It Creeps In Everywhere

     Pascal, Dave, and I have written quite a lot that falls under the death cults category. There are plenty of reasons; a perusal of the essays in this book and of the essays here under that heading would convince anyone not determined to ignore the evidence. I’m certain that it will remain an important, frequently visited subject for a long time to come.

     As it happens, I’m at work on a novel relevant to the subject. But quite recently Pascal reminded me that I’d “been there before:”

     The lecture hall had emptied, but Armand and Teresza remained in their seats. Armand had not moved since the closing bell, and Teresza was afraid to nudge him. She simply sat, his big hand between hers, and waited for him to return from his private space.
     They’d sat in complete silence for several minutes when he murmured, “I think I see.”
     “What, Armand?” She chafed his hand gently.
     “Where he’s going with this.” He looked straight ahead, toward the lectern but not at it, a true thousand-yard stare. “He’s been hinting at a unified theory of society, like they’re looking for in physics. I think I see what it is.”
     He doesn’t look happy about it.
     “There’s only two forces that really matter,” he said. “Life and death. Everything else is a sideshow. When we work to live, and to make more life, and to take pleasure in life and help others do the same, that’s healthy. That’s freedom. But the people of Earth weren’t free. They were surrounded by their States. By death. And the States never let up for a moment. So they couldn’t make more life, or take a lot of pleasure in it. They had to distract themselves from all the death hemming them in. All the bodies piled up around them.” He rose and turned to her at last, and she rose in response. Tears trickled down his face. “But our ancestors chose life. The Spoonerites made the Great Sacrifice and broke the circle, so our ancestors could get free.” He wiped at his tears and smiled, a peculiar compound of pity for those who had died in bondage and gratitude that he and she and their compatriots would not. “We are so lucky.”

     The State is death. It exists and perpetuates itself by violence and the threat of violence, which always embeds the possibility of death. It’s the essence of the institution. Thus it’s inevitable that one vitally concerned with life and its protection will at the very least look upon the State with a jaundiced eye.

     But that observation has another implication, as well: If anyone should contrive to somehow escape the State, he would thereby become its mortal, eternal enemy. The State would never forgive him, because:

• It’s lese majeste, which statists regard as the unforgivable crime;
• He would provide others with an example to follow.

     And Pascal reminded me that I’d embedded that thesis in a short story, which follows. It deviates slightly from the “canon” established by the novels of the Spooner Federation Saga, but the ideas it expresses are consistent.

---

The Last Ambassadors

     “What on Hope is that?” Richard Fiammare propped himself on an elbow as Victoria emerged from the lavatory. The whine of the Cerenkov drive that pushed Liberty’s Torch through space surged briefly and subsided.
     She smiled, raised her arms above her head in a dancer’s arc and pirouetted before him. “It’s called a corset.”
     The garment looked like a decorative cage for Victoria’s torso. Shiny black fabric clasped her from above her breasts to the top of her pelvis. In back it split along her spine, revealing a quarter-inch’s width of her flesh. The edges were joined by crisscross lacing that tied off in the middle.
     “What’s it for?”
     “Well, this one’s for show. Just to look pretty. The original ones were supposed to improve your shape.” She knelt beside him, took his hand and placed it over a satin-covered breast. “Do you like it?”
     The cloth was smooth and cool to his touch. It covered the pliant warmth of her breast without concealing it. Richard’s pulse accelerated.
     Victoria Hallanson was not his first lover, but if the fates were kind, she’d be his last. Her erotic gifts were incomparable. She knew an endless number of byways to the arts of love, a fund of enchanting surprises he could not exhaust. Of the quarter-billion joyously free denizens of Hope, she was the freest and most joyous of all.
     And the greatest miracle is that she chooses to lavish it on me.
     Though the trip to Earth would be the crown jewel of his three-century career in exobiology, he would never have agreed to go without her.
     But Victoria was more than an erotic genius. She was the most beloved scion of one of the noblest families of Hope, whose founder had bestowed immortality on Man. Though barely a century old, she was a celestial navigator without peer, and the foremost paleolinguist in the world. Without her, the mission would have been unthinkable.
     “How did they improve your shape?” His voice buzzed in his ears. The whine of the superluminal drive had stopped, but he paid it no mind.
     “By squeezing you.” She pulled his hand down to her waist. “They were smaller through the waist than you are, and had ribs all through here, so that if you pulled the laces tight, the ribs would press you in and make you curvier. The books say it usually took a helper to get it laced and tightened right.”
     “I don’t think you need to be any curvier.”
     She laughed. “They didn’t have nanotech or know how to do topical biofeedback, back then. Women really struggled with their figures.” She pressed him back and lay upon him, brought her face close to his. “But I just wanted a pretty one, so I told the pantograph to make one exactly my size, with no ribs. Do you like it?”
     “Very much.” He ran his hands down her corseted sides and settled them on her rump. “Just how many of your little tricks come from those old books?”
     Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “I can’t let you have all my secrets.”
     She took his face between her hands and passed the tip of her tongue lightly along his lips. He gasped and crushed her to him, and their conversation ceased.

***

     Earth did not look like a sterile world. Its blue-green majesty matched the photos in their references. Yet Richard’s bioscanners showed no evidence of animal life. Unless chance had concocted an entirely new form of mobile autochthone that didn’t concentrate heat or emit proteinous waste, nothing lived on the surface but vegetation.
     The electromagnetic receivers detected no signals in the radio frequencies or above. If Man on Earth had gone into hiding, he’d done a careful job of it.
     Eighteen hundred years since the last transmissions reached Hope.
     Martin Forrestal gave a voice to Richard’s nightmares. “Whatever cleaned them out did it thoroughly. What was the population at peak?”
     Victoria looked up from her nav board. “Seven point three billion, plus or minus three hundred million.”
     “Pretty big error bar,” Althea Morelon murmured, eyes fixed on the viewscreen.
     “Maybe the States ran out of numbers.” Victoria smirked. “They ran out of everything else.”
     No one laughed.
     Althea stepped lithely around the control pedestals and slipped into the command chair. She pressed a button on the left armpiece and waited. About fifteen seconds later, a set of LEDs lit above the button.
     “The lander shows all green. Are you two ready?”
     Richard and Victoria turned toward her. Victoria said, “There’s no point in waiting.” Richard nodded.
     Althea searched their faces for a moment. “All right. It’s a go. But I want to remind you both of a few things before you strap into your pods.” She rose and stood before them with her arms crossed over her chest, six feet of powerfully muscled beauty, towering intellect, and Solomonic judgment.
     “You will be the first Spoonerites to set foot on Earth since the Hegira. Our ancestors did not leave this neighborhood on good terms. If there are still men on Earth, you must assume that they will be hostile toward you.
     “If you find men, or any other form of intelligence, your first act must be to cultivate good will. You have no other defenses. Don’t provoke unnecessary confrontations.
     “Most important of all, there is no second lander. Once you’re on the surface, Martin and I can do nothing but talk to you. If the lander is disabled once you’re down, you’re down for a minimum of eight months. I can’t put Liberty’s Torch down on a planetary surface. I can scramble for home and organize a second expedition, nothing else.”
     Althea’s eyes struck into Richard’s with hammerblow force. He could feel her willing him to envision his own dismemberment and death. She turned to focus the same look on Victoria.
     “You volunteered for this voyage, but that was four months ago. That’s time enough for a lot of second thoughts. I won’t say a word in protest if you elect to back out, even now. Take a moment to think it over.”
     Richard fought down the chill surge that radiated from the base of his spine. He tried to speak, but his mouth had gone too dry. Before he could compose himself, Victoria’s hand slipped around his own and squeezed it.
     “We’ll go, Al. Try not to worry about us. We’ll be together.”
     Althea nodded. “Yes, you will. Try to stay that way.” She embraced each of them briefly. Martin stepped forward from the power console. Richard shook his hand solemnly. Victoria embraced him and kissed his cheek.
     Althea returned to the command chair and toggled switches. “The lander is in preflight. Get aboard, strap in and prepare for the ride of your lives.”

***
     The lander’s propulsion was a liquid fueled rocket of venerable design. Ninety-three percent of its mass was fuel tanks and fuel. Most of the rest was its control electronics and its two passenger pods. Within the pods lay Richard and Victoria.
     The pods were a concatenation of nanotechnology and anti-acceleration engineering. Their inner surfaces appeared to be smooth, soft plastic. In reality they were composed of billions of sensors, infusors, and actuators, each of which was capable of performing a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic operations on the flesh it swaddled. One pod was tuned to Richard’s genes and vital parameters, the other to Victoria’s.
     Should a pod’s owner crawl into it, however tenuously alive, its collection of adaptive nanomachines would sustain him and work to repair him until all its sources of energy were cut off. Should anyone else enter it, no matter how vibrantly healthy, he would never emerge; it would kill him and convert his flesh into base chemicals with which to succor its rightful owner.
     The pods were the pinnacle of technological achievement on Hope. In its ability to sense the detailed condition of its owner and adapt itself to his needs, a pod came closer to being intelligent life than anything else ever created by human skill.
     Victoria had entered the desired landing coordinates into the lander’s computers. When she pressed the COMMIT toggle, the pods would anesthetize their occupants. They would sleep as the lander separated from Liberty’s Torch, cruised toward Earth, and made planetfall.
     They looked fondly at one another one final time through the pods’ clear vitrine shells. Richard mouthed a kiss at his lover. Victoria smiled and pressed COMMIT.
     Explosive bolts blew the lander free of Liberty’s Torch. Seconds later her main engine fired briefly, and she began her pilgrimage to the birthplace of Man.
***
     Of all the technologies for the detection of animal life, the simplest are those which seek concentrations of heat. The inanimate world is relentless about dissipating heat. A persistent concentration of it in a non-volcanic region on a planetary surface is a virtual guarantee of animal life there. As the lander descended, its sensors scanned a wide circle around the preprogrammed planetfall point for such a concentration.
     There was a heat detection system on the ground as well, a few hundred miles northeast of the point Victoria had selected. For eighteen hundred years it had passively awaited the approach of a spacecraft. When the lander was three hours from planetfall, its infrared emissions became strong enough to trigger the ground system.
     The ground system was technologically as simple as the lander’s pods were complex: a bimetallic leaf spring, warmed by an infrared lens, that closed a switch when it reached its target temperature. The switch connected the output of an array of tidally charged batteries to a huge steel cylinder that nestled in a concrete turret atop a granite cliff.
     The cylinder filled with reagents. Current coursed through the brew. The ensuing reactions were powerfully exothermic, far more than enough to deflect the lander from its original course. The turret had been fabricated with a plexiglass lens as its upper face for that reason. The lander’s navigation system replaced Victoria’s landing coordinates with those of the heat emission, and swooped gently toward the infrared flare.
***
     Richard awoke first. All his pod’s indicators shone a reassuring green. He tripped the hatch release and rose before Victoria’s eyes had opened.
     Through the lander’s viewport he could see a rocky headland, rough cliffs and crags that overlooked a gray, uninviting sea. There was no sign of artifice, no indication of a human presence, except for a massive gray-white turret atop the highest of the cliffs. He focused the rangefinder on the turret and triggered it. The readout said 1.8 miles.
     Where’s the city?
     Victoria had programmed the lander to take them to the old seat of planetary government on the continent’s eastern coast. It had been the greatest of the cities of Earth. Even if its population were entirely extinct, he’d expected to see some ruins. He saw nothing but the turret.
     He was about to check in with Liberty’s Torch when Victoria stirred. He turned away from the radio panel and smiled down at her. She popped the hatch on her pod, sat up and stretched as languidly as if she’d awakened from an ordinary night’s sleep. He waved at the viewport. She stepped daintily out of her pod, moved to his side and frowned at the unpromising landscape.
     “It’s not New York,” she said.
     “Not the New York we were expecting, anyway.”
     “The magnetics say we’re about three hundred miles north of there.” She glanced at the bioscanner. “Environment’s not bad. We won’t need the suits. But where to?”
     He flipped a hand at the turret. “Unless there’s something better aft of us. Shall we debark?”
     She shrugged. “At least we can stir around.”
     “Best course I can think of.”
     She grinned mischievously. “Is it really?”
     He groaned. “Please, Vic –”
     “I know, I know. Not around the pods.”
***
     Behind the lander was a forest of tall firs, its edge only a few hundred yards distant. It stretched off to infinity on each side, as if it had taken possession of the whole continent save for the last few miles to the sea. The space between the forest and the sea was carpeted by a gray-green moss, punctuated by patches of bare rock and clumps of coarse, broadleaf weeds.
     There were no sounds of movement, no chitterings of rodents or songs of birds. The air smelled of damp and lichen. Above them spread a heavy, uniform cloud cover, stirred slightly by the gentle wind.
     Richard was unhappy. The turret was the only artificial item in view, and it was distinctly uninviting. Yet nothing else in sight could have produced enough heat to override their preprogrammed course.
     Victoria scanned the area, spending no more time on the turret than on the cliffs or the forest.
     “Nothing on the scanners?” she asked.
     He shook his head. “There’s us, that thing, and a lot of trees, and that’s all. If we hustle, we could be there in half an hour or so.”
     Her eyebrows knitted. “Why the hurry? Do you have friends in there? Let’s wander around a bit, see if we can find any evidence of habitation.”
     He glanced at the forest, then shook his head. “I don’t think we have much light left. If we have any prospects, they’re over that way. There’s always tomorrow to ramble around in the woods.”
     She didn’t look happy about it. He began to doubt himself. Her instincts were good ones. The direction of the ground mission was nominally his to decide, but if she continued to object, he wouldn’t insist.
     Presently she nodded. “Want to radio Althea and Martin first?”
     He knew what they ought to do, but his innate balkiness spoke for him. “Naah. Plenty of time for that after dinner. Maybe we’ll actually know something by then.” He sealed the lander’s hatch, and they started toward the turret.
***
     They halted about a quarter mile away to study the turret. It was perched at the edge of the ocean, on a promontory that jutted straight out into the choppy gray water. It was enormous, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter and three hundred feet tall. It appeared to be made of old-fashioned concrete. Richard could see no openings in its gray-white surface.
     The approach to the turret was defined by a pair of thick concrete walls, eight feet high. The walls enclosed a channel twelve feet wide that followed a steady ten degree upgrade. The channel began only a few yards from where they’d paused. Outside it, right up to the turret wall, the firs grew thick and high.
     “Do you think we’ll find anyone there?” Victoria asked.
     “No. If there are men left alive on Earth, they’ve shunned the surface. The scanners picked up absolutely nothing.”
     She looked sideways at him. Then why are we here? she asked silently. It was a question he’d asked himself.
     “Mankind is gone from Earth, Vic. If they did it to themselves, we need to know why. If something else exterminated them, we need to know how. And either way, there’s bound to be some history here, something about the last days.”
     “The States killed everyone,” she murmured.
     He’d thought the same. Yet to hear it said aloud was like a knife thrust into his spine. He needed to distance them from it, push it as far as he could from the realm of the probable.
     “Then who killed the States? Did they exterminate the rest of the world to secure their power? Then where are their descendants? Or was it some biowarfare experiment that went horribly wrong, in which case why wasn’t anyone immune? Why didn’t anyone get away?”
     She shuddered, squatted to sit on the mossy carpet and looped her arms over her knees. He sat next to her.
     “Extraterrestrial invasion, maybe?” he said. “Althea’s people took three years building Liberty’s Torch and spent two hundred million dekas to do it. What was the invader’s motive for doing something so difficult and expensive? What did he want and why is he gone? Why haven’t we picked up any of his radio transmissions? Vic, every scenario leads to a blank wall. Every possibility says there must be survivors or conquerors somewhere, so where are they?”
     She said nothing. The bleak silence of that spit of land was broken only by the faint sigh of the breeze. He stared at the turret with a mixture of curiosity and resentment.
     You brought us here. You generated enough of a heat signature to deflect us from New York. Those who built you must have intended that. What else did they intend?
     “I guess,” he said, “what I really want to discover is that they’re not dead, just gone to a better neighborhood.”
     That brought her head around. “All of them? Seven billion people?”
     “It’s not likely, but if it’s true, then we don’t have to worry about it happening to Hope.”
     Her face flared with animation. “It can’t happen to Hope no matter what it was,” she said. “Only States do this kind of thing. Only States kill in large numbers, or exile whole populations, or turn germs into weapons. And — ”
     “And Hope has no States,” he said. “We’ve banished them forever. Vic, you took Social Patterns One under Stromberg. Do you remember his demonstration of the State?”
     She nodded uncertainly.
     “Do you remember how it felt, the sense of power over the others, the sense of the possibilities? Do you really think it couldn’t happen on Hope? Never?”
     Her mouth quivered and tears welled in her eyes. He pulled her to him and bundled her in his arms.
     “It hurts even to think it, I know,” he whispered. “But they were men, and so are we, and whatever’s happened to them can happen to us. That’s why the Morelons spent all that money to get us here.”
     She stayed curled up small and silent in his arms for a long time. When she raised her face to his, her expression spoke of unpleasant conclusions long averted, that had triumphed over her resistance at last.
     “The light is fading,” she said. “Maybe we’d better get moving.”
     He brushed a tear from her cheek and nodded.
***
     Inside the turret, all was ready.
     The reactions touched off by the infrared sensors had reached equilibrium. The product lay quiet in the giant steel sleeve, awaiting the event that would deploy it as its designers had intended. That event would be sensed by a mechanism as simple and durable as the turret’s infrared sensor: a hydraulically suspended granite plate, a buried apron that covered the last twenty feet of the approach to the turret. A man’s tread would put the water-powered balances below it into irrevocable motion.
***
     The concrete tower revealed nothing of itself at any distance. The only change was in the height of the walls that limned the approach, which had steadily risen to about twenty feet.
     Richard and Victoria stared up the side of the inexplicable thing from a dozen paces away. There was nothing to see. Not a dent, nor a protrusion, nor any discoloration marred its cylindrical surface. It offered no hint of how it had called to the lander, nor of what it expected from those who arrived there.
     Victoria squeezed Richard’s hand. “What do we do now?”
     He shook his head.
     “There’s no one for me to talk to and no one for you to assay,” she said. “Do we just turn around and go back to the lander? Tell Althea we knocked but no one answered, so we might as well head back to Hope?”
     Richard’s gut roiled with a sour disappointment. “We could fly the lander directly over it, I guess.”
     “Why do that?”
     “Something drew us here, Vic. It might not be sentient, but it stood out enough from the thermal background to divert us from New York. Don’t you want to know what it was?”
     “We won’t find out much that way.”
     “Why not?”
     “Engine backwash.”
     “Oh. Damn. You’re right.” He stared at the tower, vainly willing it to spill forth its secrets, and surrendered. “At least I want to be able to tell Althea that we did knock.”
     He pulled his portable bioscanner out of his pack and strode toward the tower wall.
***
     The watercourses beneath the granite slab registered the change in pressure. Two valves inside the tower’s fundament opened in response. One released streams of nitric acid down the inner wall of the concrete layer. The other unsealed a hatch at the bottom of the steel cylinder, allowing the highly energetic phosphoretted sulfate colloid it contained to ooze forth.
     The acid ate away the structural strength of the concrete shell as the colloid massed between it and the steel beaker. As the pressure mounted, the steel groaned under the stress. It was the first sound made in that place by anything but the ocean in eighteen hundred years.
***
     Richard pressed his bioscanner’s contact sensor to the smooth concrete surface. The scanner’s thermal gauge showed nothing, but the vibration sensor twitched against the zero pin and crept upward. Richard’s heart surged with hope that there might yet be sentient life in that forsaken place. When the thermal gauge swung convulsively from the left to the right stop, his ears caught the rumbling from within, and every nerve in his body spiked with terror.
     “Run!”
     He flung the scanner aside and fled down the entranceway with all the speed he could muster. Victoria hesitated from surprise, then turned and sprinted after him, a few strides behind.
     Seconds later, the tower erupted behind them.
     They were flying down the path, nearly at the end of the enclosing walls, when the roar of flame eclipsed the sound of crumbling concrete. A blast of heat blistered Richard’s back. The roar crescendoed to a sustained thunder like the collision of planets.
     Panting and nearly spent, Richard threw himself to the side as he passed the edge of the wall. He scrambled about just in time to see a river of white fire six feet high flood down the channel and snatch Victoria off her feet. Her clothes flashed instantly into flame. The tongue of lava carried her final scream into eternity, and inscribed it upon his nightmares forever.
***
     When Richard awoke in his pod, Althea’s face was the first thing he saw.
     He did not move. She unlatched the pod cover from without, swung it out of the way, and squatted beside him to peer into his face.
     “Can you get up?”
     He nodded, but remained where he was.
     “But — ?”
     “I don’t know if I want to.”
     She scowled, put her hands to his shoulders, and lifted him out of the pod’s gentle grip. When he failed to follow, she pulled him all the way out of the shell, ran her hands quickly along his contours, and wrapped him in an uncompromising embrace. After a moment, he returned it.
     “You didn’t kill her, Richard. And you couldn’t have saved her.”
     “I know.”
     “If she hadn’t hesitated, she might still have died. You were faster and luckier. Now let yourself cry, damn it.”
     He buried his face in her shoulder, and the tears came: first a trickle, then a flood, and a howl of grief that seemed as if it might go on forever. Althea held him tightly as he shook. He clutched her as if there were nothing else solid in the universe.
     “I want to go home,” he gasped.
     “We’re going. We leave orbit in two hours.”
     He clasped her with all the pitiful force that remained to him, huddling against her stolid, prosaic strength.
     “Al, put me out for the trip. I don’t want to see or hear or think until we’re back on Hope. I can’t even bear to dream.”
     She pushed him back a little way and regarded him reprovingly. “I can’t do that. Martin and I can’t get us home all by ourselves. We’d be walking corpses before we were halfway back. Besides, if you slept the whole way, you’d still be a wreck when we land, which is when I’ll need you most. Stay with us and heal.”
     “How do I do that, Al?” He choked and coughed as the tears surged back, barely managing not to howl again. “How do I heal from seeing Victoria burned alive, so close I could almost have touched her?”
     The reproof faded from Althea’s face, displaced by a sorrow too palpable to need words.
     “I don’t know, but you’ll have to try.”
     She slipped an arm around his waist and shepherded him to his cabin.
***
     Two watches after, Althea came to his cabin during his off-time and found him half-slumped on his bed, staring at nothing.
     He looked up as she entered, smiled weakly, and tried to straighten up. It was too difficult. He should have been on the mend, but he could feel himself slipping backward instead. Althea had to know.
     She sat next to him on his bed, hands folded in her lap.
     “Should I make small talk?”
     He looked away. “No, it’s not necessary.” His gaze stopped at the corset Victoria had worn for him, their last off-watch before the descent to Earth. He looked away before he could yield to tears again.
     “She was right. She had to be. Only States ever did things like that. Maybe we’ll never know exactly how or why, but it had to be the States.” He shuddered. “For certain it was a State that built that artificial volcano.”
     “But why, Richard?”
     “As a weapon. What does it matter?”
     She turned to face him more directly. “For the same reason we made this trip in the first place. To know whether it’s something that could happen on Hope.”
     He clenched his jaw.
     “People build weapons for a reason, Richard. A static weapon, that can’t possibly be moved, is always to defend something nearby. What possible mission could there have been for that hellish thing? What could it have defended?”
     “Their pride.”
     Her eyes widened, commanding him to continue.
     “They never recovered from the Hegira. They never got over the blow to their pride when our ancestors got away from them. If the radio logs are significant, it wasn’t long after the Hegira that whatever killed them got loose. Probably a war virus, something that attacked the membranes of animal cells. They must have known they were doomed, that the future of mankind would belong to the dirty anarchists who’d eluded their clutches. So they made sure that if any of us ever came back to the neighborhood, we’d get a last taste of their whip.”
     Althea’s mouth dropped open.
     “It had to be built to last, simple and strong. They had to make sure the house would be ready whenever we decided to drop by. So they made themselves a sturdy little cauldron of fuel and accelerant, and they arranged a simple electrolytic process that would put the casserole in the oven and ring the dinner bell just as we came to the front fence — when the lander broke through the upper atmosphere. There had to be a pressure plate right in front of the tower that sensed our arrival and triggered the release, and walls to channel the flow, so it would definitely get whoever came to their door.
     “And it worked.” A red haze of hatred churned in his brain, interrupting his exposition. “We sent the finest, most special creature in all of Hope to be an ambassador to the dead, and the dead killed her for it. Al, I want to kill them all. I want to plaster that planet with hydrogen bombs until all the forests are cinders and all the oceans have boiled away. I want to sit in orbit and watch it burn and smolder until there’s nothing left but radioactive slag. I want it so horribly much that I can’t even think it, my mind fills up with smoke and flames, but they’re all dead already. They took their revenge on us, but how do we take our revenge on them?”
     She took his hand and squeezed. Except for the distant whine of the drive, Liberty’s Torch was silent around them.
     “Make love with me, Richard.”
     “Huh? But –”
     “Please.” She rose and stood over him. For a flickering instant her veneer of control slid aside and her own agony stood revealed: the special suffering of the leader who’d sent a subordinate to her death. “I need to mourn her too, and this is the best way. Trust me.”
     He bowed his head, considered, and slid aside to make room for her. She stretched out next to him and took him in her arms, and they began the ancient rite of cherishing and renewal that had passed unchanged down all the eons of Man.
     Poised over him and moving slowly against him, Althea took his face between her hands, brushed her lips over his and murmured, “I know how to take revenge on the dead.”
     “How?” he breathed.
     Her answer was a zephyr of hope that defied all pain.
     “Live.”

==<O>==

     Copyright © 2010 Francis W. Porretto. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.