“I don’t know what day it is.”

  “October twelfth,” she said.

  “It’s August.”

  “Write October twelfth,” she said. “I’m in the legend business now.”

  “August twenty-fourth,” he murmured, but he wrote the date she asked for.

  “The helicopter comes this morning,” she said.

  “Good-bye,” he said. He started for the door.

  Her hands caught at him, held his arm, pulled him back. She embraced him, this time not in a dream, cool bodies together in the doorway of the house. The geis was off him now, or else he was worn out; her body had no power over his anymore.

  “I did love you,” she murmured. “It was not just the god that brought you.”

  Suddenly he felt very young, even younger than fifteen, and he broke away from her and walked quickly away through the sleeping village. He did not try to retrace his wandering route through the jungle; he stayed on the moonlit path and soon was at his father’s hut. The old bastard woke up as Sam came in.

  “I knew it’d happen,” Father said.

  Sam rummaged for underwear and pulled it on.

  “There’s no man born who can keep his zipper up when a woman wants it.” Father laughed. A laugh of malice and triumph. “You’re no better than I am, boy.”

  Sam walked to where his father sat on the bed and imagined hitting him across the face. Once, twice, three times.

  “Go ahead, boy, hit me. It won’t make you a virgin again.”

  “I’m not like you,” Sam whispered.

  “No?” asked Father. “For you it’s a sacrament or something? As my daddy used to say, it don’t matter who squeezes the toothpaste, boy, it all squirts out the same.”

  “Then your daddy must have been as dumb a jackass as mine.”

  Sam went back to the chest they shared, began packing his clothes and books into one big suitcase. “I’m going out with the chopper today. Mom will wire me the money to come home from Manaus.”

  “She doesn’t have to. I’ll give you a check.”

  “I don’t want your money. I just want my passport.”

  “It’s in the top drawer.” Father laughed again. “At least I always wore my clothes home.”

  In a few minutes Sam had finished packing. He picked up the bag, started for the door.

  “Son,” said Father, and because his voice was quiet, not derisive, Sam stopped and listened. “Son,” he said, “once is once. It doesn’t mean you’re evil, it doesn’t even mean you’re weak. It just means you’re human.” He was breathing deeply. Sam hadn’t heard him so emotional in a long time. “You aren’t a thing like me, son,” he said. “That should make you glad.”

  Years later Sam would think of all kinds of things he should have said. Forgiveness. Apology. Affection. Something. But he said nothing, just left and went out to the clearing and waited for the helicopter. Father didn’t come to try to say good-bye. The chopper pilot came, unloaded, left the chopper to talk to some people. He must have talked to Father because when he came back he handed Sam a check. Plenty to fly home, and stay in good places during the layovers, and buy some new clothes that didn’t have jungle stains on them. The check was the last thing Sam had from his father. Before he came home from that rig, the Venezuelans bought a hardy and virulent strain of syphilis on the black market, one that could be passed by casual contact, and released it on Guyana. Sam’s father was one of the first million to die, so fast that he didn’t even write.

  PAGE, ARIZONA

  The State of Deseret had only sixteen helicopters, all desperately needed for surveying, spraying, and medical emergencies. So Governor Sam Monson rarely risked them on government business. This time, though, he had no choice. He was only fifty-five, and in good shape, so maybe he could have made the climb down into Glen Canyon and back up the other side. But Carpenter wouldn’t have made it, not in a wheelchair, and Carpenter had a right to be here. He had a right to see what the red-rock Navaho desert had become.

  Deciduous forest, as far as the eye could see.

  They stood on the bluff where the old town of Page had once been, before the dam was blown up. The Navahos hadn’t tried to reforest here. It was their standard practice. They left all the old European towns unplanted, like pink scars in the green of the forest. Still, the Navahos weren’t stupid. They had come to the last stronghold of European science, the University of Deseret at Zarahemla, to find out how to use the heavy rainfalls to give them something better than perpetual floods and erosion. It was Carpenter who gave them the plan for these forests, just as it was Carpenter whose program had turned the old Utah deserts into the richest farmland in America. The Navahos filled their forests with bison, deer, and bears. The Mormons raised crops enough to feed five times their population. That was the European mind-set, still in place, enough is never enough. Plant more, grow more, you’ll need it tomorrow.

  “They say he has two hundred thousand soldiers,” said Carpenter’s computer voice. Carpenter could speak, Sam had heard, but he never did. Preferred the synthesized voice. “They could all be right down there, and we’d never see them.”

  “They’re much farther south and east. Strung out from Phoenix to Santa Fe, so they aren’t too much of a burden on the Navahos.”

  “Do you think they’ll buy supplies from us? Or send an army in to take them?”

  “Neither,” said Sam. “We’ll give our surplus grain as a gift.”

  “He rules all of Latin America, and he needs gifts from a little remnant of the U.S. in the Rockies?”

  “We’ll give it as a gift, and be grateful if he takes it that way.”

  “How else might he take it?”

  “As tribute. As taxes. As ransom. The land is his now, not ours.”

  “We made the desert live, Sam. That makes it ours.”

  “There they are.”

  They watched in silence as four horses walked slowly from the edge of the woods, out onto the open ground of an ancient gas station. They bore a litter between them, and were led by two—not Indians—Americans. Sam had schooled himself long ago to use the word American to refer only to what had once been known as Indians, and to call himself and his own people Europeans. But in his heart he had never forgiven them for stealing his identity, even though he remembered very clearly where and when that change began.

  It took fifteen minutes for the horses to bring the litter to him, but Sam made no move to meet them, no sign that he was in a hurry. That was also the American way now, to take time, never to hurry, never to rush. Let the Europeans wear their watches. Americans told time by the sun and stars.

  Finally the litter stopped, and the men opened the litter door and helped her out. She was smaller than before, and her face was tightly wrinkled, her hair steel-white.

  She gave no sign that she knew him, though he said his name. The Americans introduced her as Nuestra Senora. Our Lady. Never speaking her most sacred name: Virgem America.

  The negotiations were delicate but simple. Sam had authority to speak for Deseret, and she obviously had authority to speak for her son. The grain was refused as a gift, but accepted as taxes from a federated state. Deseret would be allowed to keep its own government, and the borders negotiated between the Navahos and the Mormons eleven years before were allowed to stand.

  Sam went further. He praised Quetzalcoatl for coming to pacify the chaotic lands that had been ruined by the Europeans. He gave her maps that his scouts had prepared, showing strongholds of the prairie raiders, decommissioned nuclear missiles, and the few places where stable governments had been formed. He offered, and she accepted, a hundred experienced scouts to travel with Quetzalcoatl at Deseret’s expense, and promised that when he chose the site of his North American capital, Deseret would provide architects and engineers and builders to teach his American workmen how to build the place themselves.

  She was generous in return. She granted all citizens of Deseret conditional status as adopted Americans, and she promised that Quetzalcoatl’s armies would stick to the roads through the northwest Texas panhandle, where the grasslands of the newest New Lands project were still so fragile that an army could destroy five years of labor just by marching through. Carpenter printed out two copies of the agreement in English and Spanish, and Sam and Virgem America signed both.

  Only then, when their official work was done, did the old woman look up into Sam’s eyes and smile. “Are you still a heretic, Sam?”

  “No,” he said. “I grew up. Are you still a virgin?”

  She giggled, and even though it was an old lady’s broken voice, he remembered the laughter he had heard so often in the village of Agualinda, and his heart ached for the boy he was then, and the girl she was. He remembered thinking then that forty-two was old.

  “Yes, I’m still a virgin,” she said. “God gave me my child. God sent me an angel, to put the child in my womb. I thought you would have heard the story by now.”

  “I heard it,” he said.

  She leaned closer to him, her voice a whisper. “Do you dream, these days?”

  “Many dreams. But the only ones that come true are the ones I dream in daylight.”

  “Ah,” she sighed. “My sleep is also silent.”

  She seemed distant, sad, distracted. Sam also; then, as if by conscious decision, he brightened, smiled, spoke cheerfully. “I have grandchildren now.”

  “And a wife you love,” she said, reflecting his brightening mood. “I have grandchildren, too.” Then she became wistful again. “But no husband. Just memories of an angel.”

  “Will I see Quetzalcoatl?”

  “No,” she said, very quickly. A decision she had long since made and would not reconsider. “It would not be good for you to meet face-to-face, or stand side by side. Quetzalcoatl also asks that in the next election, you refuse to be a candidate.”

  “Have I displeased him?” asked Sam.

  “He asks this at my advice,” she said. “It is better, now that his face will be seen in this land, that your face stay behind closed doors.”

  Sam nodded. “Tell me,” he said. “Does he look like the angel?”

  “He is as beautiful,” she said. “But not as pure.”

  Then they embraced each other and wept. Only for a moment. Then her men lifted her back into her litter, and Sam returned with Carpenter to the helicopter. They never met again.

  In retirement, I came to visit Sam, full of questions lingering from his meeting with Virgem America. “You knew each other,” I insisted. “You had met before.” He told me all this story then.

  That was thirty years ago. She is dead now, he is dead, and I am old, my fingers slapping these keys with all the grace of wooden blocks. But I write this sitting in the shade of a tree on the brow of a hill, looking out across woodlands and orchards, fields and rivers and roads, where once the land was rock and grit and sagebrush. This is what America wanted, what it bent our lives to accomplish. Even if we took twisted roads and got lost or injured on the way, even if we came limping to this place, it is a good place, it is worth the journey, it is the promised, the promising land.

  Special thanks to Tor for giving permission for IGMS to reprint The Folk of the Fringe which is still in print.

  Eye For Eye—Part 1

  Eye for Eye was published in 1990 as a Tor double novel, along with “Tunesmith” by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. It is currently out of print, although it is available as an audiobook.

  Part 1

  Just talk, Mick. Tell us everything. We’ll listen.

  Well to start with I know I was doing terrible things. If you’re a halfway decent person, you don’t go looking to kill people. Even if you can do it without touching them. Even if you can do it so as nobody even guesses they was murdered, you still got to try not to do it.

  Who taught you that?

  Nobody. I mean it wasn’t in the books in the Baptist Sunday School—they spent all their time telling us not to lie or break the sabbath or drink liquor. Never did mention killing. Near as I can figure, the Lord thought killing was pretty smart sometimes, like when Samson done it with a donkey’s jaw. A thousand guys dead, but that was okay cause they was Philistines. And lighting foxes’ tails on fire. Samson was a sicko, but he still got his pages in the Bible.

  I figure Jesus was about the only guy got much space in the Bible telling people not to kill. And even then, there’s that story about how the Lord struck down a guy and his wife cause they held back on their offerings to the Christian church. Oh, Lord, the TV preachers did go on about that. No, it wasn’t cause I got religion that I figured out not to kill people.

  You know what I think it was? I think it was Vondel Cone’s elbow. At the Baptist Children’s Home in Eden, North Carolina, we played basketball all the time. On a bumpy dirt court, but we figured it was part of the game, never knowing which way the ball would bounce. Those boys in the NBA, they play a sissy game on that flat smooth floor.

  We played basketball because there wasn’t a lot else to do. Only thing they ever had on TV was the preachers. We got it all cabled in—Falwell from up in Lynchburg, Jim and Tammy from Charlotte, Jimmy Swaggart looking hot, Ernest Ainglee looking carpeted, Billy Graham looking like God’s executive vice-president—that was all our TV ever showed, so no wonder we lived on the basketball court all year.

  Anyway, Vondel Cone wasn’t particularly tall and he wasn’t particularly good at shooting and on the court nobody was even halfway good at dribbling. But he had elbows. Other guys, when they hit you it was an accident. But when Vondel’s elbow met up with your face, he like to pushed your nose out your ear. You can bet we all learned real quick to give him room. He got to take all the shots and get all the rebounds he wanted.

  But we got even. We just didn’t count his points. We’d call out the score, and any basket he made it was like it never happened. He’d scream and he’d argue and we’d all stand there and nod and agree so he wouldn’t punch us out, and then as soon as the next basket was made, we’d call out the score—still not countingVondel’s points. Drove that boy crazy. He screamed till his eyes bugged out, but nobody ever counted his cheating points.

  Vondel died of leukemia at the age of fourteen. You see, I never did like that boy.

  But I learned something from him. I learned how unfair it was for somebody to get his way just because he didn’t care how much he hurt people. And when I finally realized that I was just about the most hurtful person in the whole world, I knew then and there that it just wasn’t right. I mean, even in the Old Testament, Moses said the punishment should fit the crime. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Even Steven, that’s what Old Peleg said before I killed him of prostate cancer. It was when Peleg got took to the hospital that I left the Eden Baptist Children’s Home. Cause I wasn’t Vondel. I did care how much I hurt folks.

  But that doesn’t have nothing to do with anything. I don’t know what all you want me to talk about.

  Just talk, Mick. Tell us whatever you want.

  Well I don’t aim to tell you my whole life story. I mean I didn’t really start to figure out anything till I got on that bus in Roanoke, and so I can pretty much start there I guess. I remember being careful not to get annoyed when the lady in front of me didn’t have the right change for the bus. And I didn’t get angry when the bus driver got all snotty and told the lady to get off. It isn’t worth killing for. That’s what I always tell myself when I get mad. It isn’t worth killing for, and it helps me calm myself down. So anyway I reached past her and pushed a dollar bill through the slot.

  “This is for both of us,” I says.

  “I don’t make change,” says he.

  I could’ve just said “Fine” and left it at that, but he was being such a prick that I had to do something to make him see how ignorant he was. So I put another nickel in the slot and said, “That’s thirty-five for me, thirty-five for her, and thirty-five for the next guy gets on without no change.”

  So maybe I provoked him. I’m sorry for that, but I’m human, too, I figure. Anyway he was mad. “Don’t you smart off with me, boy. I don’t have to let you ride, fare or no fare.”

  Well, fact was he did, that’s the law, and anyway I was white and my hair was short so his boss would probably do something if I complained. I could have told him what for and shut his mouth up tight. Except that if I did, I would have gotten too mad, and no man deserves to die just for being a prick. So I looked down at the floor and said, “Sorry, sir.” I didn’t say “Sorry sir” or anything snotty like that. I said it all quiet and sincere.

  If he just dropped it, everything would have been fine, you know? I was mad, yes, but I’d gotten okay at bottling it in, just kind of holding it tight and then waiting for it to ooze away where it wouldn’t hurt nobody. But just as I turned to head back toward a seat, he lurched that bus forward so hard that it flung me down and I only caught myself from hitting the floor by catching the handhold on a seatback and half-smashing the poor lady sitting there.

  Some other people said “Hey!” kind of mad, and I realize now that they was saying it to the driver, cause they was on my side. But at the time I thought they was mad at me, and that plus the scare of nearly falling and how mad I already was, well, I lost control of myself. I could just feel it in me, like sparklers in my blood veins, spinning around my whole body and then throwing off this pulse that went and hit that bus driver. He was behind me, so I didn’t see it with my eyes. But I could feel that sparkiness connect up with him, and twist him around inside, and then finally it came loose from me, I didn’t feel it no more. I wasn’t mad no more. But I knew I’d done him already.

  I even knew where. It was in his liver. I was a real expert on cancer by now. Hadn’t I seen everybody I ever knew die of it? Hadn’t I read every book in the Eden Public Library on cancer? You can live without kidneys, you can cut out a lung, you can take out a colon and live with a bag in your pants, but you can’t live without a liver and they can’t transplant it either. That man was dead. Two years at the most, I gave him. Two years, all because he was in a bad mood and lurched his bus to trip up a smartmouth kid.