blood congealed in panicky clumps, and his skin cooled as blood raced inside to his heart and viscera, hiding. Everything looked too wide to him, agoraphobic. He held onto the countertop. Damn it, he hated the fear that froze him. Anger should warm him, inflame him, burn brightly, but that wasn't his way. It wasn't Lucy's way, either, and that quieted him. She felt and reacted just like he did. It was in her bones. He'd been reading too many stories about battling gods. "I know you didn't sleep with him," he said.

"Damn, I knew it. Are you still jealous?"

At home, he wouldn't wonder. Rumors never started. Here, rumors sprouted and grew and branched until everyone had heard the rumor, whether it was about an affair or an email virus or gerbils and movie stars or KGB moles. "You're too damned native."

She set down her cereal bowl. "Did you take your pills this morning?"

"I forgot to bring them. I can miss a few."

"Of course," she said. "Get packed. I'll drive."

"It's not that," he said.

"Of course it isn't."

"My brother Osiris has fathered a child?" Set asked. Pale desert sand blew through the columns and into the pool. The water that reflected the white-hot Egyptian sun turned beige. "Was it Osiris's own wife this time, or mine again?"

Lucy packed. She drove. Bill's mind buzzard-circled and dove at the problem all the way home, but he kept coming back to the planet, the air, the water, the garish yellow sun, their flat voices, the oppressive gravity, the stink of the apes, their lives on hold, and the whole culture of separateness, no community, no family, and nowhere for him to go and nothing that he could do about it except go home, go home, go home. The Earth air and water polluted his flesh, and he wanted it off of him. He wanted to crawl out of his skin.

At home, in the bedroom, Lucy pressed a small patch onto the tender skin under his left arm and suggested he sleep. The patch was a combination of anti-psychotics and sleep-inducing drugs loaded onto tiny needles that felt like the rough side of Velcro, and he dreamed of half-human, half-Y'soolonu babies, furred in tufts and scaled in patches, lost in minotaur mazes or screaming Sphinxian riddles and flying away. Bill woke up Sunday afternoon with vague memories of another patch during the night.

Lucy wasn't home. He shuffled to the kitchen.

Lucy came in the back door, holding groceries, while he was eating a peach. "You have your appetite back, I see."

"I'm fine," he said.

"Of course. How are you feeling?"

"Fine." He didn't want to say sheepish and ashamed for falling into psychosis. He didn't say that in his own spinning mind he understood how his father had slipped away.

"I think we should increase your medication."

"It isn't psychotic to get tired of fieldwork. It isn't crazy to miss your family and friends. Maybe you'll need meds to help you adjust when we get home."

"We're not going home."

"Yes, we are."

She started unloading groceries. Celery, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, parsley and limes. She said, "I'm not."

She was a stranger. She'd gone native. It was horrible, horrible to imagine her here, solitary, singular, a point instead of a knot in a mesh. "You're crazy."

"I'm fulfilling my commitment." She dumped an armload of vegetables into the crisper drawer. The open refrigerator door hid most of her except her flat loafers and her khaki pants.

"To who?"

She closed the refrigerator slowly and leaned against it. She stared at the refrigerator magnets -- London, Paris, York, Istanbul -- holding coupons from Jiffy-Lube, Papa John's, and Ching Dau. "I'm not going back," she muttered.

Soonerau would know what to do. He could talk to Lucy's family. Looshou's family, Bill thought. In his head, he heard it sonorous and in two octaves. He took the car keys from the counter.

He had four hours to drive to the cabin. Time enough to think.

A ruby glinted bindi-like between the deer's kohl-lined eyes.

An arrow drove between its ribs.

When the deer called out Sita's name in her husband's voice, the breath rushed out of her lungs in a long wail. "Rama!" she screamed, "Rama!" and she fell on the deer's warm, white body.

Its leg twitched under her breasts.

"Why?" she asked. "Why?"

At the cabin, Blooleau set the parameters and aimed the roof antenna toward Charon.

Soonerau answered quickly. "What is it? Are you guys all right?"

Blooleau said, "Yes, I'm fine. Looshou is in trouble. I need you to check her files for a predisposition for emotional isolation and depression." Blooleau knew it was there. It had caused the downgrade to a pre-starfaring society. "And I need an extraction team. Looshou has gone native. She's acting as if she has no relatives. Her physical symptoms are merely signs of her extreme mental fragility.

"We're going home."

He slept at the cabin and drove back to Phoenix the next morning. The extraction team should arrive that evening. In a few months, they would be home. Bill tapped the top of the steering wheel with his palm.

The desert slipped behind him. All those solitary bees and thorned plants and poisonous lizards and snakes, no wonder Lucy had slipped away from him. No one could be surrounded by the pollen from those spiked cacti and the venomous breath of the reptiles without getting caught up. Lucy would adapt when they were back home.

When he got home, Lucy's car wasn't in the garage.

In her closet, the few remaining clothes hung limply with lengths of rod between them. Her skiing bib overalls were still there, and her gold-woven sari. Her jewelry box was empty.

From the kitchen, she had taken two of the pots, a skillet, and the cappuccino machine. The butter cubicle in the refrigerator, where she kept her medications, had a little dust in the bottom of it. Bill looked all over the house, but Lucy hadn't left a note.

Bill sat on the couch and waited. The extraction team should arrive in a few hours. What could be tell them? That she had disappeared?

He couldn't drive to the cabin and get back before the extraction team got there.

Bill pulled out their address book and called Vince Ackerman. "I just got back from a business trip," he told Vince. "Lucy isn't here. Have you seen her?"

Vince said no, and they chatted a few minutes before Bill called Bob and Reanna Anderson.

After sunset, when Bill was calling Harry Vincent, there was a knock at the door. Bill hung up the phone and opened the door.

Outside, lit by the porchlight, four cloaked, hooded figures and a man stood. A blue minivan was parked at the curb.

Bill let them in. "What if you guys were pulled over?" he asked them. "What were you going to say? Hello, Bob. How's Reanna?"

Bob, the man, smiled. "Reanna's fine. The big guys were in crates."

Bob and Reanna had stayed with Bill and Lucy for a month while they were acclimating to Earth. Bob studied clandestine societies. God only knew where Bob was most of the time, but at least he was writing a paper.

Bob Anderson was six feet seven inches tall, but he looked like a child among the cloaked figures who hunched in the entryway. Once again, Bill felt stunted. He'd gotten used to playing power forward on the EVTEC basketball team because he was six feet four. Bill closed the curtains. "Yeah, because cops don't get suspicious about a guy with a bunch of crates in the back of a minivan. Jesus, they would have thought you were hauling drugs."

"I'm tight with the police," Bob said.

One of the draped figures asked, "Where is Looshou?" in two octaves, treble and bass, but in English.

"Soonerau!" Bill said. "You came? Can I offer you some carrots?"

"Looshou?" Another Y'soolonu dropped his hood back. His hair spilled out in back, and pudgy fat pads rode over the bones of his face. His scales were thick dark green, each like a hard callus. How could he let himself get so fat? He bent from the waist to talk to Bill. "I am Ullauru. I have heard about these carrots."

"Nice to finally meet you." Bill stepped back. His head spun. It was disorienting, being the tiniest person in the group. His hands, which at work fumbled on computer keyboards and dropped pens, again seemed like squirrel paws, nimble and fussy. "I'll get carrots."

Soonerau asked, "Where is Looshou?"

"She's not here." Bill shrugged his shoulders, palms up. Once again, his gestures were expanding to bulk him up. A subtle shrug would be unnoticed on his wispy body.

Soonerau asked, "Where did she go?"

"Out."

"When will she come back?" Ullauru asked.

"Soon." Bill sat on the couch under the overhanging plants and curled his feet under him.

Soonerau slowly lowered himself, squatting deeply, onto the couch and put his arm around Bill. He wasn't family, but he was a friend, and that would do. Soonerau sighed, like the last puff of air escaping a pipe organ. "Then we will wait."

"Okay." She had to come back. She only had two weeks worth of pills left. He tried not to imagine it, but the image of Lucy, vomiting blood as her ulcers corroded her stomach, leg bones snapping when she walked, metabolic toxins building up in her blood and making her confused and sick, knowing that human doctors couldn't help, and then, without drugs to repress the genes and their proteins, scales would begin to cut through her skin, mint green at first, then unhealthy iridescent blue at the new growth.

"We've got to find her," Bill said and leaned closer to Soonerau.

Soonerau's scaly palm caught in Bill's hair, and for intermittent moments, Soonerau's dry scales on his hands and face were unpleasant, agitating, but Bill remembered his parents and his cousins soothing him. "I was going to get you those carrots," Bill said.

"Ah, yes." Ullauru squatted and sat on the sofa. "Those would be nice." Muffled chimes tinkled from somewhere in his cloak. "Ah, excuse me." Ullauru took a small box from his pouch, opened it delicately with his long fingers, and removed a small patch and a long needle from it. He used to needle to pry up one of his fat scales, slipped the patch under it, and pressed the scale down into his skin below. Bill tried not to stare. Usually scales bent back flexibly.

Perhaps a light supper today, or maybe Bill would skip it all together.

Ullauru teased the spent patch out from under his scale and set it in a gold glass bowl on the coffee table.

In the kitchen, Bill diced carrots. When they were an orange mound in a salad bowl, Bill put the rest of the bag back in the crisper and went to the address book he'd left on the kitchen table. He called George Franklin's phone number.

That afternoon, he had skipped it because if George knew, he wouldn't tell

Bill, and Bill didn't want to hear that ape's voice.

"Hello?" George answered. His voice was happy and dumb luck struck. "Yeah?"

"I was wondering if you had seen Lucy Stranger. This is her husband, Bill."

"Why would I have seen her?"

"She needs medication. She forgot one of her medications at home."

Bill could hear the hesitation. She was there. Lucy was at that musician's apartment, probably listening to him play the drum or touching that chimp.

"It's important. It's like insulin." "If I see her, I'll tell her you called."

Bill hung up. George's address was penciled next to his name in Lucy's scrolly handwriting.

Bill took the bowl of diced carrots into the living room for the others.

Ullauru exclaimed when he saw the carrots, "So beautiful!" and when he tasted one, "So fresh!"

Soonerau patted the couch beside him, and Bill sat next to him. The other two robed Y'soolonu stood motionless in the entry way. "Would you guys like some carrots?" Bill called over to them.

They didn't answer.

"I said," Bill began, but Soonerau's grip on Bill's arm tightened, and he stopped.

"They're a precaution," Soonerau said.

"In case what?"

"In case we need to restrain Lucy to take her home."

"We have police?" The air around Bill seemed too thin and still. He couldn't suck any air in. How much had things changed back home?

"Consider them helpers," Soonerau said. Ullauru ate carrots bits by pinching each individual carrot piece in his fingers and delicately tossing it into his mandibles. The coffee table in front of him was littered with carrot that had popped out from between his fingers.

Bill shifted out from under Soonerau's arm. "What are you going to do? Tie her up like a bug caught in a spider web?"

Soonerau and Ullauru recoiled. "Don't be vulgar," Soonerau said.

"Physical force? This is what it has come to? She's a scientist!"

"If she is unstable," Soonerau said, "she might tell someone about us."

"So you were going to kidnap them?"

"Perhaps," Soonerau said.

Perhaps? Perhaps? Had insanity swept Y'soolonu? "What else? Are you going to kidnap them? Are you going to kill them?"

"I'm sure it will not come to that," Ullauru said. "But we had to be prepared."

The police stood by the door.

Ullauru had reached the bottom of the bowl, and he blinked. How humiliating for him not to have left some. Ullauru looked at his hands, covered with heavy scales. Bill said, "I'll just get some more."

Bill walked past the others standing in the foyer, and one moved aside to let Bill pass. The police, or guard or whatever, clanked when he moved, metal on chitin.

Y'soolonu didn't wear metal adornments. Even the aboriginal cultures on Y'soolonu, even the yellow-scaled ones who lived on the other side of the planet and worshipped several gods, and the short, dark-scaled ones from the equator countries, the Shoonsees, no one would wear metal on their bodies. It would be like a human wearing clothes made of whipped cream.

He walked through the kitchen, set the carrot bowl on the counter, and walked into the garage. He fired up the car and drove out into the neighborhood.

Suicide if she stayed. Murdered if she didn't come back with them.

The humans and Lucy.

Murder.

Bill couldn't think of a word that approximated it in Y'soolonu. The closest word meant "restraint," more like "detention." Death vocabulary connotated planned peace and release.

No wonder Bill couldn't write about human mythology. He had no words for it. He would have to use English words, or some other language.

And the language of violence would seep farther into Y'soolonu.

Police.

Kill. Slaughter. Drive-by. Assassinate. Execute. Massacre. Bloodbath.

Terrorism. Holocaust.

Bill drove to George's apartment. He had to find Lucy.

The witch boiled her broth, and Elaine drank it. Her hair grew long, blond, and curled, her waist narrowed, and her gown turned purple and shot with gold. Guinevere's diamond crown rested on her head.

"Now Launcelot will love me?" she asked.

The witch said, "No, but you can sleep with him, if you want."

Even at ten o'clock that Friday night, the downtown streets were jammed. As he got closer to Central, traffic worsened. Gridlock. Cruising teenagers. Gang members? If he flashed his lights at their dark car, would they turn around and drive-by shoot him? Or was that another urban myth?

Another stoplight cycle at Fifth. The teenagers in the convertible ahead of him laughed and threw a bottle. The beer bottle smashed on the asphalt and splattered. A wet splash glistened on the side of the car beside them in Bill's headlights. The other teenagers got out of the splashed car and walked over to the convertible, gesturing. Stereotypes and legends, and yet here.

Bill drove down the turn lane past them.

He turned onto Fifth and drove up to Orangewood. No traffic blocked the residential streets.

He found the apartment complex and George's apartment in it. Standing outside number twelve, he listened. Inside, a drum pattered complex beats in seven-four time -- one two three four five six seven one -- with tapping trills running around the bass. The softly muted beats were from a hand drum, not the sharp slap of a drumstick on a snare.

Bill's hand, poised to knock at the door, shook. George was playing those drums for her. Maybe they were lying naked on a futon bed, George with the drum between his legs, Lucy reclining and listening. Or they might be sitting on the floor, Lucy dressed in one of George's T-shirts, and George in a robe. Bill's skin chilled. He knocked.

Two measures of silence later, George answered the door. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and his blonde hair that fell past his shoulders was loose. He didn't open the door very far. His eyes were six inches below Bill's, but his T-shirt draped over his burly chest and hung loose over his flat stomach. He was a powerful little ape. "Yes?"

"I have to see Lucy."

"She isn't here, man."

"I have to see her." Bill looked behind George. Drums, like steel kettles with skins stretched over them, lay on the floor. George's foot was planted behind the door.

Romulus's hand held the knife. Remus lay dead on the marble floor of the palace.

"It wasn't my fault," Romulus said.

"I was fathered by a raping god, left for dead, ruled by a usurping tyrant, and became a prince by killing my uncle.

"Violence runs in my family."

Bill inhaled and jumped. He pushed George back, and though Bill was probably weaker than the squat ape, Bill's center of gravity was higher and his momentum pushed them over, and George fell back.

"What the?" George started punching.

Blows slammed into the long, flat bones that ran down Bill's sides.

"Stop!" Lucy yelled.

George landed one more in Bill's stomach. Bill's skin, dry-brittle and unprotected, split. Pain shot up.

Lucy was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room. "Lucy?" Bill said. "Looshou?"

She was beside him. "Jesus, George. You didn't have to hurt him."

"He jumped me!" George said. He was balancing on his toes, breathing hard.

"Cracked," Bill said to Lucy. He tried to hold his skin together under his shirt, but the edges of his skin rubbed the fabric and hurt, and he knew he was seeping blood. Yellow would stain his shirt soon.

"I've got a first aid kit in the car." Lucy ran outside. George stood over him. "I'm really sorry, man. I play in bars, and I just punch when someone jumps me."

"All right," Bill said. Pain tourniqueted him.

George said, "Lucy said she needed a few weeks off, that she wanted to disappear and take a vacation. She asked me where a good place was to get lost. I told her Mexico. Is she a little off kilter?"

But Lucy couldn't just disappear. What if she got sick? Hurt? If she went native, she might not remember to come back. Could KGB moles take a vacation from spying? Did they cease to observe? Even when Dian Fossey wasn't sitting in a tree and living in a tent, did she notice the absence of jungle, or was she aware that the city was surrounded by jungle and forest and deep ocean and glittering sky?

Lucy returned with the first aid kit. She told George, "Boil some water."

When he had gone into the kitchen, Bill asked, "Boil water?"

"I don't know. They do it in the movies."

Bill would have laughed, but he was seeping blood.

Lucy peeled up his shirt. "About six inches." She tore elastic tape and stretched pieces across his wound, so the tape sprung back and pulled the lips of the split together. She put a pad over it to soak up the blood. She pressed an injection pad on the inside of his elbow.

"Soonerau is at the house," Bill said. "And others."

"Who?" She frowned.

"Extraction team."

"What!"

"Sorry." The edges of Bill's wound began to knit together and itched.

"Jesus." She rolled her eyes.

"They're armed."

"Since when?" she asked.

"Things have changed back home."

"Nice of them to keep us informed." Lucy ran her hands through her red hair.

"You wanted a vacation?" Bill asked. He grabbed the shag carpeting so he would not scratch the healing wound.

"Yeah."

"You'd just be going someplace else that isn't home."

"I was going to try."

"Have you told George anything?" His hand drifted toward the bandage on his abdomen.

Lucy lifted his hand away from his belly. "What would I tell him?" Her hand was perfectly cool.

"Soonerau might, I don't know what he would do. I thought Soonerau might kidnap you, but he might kill George."

Lucy shook her head. "Could they do that?" She pressed her hand to her stomach.

Bill grabbed the carpeting and did not scratch the deep itch in his stomach. "We have to go back," Bill said.

"George was playing me music from India. These are tabla." Lucy gestured to the drums. "There's so much more."

"Your thesis is supported," Bill said. "India is outside the scope of your hypothesis."

"I could write more."

"We have to leave the jungle sometime."

Lucy sighed. "I like the jungle."

"And the ape?"

"Don't call him that." She peeled the bandage back a little. The tape pulled his skin. She looked underneath, then ripped it the rest of the way off. A jaundiced scar ran down Bill's abdomen, from where his ribs stretched his skin tight toward his navel. He pulled his shirt down.

George came back in, holding a pot. "It's boiling."

Lucy motioned him over and carefully dropped the soiled bandage in the pot. Bill smiled. That would destroy any nucleic acid or proteins on it.

George asked, "Is he all right?"

"Just a scratch. Looks a lot better cleaned up," Bill said.

George looked at Bill and asked Lucy, "Does he need to go to a hospital?"

"No," Bill said.

"He's fine," Lucy said. "I don't think I'm going to Mexico." She fidgeted with her coppery hair and the muscles around her surgically-installed jawbone contracted. "Bill, could you wait outside a moment?"

Bill stood up, steadied himself, and walked outside. He stood just outside the door, but Lucy closed it behind him.

He waited. Streetlamps lit the trees amber on one side. Shadows clung to the glowing half-trees. Some leaves were gold but their branches were dark, so that they hung in midair.

In Norse myth, Yggdrasil is the ash tree whose branches and roots join Heaven, Earth, and Hell. There was a Y'soolonu myth about a tree tall enough to climb to the stars, but there was no Hell below. The only way to fall into Hell is to be lost and alone. It is the absence of family and comfort. If you are with family, someone will pull you up. Here, on this godforsaken planet, you could be thrown into Hell at the whim of someone else.

Lucy opened the door. "Come on," she said. She wiped away an amber tear. "Soonerau's waiting."

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