The Queen raised the knife in her hand, holding it lightly and watching the child intently. It was at that moment that Orem glanced in his agony at Urubugala, and saw that the fool had raised his hands in supplication to him. The fool wanted him to act. Wanted him to do—what? What could he do? The ritual was meaningless, because his son had never swallowed the fluid of his body—

  Orem remembered the day he wept for the loss of Weasel’s love. The day Youth reached up and took a tear from his cheek and tasted it.

  What were the final words of the ritual? Orem’s eyes went blank; he did not see as the Queen smoothly drew the knife through Youth’s throat, and blood spurted from the baby atop the altar; he did not notice that the child’s terrible shouts had ended in a gurgle of bloody foam. His mind raced, and he tried to find in his memory what words the Queen had said.

  “Come water, come water,” he said as the words formed in his mind. “Come mother, come daughter. Come father, come son. Come blood and be done. The hart—the hart—”

  The Queen lifted Youth’s body by the feet, and the blood spouted from his throat into the silver bowl she held under him. It filled enough to satisfy her; she laid down the child, who still lived, whose hands still struggled, whose eyes still started out of his small head in agony; she picked up the bowl to drink.

  And the last words came into Orem’s mind. “The hart makes us one, the hind makes us water.”

  And he felt a terrible pain as if his bones were being ripped from his skin all at once. He cried out in the agony of it; and then it passed.

  The Queen held the bowl to her lips, but Orem’s scream stopped her. She knew what had happened, knew it instantly. Knew that the child had just become Orem, as surely as it held all the Queen’s power. But Orem’s gift was the negation of all magic, and suddenly there was a Sink within the Queen’s walls, and the Sink contained everything that she was, and that suddenly it was gone. All was gone, and in the moment of hesitation the boy died, and it was no longer the blood of her living child that she held in the bowl.

  Too much. She had given the child too much, believing that it would come back to her a hundred times more. With the child’s swallowing of it all, it came to an end. All her magics. All her bindings. All her spells. Including, of course, the thin thread of magic she had retained to keep herself alive despite the age of her body. She did not have even the strength to speak again. She simply stopped living and slid down the altar into the pool of her baby’s blood on the floor.

  In the same instant, Urubugala was no longer, and the aged black wizard Sleeve was in his place. Around him there was suddenly a cloud of light that dazzled all vision in the room, for the mirrors caught it and reflected it a hundred thousand times. There was nowhere to look to be free of it. In that light Sleeve cried out to the hart and the Sweet Sisters and the Seven Broken Circles of the god of the great hare. There were some works of Queen Beauty that he could not allow to fail—it was, after all, her magic that had kept Palicrovol and Zymas and Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin alive for these centuries. He also used the blood of the child, but in a different way, for great magic, but not for the same magic; enough of the virtue in the dead child’s blood to hold them all as they had been when Queen Beauty first conquered three centuries before.

  Outside the city walls, King Palicrovol suddenly stopped, held his chest, and cried out in the agony of death. And as suddenly there was a great light from the palace, and he came suddenly alive again, and his soldiers looked at him and saw that he was not old now; he was young again. None of them could remember him as he looked when he first conquered Hart’s Hope and won his throne, but they imagined that this is the man who did those deeds, and they were right.

  “The Queen is dead!” cried Palicrovol. “Open the gate!” And such was the authority in his voice that the soldiers opened the gate. Palicrovol entered the city in peace, after all; he left his great army outside, and with him came only a hundred soldiers. His brave ones, who had come to face the worst thing in the world for the second time. Instead of the worst thing, they found the best thing. The people of the farms outside the walls named their town Kings Victory, and Harts Hope gratefully welcomed home their King.

  The Little King was gone from the palace before King Palicrovol got there, and it was a measure of Palicrovol that he never asked where the boy had gone. He was not vindictive; and when he learned that the Queen’s defeat would have been impossible without the Little King, he was content to let the man who had lain with the Queen go unpunished for that. “He’s paid his price,” Sleeve told him, “and it’s better if you never know who he was.”

  Palicrovol paid off his army from the Taxhouse; he purged the kingdom in a few days of those who had most eagerly followed the Queen and fought against him. But he pardoned most, and even the punished were only exiled. The people of Burland remembered the few years of his reign before as a brief golden age, between Queen Beauty and her old, cruel father.

  And the body of Asineth, once called Queen Beauty, was buried in the palace park, not far from the pool.

  And when things were settled and the Kings position secure, he finished the business interrupted so long ago. He married Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin and made her his Queen. Zymas was his viceroy, and Sleeve his closest friend, and Palicrovol’s people were more or less happy through his long reign.

  It was many years later when Palicrovol died, and one of the mourners at his funeral was Orem Banningside, a merchant whose fortune had been made suddenly but was well kept throughout the peaceful, prosperous years of King Palicrovol’s reign. The merchant was also an old man now, though not as old as the King had been; some took note of the fact that he cried real tears, more profusely than most, and that the aged Widow Queen held his hand and kissed him as he paid his respects. No one had known that he had even visited the palace; it was a small marvel, and cause for some little gossip in the city.

  But it was cause for more gossip that every year Orem Banningside went to a comer of the Cemetery in the High Town just under the castle walls and knelt at the statue of an infant. Few knew anything about the statue, only that it was somehow very sad. The infant was in someone’s arms, but the arms came out of uncut marble, and it was assumed that it was God who held the child. On the pedestal was the single word youth. And as he knelt before the statue, the old man wept.

  His friends misunderstood when they saw him there. They thought he was weeping because of his own great age and the fact that his childhood, his young manhood had been misspent somehow, lost somehow, and could never be recovered now.

  They misunderstood, but perhaps were not altogether wrong.

  Orem had his name and his place. As for his poem, he had that, too, though only an aging Queen, an old soldier, and a lonely black wizard knew it. “Sweet Sisters,” he said at his shrine to lost Youth, “I forgive you for my emptiness; forgive me that I am also full.”

  St Amy’s Tale

  Mission completed, the Wreckers were poised to land and rebuild on the ruins of their old world

  Mother could kill with her hands. Father could fly. These are miracles But they were not miracles then. Mother Elouise taught me that there were no miracles then.

  I am the child of Wreckers, born while the angel was in them. This is why I am called Saint Amy. though I perceive nothing in me that should make me holier than any other old woman. Yet Mother Elouise denied the angel in her, too, and it was no less there.

  Silt your fingers through the soil, all you who read my words. Take your spades of iron and your picks of stone Dig deep You will find no ancient works of man hidden there. For the Wreckers passed through the world, and all the vanity was consumed in fire: all the pride broke in pieces when it was smitten by God’s shining hand.

  Elouise leaned on the rim of the computer keyboard All around her the machinery was alive, the screens displaying information rapidly, as if they knew they were the last of the machines and this the last of the information. Elouise fell nothing but weariness. She was leaning because, for a moment, she had felt a frightening vertigo. As if the world underneath the airplane had dissolved and slipped away into a rapidly receding star and she would never be able to land.

  True enough, she thought. I’ll never be able to land, not in the world I knew.

  “Getting sentimental about the old computers?”

  Elouise, startled, turned in her chair and faced her husband. Charlie. At that moment the airplane lurched, but. like sailors accustomed to the shifting of the sea. they adjusted unconsciously and did not notice the imbalance. “Is it noon already?” she asked.

  “It’s the moral equivalent of noon. I’m too tired to fly this thing anymore, and it’s a good thing Bill’s at the controls.”

  “Hungry?”

  Charlie shook his head. “But Amy probably is,” he said.

  “Voyeur,” said Elouise.

  Charlie liked to watch Elouise nurse their daughter. But despite her accusation, Elouise knew there was nothing sexual in it. Charlie liked the idea of Elouise being Amy’s mother. He liked the way Amy’s sucking resembled the sucking of a calf or a lamb or a puppy. He had said, “It’s the best thing we kept from the animals. The best thing we didn’t throw away.”

  “Better than sex?” Elouise had asked. And Charlie had only smiled.

  Amy was playing with a rag doll in the only large clear space in the airplane, near the exit door. “Mommy Mommy Mamommy Mommy-o,” Amy said. The child stood and reached to be picked up. Then she saw Charlie. “Daddy Addy Addy.”

  “Hi,” Charlie said.

  “Hi,” Amy answered. “Ha-ee.” She had only just learned to close the diphthong, and she exaggerated it. Amy played with the buttons on Elouise’s shirt, trying to undo them.

  “Greedy,” Elouise said, laughing.

  Charlie unbuttoned the shirt for her. and Amy seized on the nipple after only one false grab. She sucked noisily, tapping her hand gently against Elouise’s breast as she ate.

  “I’m glad we’re so near finished.” Elouise said. “She’s too old to be nursing now.”

  “That’s right. Throw the little bird out of the nest.”

  “Go to bed,” Elouise said.

  Amy recognized the phrase. She pulled away. “La-lo,” she said.

  “That’s right. Daddy’s going to sleep,” Elouise said.

  Elouise watched as Charlie stripped off most of his clothing and lay down on the pad. He smiled once, then turned over, and was immediately asleep. He was in tune with his body. Elouise knew that he would awaken in exactly six hours, when it was time for him to take the controls again.

  Amy’s sucking was a subtle pleasure now, though it had been agonizing the first few months, and painful again when Amy’s first teeth had come in and she had learned to her delight that by nipping she could make her mother scream. But better to nurse her than ever have her eat the predigested pap that was served as food on the airplane. Elouise thought wryly that it was even worse than the microwaved veal cordon bleu that they used to inflict on commercial passengers. Only eight years ago. And they had calibrated their fuel so exactly that when they took the last draft of fuel from the last of their storage tanks, the tank registered empty; they would burn the last of the processed petroleum, instead of putting it back into the earth. All their caches were gone now, and they would be at the tender mercies of the world that they themselves had created.

  Still, there was work to do: the final work, the final checks. Elouise held Amy with one arm while she used her free hand slowly to key in the last program that her role as commander required her to use. Elouise Private, she typed. Teacher teacher I declare I see someone’s underwear, she typed. On the screen appeared the warning she had put there: “You may think you’re lucky finding this program, but unless you know the magic words, an alarm is going to go off all over this airplane and you’ll be had. No way out of it, sucker. Love, Elouise.”

  Elouise, of course, knew the magic words. Einstein sucks, she typed. The screen went blank, and the alarm did not go off.

  Malfunction? she queried. “None.” answered the computer.

  Tamper? she queried, and the computer answered, “None.”

  Nonreport? she queried, and the computer flashed. “AFscanP7bb55.”

  Elouise had not really been dozing. But still she was startled, and she lurched forward, disturbing Amy, who really had fallen asleep. “No no no,” said Amy. and Elouise forced herself to be patient; she soothed her daughter back to sleep before pursuing whatever it was that her guardian program had caught. Whatever it was. Oh, she knew what it was. It was treachery. The one thing she had been sureher group, her airplane would never have. Other groups of Rectifiers Wreckers, they called themselves, having adopted their enemies’ name for them—other groups had had their spies or their fainthearts, but not Bill or Heather or Ugly-Bugly.

  Specify, she typed.

  The computer was specific.

  Over northern Virginia, as the airplane followed its careful route to find and destroy everything made of metal, glass, and plastic: somewhere over northern Virginia, the airplane’s path bent slightly to the south, and on the return, at the same place, the airplane’s path bent slightly lo the north, so that a strip of northern Virginia two kilometers long and a few dozen meters wide could contain some nonbiodegradable artifact, hidden from the airplane, and if Elouise had not queried this program.

  she would never have known it.

  But she should have known it. When the plane’s course bent, alarms should have sounded. Someone had penetrated the first line of defense. But Bill could not have done that, nor could Heather, really—they didn’t have the sophistication to break up a bubble program. Ugly-Bugly?

  She knew it wasn’t faithful old Ugly-Bugly. No, not her.

  The computer voluntarily flashed, “Override M577b, commandmo4. intwis CtTttT.” It was an apology. Someone aboard ship had found the alarm override program and the overrides for the alarm for improper use of the alarm overrides. Not my fault, the computer was saying.

  Elouise hesitated for a moment She looked down at her daughter and moved a curl of red hair away from Amy’s eye. Elouise’s hand trembled. But she was a woman of ice. yes, all frozen where compassion made other women warm. She prided herself on that, on having frozen the last warm places in her frozen so goddamn rigid that it was only a moment’s hesitation. And then she reached out and asked for the access code used to perform the treachery, asked for the name of the traitor.

  The computer was even less compassionate than Elouise It hesitated not at all.

  The computer did not underline; the letters on the screen were no larger than normal. Yet Elouise felt the words as a shout, and she answered them silently with a scream.

  Charles Evan Hardy, b24ag61-richlandWA.

  It was Charlie who was the traitor—Charlie, her sweet, soft, hard-bodied husband, Charlie who secretly was trying to undo the end of the world.

  God has destroyed the world before Once in a flood, when Noah rode it out in the Ark. And once the tower of the world’s pride was destroyed in the confusion of tongues. The other times, if there were any other times, those times are all forgotten.

  The world will probably be destroyed again, unless we repent. And don’t think you can hide from the angels. They start out as ordinary people, and you never know which ones. Suddenly God puts the power of destruction in their hands, and they destroy. And just as suddenly, when ail the destruction is done, the angel leaves them, and they’re ordinary people. Just my mother and my father.

  I can’t remember Father Charlie’s face. I was too young.

  Mother Elouise told me often about Father Charlie. He was born far to the west in a land where water only comes to the crops in ditches, almost never from the sky. It was a land unblessed by God. Men lived there, they believed, only by the strength of their own hands. Men made their ditches and forgot about God and became scientists. Father Charlie became a scientist. He worked on tiny animals, breaking their heart of hearts and recombining it in new ways. Hearts were broken too often where he worked, and one of the little animals escaped and killed people until they lay in great heaps like fish in the ship’s hold.

  But this was not the destruction of the world.

  Oh, they were giants in those days, and they forgot the Lord, but when their people lay in piles of moldering flesh and brittling bone, they remembered they were weak.

  Mother Elouise said. “Charlie came weeping.” This is how Father Charlie became an angel. He saw what the giants had done, by thinking they were greater than God. At first he sinned in his grief. Once he cut his own throat. They put Mother Elouise’s blood in him to save his life. This is how they met: In the forest where he had gone to die privately, Father Charlie woke up from a sleep he thought would be forever to see a woman lying next to him in the tent and a doctor bending over them both. When he saw that this woman gave her blood to him whole and unstintingly, he forgot his wish to die. He loved her forever. Mother Elouise said he loved her right up to the day she killed him.

  When they were finished, they had a sort of ceremony, a sort of party. “A benediction,” said Bill, solemnly sipping at the gin. “Amen and amen.”

  “My shift,” Charlie said, stepping into the cockpit. Then he noticed that everyone was there and that they were drinking the last of the gin, the bottle that had been saved for the end. “Well, happy us,” Charlie said, smiling.

  Bill got up from the controls of the 787. “Any preferences on where we set down?” he asked. Charlie took his place.

  The others looked at one another. Ugly-Bugly shrugged. “God, who ever thought about it?”