"We don't die, Mr. Crane. We reproduce by splitting off whole sections of ourselves with identical DNA-- you know about DNA?"

  "I went to college."

  "And with us, of course, as with all other life in the universe, intelligence is carried on the DNA, not in the brain. One of the byproducts of death, the brain is. We don't have it. We split, and the individual, complete with all memories, lives on in the children, who are made up of the actual flesh of my flesh, you see? I will never die."

  "Well, bully for you," Willard said, feeling strangely cheated, and wondering why he hadn't guessed.

  "And so we came here and found people whose life had a finish; who began as unformed creatures without memory and, after an incredibly brief span, died."

  "And for that you worship us? I might as well go worshiping bugs that die a few minutes after they're born."

  The alien chuckled, and Willard resented it.

  "Is that why you come here? To gloat?"

  "What else would we worship, Mr. Crane? While we don't discount the possibility of invisible gods, we really never have invented any. We never died, so why dream of immortality? Here we found a people who knew how to worship, and for the first time we found awakened in us a desire to do homage to superior beings."

  And Willard noticed his heartbeat, realized that it would stop while the alien had no heart, had nothing that would ever end. "Superior, hell."

  "We," said the alien, "remember everything, from the first stirrings of intellect to the present. When we are 'born,' so to speak, we have no need of teachers. We have never learned to write-- merely to exchange RNA. We have never learned to create beauty to outlast our lives because nothing outlasts our lives. We live to see all our works crumble. Here, Mr. Crane, we have found a race that builds for the sheer joy of building, that creates beauty, that writes books, that invents the lives of never-known people to delight others who know they are being lied to, a race that devises immortal gods to worship and celebrates its own mortality with immense pomp and glory. Death is the foundation of all that is great about humanity, Mr. Crane."

  "Like hell it is," said Willard. "I'm about to die, and there's nothing great about it."

  "You don't really believe that, Mr. Crane," the alien said. "None of you do. Your lives are built around death, glorifying it. Postponing it as long as possible, to be sure, but glorifying it. In the earliest literature, the death of the hero is the moment of greatest climax. The most potent myth."

  "Those poems weren't written by old men with flabby bodies and hearts that only beat when they feel like it."

  "Nonsense. Everything you do smacks of death. Your poems have beginnings and endings, and structures that limit the work. Your paintings have edges, marking off where the beauty begins and ends. Your sculptures isolate a moment in time. Your music starts and finishes. All that you do is mortal--

  it is all born. It all dies. And yet you struggle against mortality and have overcome it, building up tremendous stores of shared knowledge through your finite books and your finite words. You put frames on everything."

  "Mass insanity, then. But it explains nothing about why you worship. You must come here to mock us."

  "Not to mock you. To envy you."

  "Then die. I assume that your protoplasm or whatever is vulnerable."

  "You don't understand. A human being can die-- after he has reproduced--

  and all that he knew and all that he has will live on after him. But if I die, I cannot reproduce. My knowledge dies with me. An awesome responsibility. We cannot assume it. I am all the paintings and writings and songs of a million generations. To die would be the death of a civilization. You have cast yourselves free of life and achieved greatness.

  "And that's why you come here."

  "If ever there were gods. If ever there was power in the universe. You are those gods. You have that power."

  "We have no power."

  "Mr. Crane, you are beautiful."

  And the old man shook his head, stood with difficulty, and doddered out of the temple and walked away slowly among the graves.

  "You tell them the truth," said the alien to no one in particular (to future generations of himself who would need the memory of the words having been spoken), "and it only makes it worse."

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

  It was only seven months later, and the weather was no longer spring, but now blustered with the icy wind of late autumn. The trees in the cemetery were no longer colorful; they were stripped of all but the last few brown leaves. And into the cemetery walked Willard Crane again, his arms half enclosed by the metal crutches that gave him, in his old age, four points of balance instead of the precarious two that had served him for more than ninety years. A few snowflakes were drifting lazily down, except when the wind snatched them and spun them in crazy dances that had neither rhythm nor direction.

  Willard laboriously climbed the steps of the temple.

  Inside, an alien was waiting.

  "I'm Willard Crane," the old man said.

  "And I'm an alien. You spoke to me-- or my parent, however you wish to phrase it-- several months ago."

  "Yes."

  "We knew you'd come back."

  "Did you? I vowed I never would."

  "But we know you. You are well known to us all, Mr. Crane. There are billions of gods on Earth for us to worship, but you are the noblest of them all."

  "I am?"

  "Because only you have thought to do us the kindest gift. Only you are willing to let us watch your death."

  And a tear leaped from the old man's eye as he blinked heavily.

  "Is that why I came?"

  "Isn't it?"

  "I thought I came to damn your souls to hell, that's why I came, you bastards, coming to taunt me in the final hours of my life."

  "You came to us."

  "I wanted to show you how ugly death is."

  "Please. Do."

  And, seemingly eager to oblige them, Willard's heart stopped and he, in brief agony, slumped to the floor in the temple.

  The aliens all slithered in, all gathered around closely, watching him rattle for breath.

  "I will not die!" he savagely whispered, each breath an agony, his face fierce with the heroism of struggle.

  And then his body shuddered and he was still.

  The aliens knelt there for hours in silent worship as the body became cold.

  And then, at last, because they had learned this from their gods-- that words must be said to be remembered-- one of them spoke:

  "Beautiful," he said tenderly. "Oh Lord my God," he said worshipfully.

  And they were gnawed within by the grief of knowing that this greatest gift of all gifts was forever out of their reach.

  PRIOR RESTRAINT

  Orson Scott Card

  I met Doc Murphy in a writing class taught by a mad Frenchman at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I had just quit my job as a coat-and-tie editor at a conservative family magazine, and I was having a little trouble getting used to being a slob student again. Of a shaggy lot, Doc was the shaggiest. And I was prepared to be annoyed by him and ignore his opinions. But his opinions were not to be ignored. At first because of what he did to me. And then, at last, because of what had been done to him. It has shaped me; his past looms over me whenever I sit down to write.

  Armand the teacher, who had not improved on his French accent by replacing it with Bostonian, looked puzzled as he held up my story before the class. "This is commercially viable," he said. "It is also crap. What else can I say?"

  It was Doc who said it. Nail in one hand, hammer in the other, he crucified me and the story. Considering that I had already decided not to pay attention to him, and considering how arrogant I was in the lofty position of being the one student who had actually sold a novel, it is surprising to me that I listened to him. But underneath the almost angry attack on my work was something else: A basic respect, I think, for what a good writer should be. And for that small hint in my work that a good writer might be hiding somewhere in me.

  So I listened. And I learned. And gradually, as the Frenchman got crazier and crazier, I turned to Doc to learn how to write. Shaggy though he was, he had a far crisper mind than anyone I had ever known in a business suit.

  We began to meet outside class. My wife had left me two years before, so I had plenty of free time and a pretty large rented house to sprawl in; we drank or read or talked, in front of a fire or over Doc's convincing veal parmesan or out chopping down an insidious vine that wanted to take over the world starting in my backyard. For the first time since Denae had gone I felt at home in my house --

  Doc seemed to know by instinct what parts of the house held the wrong memories, and he soon balanced them by making me feel comfortable in them again.

  Or uncomfortable. Doc didn't always say nice things.

  "I can see why your wife left you," he said once.

  "You don't think I'm good in bed, either?" (This was a joke -- neither Doc nor I had any unusual sexual predilections.)

  "You have a neanderthal way of dealing with people, that's all. If they aren't going where you want them to go, club 'em a good one and drag 'em away."

  It was irritating. I didn't like thinking about my wife. We had only been married three years, and not good years either, but in my own way I had loved her and I missed her a great deal and I hadn't wanted her to go when she left. I didn't like having my nose rubbed in it. "I don't recall clubbing you."

  He just smiled. And, of course, I immediately thought back over the conversation and realized that he was right. I hated his goddam smile.

  "OK," I said, "you're the one with long hair in the land of the last surviving crew cuts. Tell me why you like 'Swap' Morris."

  "I don't like Morris. I think Morris is a whore selling someone else's freedom to win votes."

  And I was confused, then. I had been excoriating good old "Swap" Morris, Davis County Commissioner, for having fired the head librarian in the county because she had dared to stock a "pornographic" book despite his objections. Morris showed every sign of being illiterate, fascist, and extremely popular, and I would gladly have hit the horse at his lynching.

  "So you don't like Morris either -- what did I say wrong?"

  "Censorship is never excusable for any reason, says you."

  "You like censorship?"

  And then the half-serious banter turned completely serious. Suddenly he wouldn't look at me. Suddenly he only had eyes for the fire, and I saw the flames dancing in tears resting on his lower eyelids, and I realized again that with Doc I was out of my depth completely.

  "No," he said. "No, I don't like it."

  And then a lot of silence until he flnally drank two full glasses of wine, just like that, and went out to drive home; he lived up Emigration Canyon at the end of a winding, narrow road, and I was afraid he was too drunk, but he only said to me at the door, "I'm not drunk. It takes half a gallon of wine just to get up to normal after an hour with you, you're so damn sober."

  One weekend he even took me to work with him.

  Doc made his living in Nevada. We left Salt Lake City on Friday afternoon and drove to Wendover, the first town over the border. I expected him to he an employee of the casino we stopped at. But he didn't punch in, just left his name with a guy; and then he sat in a corner with me and waited.

  "Don't you have to work?" I asked.

  "I'm working," he said.

  "I used to work just the same way, but I got fired."

  "I've got to wait my turn for a table. I told you I made my living with poker."

  And it finally dawned on me that he was a freelance professional -- a player -- a cardshark.

  There were four guys named Doc there that night. Doc Murphy was the third one called to a table. He played quietly, and lost steadily but lightly for two hours.

  Then, suddenly, in four hands he made back everything he had lost and added nearly fifteen hundred dollars to it. Then he made his apologies after a decent number of losing hands and we drove back to Salt Lake.

  "Usually I have to play again on Saturday night," he told me. Then he grinned.

  "Tonight I was lucky. There was an idiot who thought he knew poker."

  I remembered the old saw: Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play poker with a man named Doc, and never sleep with a woman who's got more troubles than you. Pure truth. Doc memorized the deck, knew all the odds by heart, and it was a rare poker face that Doc couldn't eventually see through.

  At the end of the quarter, though, it finally dawned on me that in all the time we were in class together, I had never seen one of his own stories. He hadn't written a damn thing. And there was his grade on the bulletin board -- A.

  I talked to Amiand.

  "Oh, Doc writes," he assured me. "Better than you do, and you got an A. God knows how, you don't have the talent for it."

  "Why doesn't he turn it in for the rest of the class to read?"

  Armand shrugged. "Why should he? Pearls before swine."

  Still it irritated me. After watching Doc disembowel more than one writer, I didn't think it was fair that his own work was never put on the chopping block.

  The next quarter he turned up in a graduate seminar with me, and I asked him.

  He laughed and told me to forget it. I laughed back and told him I wouldn't. I wanted to read his stuff. So the next week he gave me a three-page manuscript.

  It was an unfinished fragment of a story about a man who honestly thought his wife had left him even though he went home to find her there every night. It was some of the best writing I've ever read in my life. No matter how you measure it.

  The stuff was clear enough and exciting enough that any moron who likes Harold Robbins could have enjoyed it. But the style was rich enough and the matter of it deep enough even in a few pages that it made most other "great" writers look like chicken farmers. I reread the fragment five times just to make sure I got it all. The first time I had thought it was metaphorically about me. The third time I knew it was about God. The fifth time I knew it was about everything that mattered, and I wanted to read more.

  "Where's the rest?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "That's it," he said.

  "It doesn't feel finished."

  "It isn't."

  "Well, finish it! Doc, you could sell this anywhere, even the New Yorker. For them you probably don't even have to finish it."

  "Even the New Yorker. Golly."

  "I can't believe you think you're too good for anybody, Doc. Finish it. I want to know how it ends."

  He shook his head. "That's all there is. That's all there ever will be."

  And that was the end of the discussion.

  But from time to time he'd show me another fragment. Always better than the one before. And in the meantime we became closer, not because he was such a good writer -- I'm not so self-effacing I like hanging around with people who can write me under the table -- but because he was Doc Murphy. We found every decent place to get a beer in Salt Lake City -- not a particularly time-consuming activity. We saw three good movies and another dozen that were so bad they were fun to watch. He taught me to play poker well enough that I broke even every weekend. He put up with my succession of girlfriends and prophesied that I would probably end up married again. "You're just weak willed enough to try to make a go of it," he cheerfully told me.

  At last, when I had long since given up asking, he told me why he never finished anything.

  I was two and a half beers down, and he was drinking a hideous mix of Tab and tomato juice that he drank whenever he wanted to punish himself for his sins, on the theory that it was even worse than the Hindu practice of drinking your own piss. I had just got a story back from a magazine I had been sure would buy it. I was thinking of giving it up. He laughed at me.

  "I'm serious," I said.

  "Nobody who's any good at all needs to give up writing."

  "Look who's talking. The king of the determined writers."

  He looked angry. "You're a paraplegic making fun of a one-legged man," he said.

  "I'm sick of it."

  "Quit then. Makes no difference. Leave the field to the hacks. You're probably a hack, too."

  Doc hadn't been drinking anything to make him surly, not drunk-surly, anyway.

  "Hey, Doc, I'm asking for encouragement."

  "If you need encouragement, you don't deserve it. There's only one way a good writer can be stopped."

  "Don't tell me you have a selective writer's block. Against endings."

  "Writer's block? Jesus, I've never been blocked in my life. Blocks are what happen when you're not good enough to write the thing you know you have to write."

  I was getting angry. "And you, of course, are always good enough."

  He leaned forward, looked at me in the eyes. "I'm the best writer in the English language."

  "I'll give you this much. You're the best who never finished anything."

  "I finish everything," he said. "I finish everything, beloved friend, and then I burn all but the first three pages. I finish a story a week, sometimes. I've written three complete novels, four plays. I even did a screenplay. It would've made millions of dollars and been a classic."

  "Says who?"

  "Says -- never mind who says. iI was bought, it was cast, it was ready for filming. It had a budget of thirty million. The studio believed in it. Only intelligent thing I've ever heard of them doing."

  I couldn't believe it. "You're joking."

  "If I'm joking, who's laughing? It's true."

  I'd never seen him look so poisoned, so pained. It was true, if I knew Doc Murphy, and I think I did. Do. "Why?" I asked.

  "The Censorship Board."

  "What? There's no such thing in America."

  He laughed. "Not full-time anyway."

  "Who the hell is the Censorship Board?"

  He told me.

  When I was twenty-two I lived on a rural road in Oregon, he said, outside of Portland. Mailboxes out on the road. I was writing, I was a playwright, I thought there'd be a career in that; I was just starting to try fiction. I went out one morning after the mailman had gone by. It was drizzling slightly. But I didn't much care.