It was a circle. No way out. He looked at the drab walls and his mind wandered.

  What did the enemy look like, anyway? Nobody could say. On the few planets they had come to and had not yet conquered no one had ever seen them. On the planets they had conquered, no one would say. All that anyone knew—or at least all the government would let on—was that without active help from the people on the planet they were attacking, the enemy couldn’t do a thing. But with such help, they were irresistible.

  What if they were already on the Earth? Reuben looked at his hands, how the fingers were all the same and yet different. What if they could look just like us, and they were already going to the store, and holding down influential jobs, and—why not?—walking dogs in the park and picking up Auerbach’s packages without going near them? Possible, Reuben thought.

  Maybe I do hallucinate, he thought. The idea frightened him.

  The FBI man came back after about an hour.

  “What did Maynard die of?” Reuben asked, jumping to his feet.

  “Nothing,” said the man. “He’s not dead. I mean, he is, of course,” he caught himself, seeing the look of hope that Reuben couldn’t hide. “But there’s no reason in the world that the dog should be dead. Perfect shape. Good for years. Not an injury.”

  “But dead anyway,” said another man who came through the door. Reuben hadn’t met him before.

  “He’s The Boss,” the FBI man said, “and he wants to have a talk.” The Boss smiled. Reuben did not smile. The FBI man left the room.

  Reuben and The Boss had a talk. During the talk Reuben figured out that nothing had happened down in southern Utah, that the whole thing was either called off or was so subtle that nobody saw it. The FBI was hunting for straws, because they did have the microfilm, and it had to mean something.

  “Ideas?” The Boss asked.

  “You’re asking me for ideas?” Reuben asked.

  “Is there anyone else in the room?” The Boss asked.

  “What kind of great ideas do you think I can give you when you’ve been trying so hard not to tell me that nothing happened down in Enterprise and that you don’t know what’s going on?” Reuben said with a look that made The Boss feel a little weak.

  “So you can read between the lines,” The Boss whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?” Reuben asked.

  “Get off my back for a minute,” The Boss said. “In my line of work we meet guys with brains about once every twenty years. Everybody else is a cop, a crook, or a congressman.”

  “So let’s trade some secrets,” Reuben said, feeling, for some reason, a little less contempt for The Boss than he felt toward everyone else.

  “All right,” The Boss agreed.

  “You first,” Reuben said.

  “Okay,” The Boss said, sighing. “So much for Top Secret. Right, nothing happened in Enterprise, even though everything pointed to it, and so we figure that either they were on to you, in which case why the hell did they have another rendezvous in the park today, or else the whole thing was a sham and they wanted someone to find out about Enterprise so we’d all go there while the real thing happened someplace else. In which case we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “And you want ideas,” Reuben said.

  “You said we’d trade secrets,” The Boss said.

  “All right,” Reuben said. “How’s this? Maybe it was a sham, like you said, only not to keep you from noticing something happening at the same time someplace else, but to keep you from noticing that it already happened awhile ago.”

  The Boss looked at him. “Like?”

  “Like you’re running around this time and maybe next time and maybe the time after, trying to find where the enemy is going to land—all the time not noticing that they’re already here and working right where you won’t notice them—under your noses.”

  The Boss looked interested. “So if they can do that, what’ve they been waiting for?”

  “I don’t know,” Reuben said, “unless maybe there aren’t very many of them, and they need to get up an organization, or else maybe they’re weak, and they have to divide us in order to take over. I don’t know. But I think they’re here.”

  And then Reuben told The Boss about the way the woman in the park never seemed to touch the Auerbach’s package. “And the way Maynard died. My dog. Just bit her and then dropped dead.”

  “Interesting theory,” The Boss said. “In fact it holds up pretty well, just the sort of devious thing we might expect. Except for one thing.”

  “Yeah?” asked Reuben.

  “We know who the lady is. Birth certificate, lots of relatives, no way she could be a plant, already thirty years old when the enemy ships came. Sorry. Just an ordinary Earth-type traitor.”

  “Was she ever bit by a dog before?” Reuben asked.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” The Boss asked.

  “Because unless it’s ordinary for certain people to cause dogs to drop dead without an injury, then she isn’t ordinary. She’s changed, right?”

  The Boss smiled. “Very good, Reuben,” he said. “We’ll check it out.”

  Reuben shook his head. “Promise me something.”

  The Boss said, “What in particular? Some promises I can’t make.”

  “Promise me you’ll tell me what happens.”

  On the way out Reuben stopped by Maynard’s corpse in the autopsy rooms. The body was kind of a mess, and Reuben did not touch Maynard’s fur.

  “Want, us to take care of this for you?” The Boss asked.

  “Yeah,” Reuben said.

  Three months later they told him what happened, and as Reuben had announced on his birthday, it was his lucky year. He got to meet the president of the United States and shake his hand and wear a medal, none of which impressed him much. He got to have his picture in every newspaper in the country, along with pictures of the people he had followed who turned out to be the enemy, which didn’t thrill him either.

  However, he also got to go home.

  His father wasn’t happy about it and Reuben noticed that there were new locks on all the bedroom doors, but Reuben just thought Suck Rocks and talked to his mother for an hour or two alone just to bug his father. They quarreled a lot, Reuben and his father. And his mother really didn’t understand him any better than she ever had. But all in all it beat hell out of the government-owned apartment and there were other compensations.

  It turned out that the enemy was a very intelligent but not-too-tough marsh gas sort of thing, only about six of them, and they had to take over human bodies—curious people, who came too close—in order to do anything at all. And once they were in a human body, when the body died so did they. So—firing squads (Utah law) and the problem was over. The ships continued to circle around the Earth, but after a few months some air force shuttleships with heavy rockets shot them down. All the ships’ defenses, impregnable a few months before, were gone, and the ships fell into the Sargasso Sea.

  It was on Reuben’s thirteenth birthday that he realized his lucky year was over. That was the day they took away his purple card and he had to start carrying money and asking permission. But he didn’t mind all that much. It was kind of fun.

  The day after his thirteenth birthday his mother and father took him to the park. Out at the car, Reuben’s father remembered the camera.

  “It’s upstairs in my closet,” his father said, and Reuben ran back up the asphalt path. He stopped just inside the front door. He bowed his head a moment, reached out his hand, and waited.

  The camera materialized in his palm.

  He opened his eyes, looked at the camera, smiled, and ran back outside, being careful to lock the door behind him as his father always asked. Then he skipped down the sidewalk, conversing with the stranger in his mind, who followed him far more closely than he would have thought possible back in the old days when he was a child, and still human.

  Kingsmeat

  The gatekeeper recognized him and the gate fell away. The Shepherd put his ax and his crook into the bag at his belt and stepped out onto the bridge. As always he felt a rush of vertigo as he walked the narrow arch over the foaming acid of the moat. Then he was across and striding down the road to the village.

  A child was playing with a dog on a grassy hillside. The Shepherd looked up at him, his fine dark face made bright by his eyes. The boy shrank back, and the Shepherd heard a woman’s voice cry out, “Back here, Derry, you fool!” The Shepherd walked on down the road as the boy retreated among the hayricks on the far slope. The Shepherd could hear the scolding: “Play near the castle again, and he’ll make kingsmeat of you.”

  Kingsmeat, thought the Shepherd. How the king does get hungry. The word had come down through the quick grapevine—steward to cook to captain to guard to shepherd and then he was dressed and out the door only minutes after the king had muttered, “For supper, what is your taste?” and the queen had fluttered all her arms and said, “Not stew again, I hope,” and the king had murmured as he picked up the computer printouts of the day, “Breast in butter,” and so now the Shepherd was out to harvest from the flock.

  The village was still in the distance when the Shepherd began to pass the people. He remembered the time, back when the king had first made his tastes known, when there had been many attempts to evade the villagers’ duties to the king. Now they only watched, perhaps hiding the unblemished members of the flock, sometimes thrusting them forward to end the suspense; but mostly the Shepherd saw the old legless, eyeless, or armless men and women who hobbled about their duties with those limbs that were still intact.

  Those with fingers thatched or wove; those with eyes led those whose hands were their only contact with the world; those with arms rode the backs of those with legs; and all of them took their only solace in sad and sagging beds, producing, after a suitable interval, children whose miraculous wholeness made them gods to a surprised and wondering mother, made them hated reminders to a father whose tongue had fallen from his mouth, or whose toes had somehow been mislaid, or whose buttocks were a scar, his legs a useless reminder of hams long since dropped off.

  “Ah, such beauty,” a woman murmured, pumping the bellows at the bread-oven fire. There was a sour grunt from the legless hag who shoveled in the loaves and turned them with a wooden shovel. It was true, of course, for the Shepherd was never touched, no indeed. (No indeed, came the echo from the midnight fires of Unholy Night, when dark tales frightened children half out of their wits, dark tales that the shrunken grownups knew were true, were inevitable, were tomorrow.) The Shepherd had long dark hair, and his mouth was firm but kind, and his eyes flashed sunlight even in the dark, it seemed, while his hands were soft from bathing, large and strong and dark and smooth and fearful.

  And the Shepherd walked into the village to a house he had noted the last time he came. He went to the door and immediately heard a sigh from every other house, and silence from the one that he had picked.

  He raised his hand before the door and it opened, as it had been built to do: for all things that opened served the Shepherd’s will, or at least served the bright metal ball the king had implanted in his hand. Inside the house it was dark, but not too dark to see the white eyes of an old man who lay in a hammock, legs dangling bonelessly. The man could see his future in the Shepherd’s eyes—or so he thought, at least, until the Shepherd walked past him into the kitchen.

  There a young woman, no older than fifteen, stood in front of a cupboard, her hands clenched to do violence. But the Shepherd only shook his head and raised his hand, and the cupboard answered him and opened however much she pushed against it, revealing a murmuring baby wrapped in sound-smothering blankets. The Shepherd only smiled and shook his head. His smile was kind and beautiful, and the woman wanted to die.

  He stroked her cheek and she sighed softly, moaned softly, and then he reached into his bag and pulled out his shepherd’s crook and leaned the little disc against her temple and she smiled. Her eyes were dead but her lips were alive and her teeth showed. He laid her on the floor, carefully opened her blouse, and then took his ax from his bag.

  He ran his finger around the long, narrow cylinder and a tiny light shone at one end. Then he touched the ax’s glowing tip to the underside of her breast and drew a wide circle. Behind the ax a tiny red line followed, and the Shepherd took hold of the breast and it came away in his hand. Laying it aside, he stroked the ax lengthwise and the light changed to a dull blue. He passed the ax over the red wound, and the blood gelled and dried and the wound began to heal.

  He placed the breast into his bag and repeated the process on the other side. Through it the woman watched in disinterested amusement, the smile still playing at her lips. She would smile like that for days before the peace wore off.

  When the second breast was in his bag, the Shepherd put away the ax and the crook and carefully buttoned the woman’s blouse. He helped her to her feet, and again passed his deft and gentle hand across her cheek. Like a baby rooting she turned her lips toward his fingers, but he withdrew his hand.

  As he left, the woman took the baby from the cupboard and embraced it, cooing softly. The baby nuzzled against the strangely harsh bosom and the woman smiled and sang a lullaby.

  The Shepherd walked through the streets, the bag at his belt jostling with his steps. The people watched the bag, wondering what it held. But before the Shepherd was out of the village the word had spread, and the looks were no longer at the bag but rather at the Shepherd’s face. He looked neither to the left nor to the right, but he felt their gazes and his eyes grew soft and sad.

  And then he was back at the moat, across the narrow bridge, through the gate, and into the high dark corridors of the castle.

  He took the bag to the cook, who looked at him sourly. The Shepherd only smiled at him and took his crook from the bag. In a moment the cook was docile, and calmly he began to cut the red flesh into thin slices, which he lightly floured and then placed in a pan of simmering butter. The smell was strong and sweet, and the flecks of milk sizzled in the pan.

  The Shepherd stayed in the kitchen, watching, as the cook prepared the king’s meal. Then he followed to the door of the dining hall as the steward entered the king’s presence with the steaming slices on a tray. The king and queen ate silently, with severe but gracious rituals of shared servings and gifts of finest morsels.

  And at the end of the meal the king murmured a word to the steward, who beckoned both the cook and the Shepherd into the hall.

  The cook, the steward, and the Shepherd knelt before the king, who reached out three arms to touch their heads. Through long practice they accepted his touch without recoiling, without even blinking, for they knew such things displeased him. After all, it was a great gift that they could serve the king: their services kept them from giving kingsmeat from their own flesh, or from decorating with their skin the tapestried walls of the castle or the long train of a hunting-cape.

  The king’s armpits still touched the heads of the three servants when a shudder ran through the castle and a low warning tone began to drone.

  The king and queen left the table and with deliberate dignity moved to the consoles and sat. There they pressed buttons, setting in motion all the unseeable defenses of the castle.

  After an hour of exhausting concentration they recognized defeat and pulled their arms back from the now-useless tasks they had been doing. The fields of force that had long held the thin walls of the castle to their delicate height now lapsed, the walls fell, and a shining metal ship settled silently in the middle of the ruins.

  The side of the skyship opened and out of it came four men, weapons in their hands and anger in their eyes. Seeing them, the king and queen looked sadly at each other and then pulled the ritual knives from their resting place behind their heads and simultaneously plunged them between one another’s eyes. They died instantly, and the twenty-two-year conquest of Abbey Colony was at an end.

  Dead, the king and queen looked like sad squids lying flat and empty on a fisherman’s deck, not at all like conquerors of planets and eaters of men. The men from the skyship walked to the corpses and made certain they were dead. Then they looked around and realized for the first time that they were not alone.

  For the Shepherd, the steward, and the cook stood in the ruins of the palace, their eyes wide with unbelief.

  One of the men from the ship reached out a hand.

  “How can you be alive?” he asked.

  They did not answer, not knowing really what the question meant.

  “How have you survived here, when—”

  And then there were no words, for they looked beyond the palace, across the moat to the crowd of colonists and sons of colonists who stood watching them. And seeing them there without arms and legs and eyes and breasts and lips, the men from the ship emptied their hands of weapons and filled their palms with tears and then crossed the bridge to grieve among the delivered ones’ rejoicing.

  There was no time for explanations, nor was there a need. The colonists crept and hobbled and, occasionally, walked across the bridge to the ruined palace and formed a circle around the bodies of the king and queen. Then they set to work, and within an hour the corpses were lying in the pit that had been the foundation of the castle, covered with urine and feces and stinking already of decay.

  Then the colonists turned to the servants of the king and queen.

  The men from the ship had been chosen on a distant world for their judgment, speed, and skill, and before the mob had found its common mind, before they had begun to move, there was a forcefence around the steward, the cook, and the gatekeeper, and the guards. Even around the Shepherd, and though the crowd mumbled its resentment, one of the men from the ship patiently explained in soothing tones that whatever crimes were done would be punished in due time, according to Imperial justice.

  The fence stayed up for a week as the men from the ship worked to put the colony in order, struggling to interest the people in the fields that once again belonged completely to them. At last they gave up, realizing that justice could not wait. They took the machinery of the court out of the ship, gathered the people together, and began the trial.