“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 was 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 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 of 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 by the grief of knowing that this greatest of all gifts was forever out of their reach.

  Second Chance

  If at first you don’t succeed . . .

  By the age of seven Batta was thoroughly trapped, though she scarcely recognized it until she was twenty-two. The bars of her cage were so fragile that to most people they would not have existed at all:

  A father, crippled in a freak tube accident and pensioned off by the government months before Batta was born.

  A mother with a heart of gold and a mind unable to concentrate on one subject for more than three minutes at a time.

  And brothers and sisters who, in the chaos and depression of the mindless, will-less home, might have come unstuck from the fabric of adjusted society had not Batta decided (without deciding) that she would be mother and father to her siblings, her parents, and herself.

  Many another person would have rebelled at having to come directly after school, with never an opportunity to meet with friends and do the mad things through the endless corridors of Capitol that occupied the time of most adolescents of the middle class. Batta merely returned from school and did homework, fixed dinner, talked to mother (or rather, listened), helped the other children with their problems, and braved the den where lather hid from the world, pretending that he had legs, or that the lack of them had not diminished his worth. (“I fathered five damned children, didn’t I?” he insisted from time to time.)

  But all was not bleak. Batta loved studying, was, in fact, not far from being a genius—and she indulged herself enough to go to college, largely because she got a scholarship and her mother believed in taking advantage of every free thing that came.

  And in college there was this one young man.

  He was not far from being a genius, too—from the other side. Batta had never known anyone like him (she didn’t realize that she had hardly known anyone at all), but a crazy friendship grew up that ranged from gift-wrapped presents of dissected thwands from Basic Zoology to hours of silence together, studying for examinations.

  No held hands. No attempted kisses. No fumbling experimentation in the dark.

  Batta was unsure of what it was like and whether she would want it (she always imagined her mother making love to a legless man), while she wondered if Abner Doon ever thought of sex at all.

  And then college ended, degrees were granted—hers in physics, his in government service—and they stopped seeing each other and the months went by and she was twenty-two and it suddenly occurred to her that she was trapped.

  “Where are you going? You’re through with college, you don’t have to go to class anymore, do you?” her mother asked plaintively.

  “I thought I’d take a walk,” Batta answered.

  “But Batta, your father needs you. You know he’s only happy when you re here.”

  Which was true. And Batta spent more and more hours inside the three-room flat until one day, almost a year after graduation, a buzzer.

  “Abner,” she said, more in surprise than in delight. She had almost forgotten him. Indeed, she had almost forgotten that she had a college education.

  “Batta. I haven’t seen you. I wanted to.”

  “Well,” she said, turning around for him to see her but knowing she looked terrible even as she did it, “here I am.”

  “You look like hell.”

  “And you,” she said, “look like a specimen that they forgot to dissect.”

  They laughed. Old times, old magic. He asked her out. She refused. He asked her to go for a walk. She was too busy. And when her father called her out of the room for the fifth time since he had arrived, he decided the conversation was over and had left the apartment before she returned.

  And she felt more trapped than ever.

  Days passed, and in every day something different happened as the other children grew older (and married or didn’t marry but left home anyway) but looking back Batta felt that the days were all the same, after all, and the illusion of variety was just her mind’s own way of keeping itself sane. And at last, when Batta was twenty-seven and a virgin and lonely as hell, all her brothers and sisters were gone and she was alone with her parents.

  That was when Abner Doon came again.

  He had not been on somec either, she noticed to her surprise as she showed him into the living mom (same battered furniture, only older; same color Weills, only dirtier; same Batta Heddis, only deader) and he sat, looking her over carefully.

  “I thought you’d be on somec by now,” she said.

  “So did everyone. But there are some things that can’t be done while one sleeps the years away. I can’t go on somec until I’m ready.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “When I rule the world.”

  She laughed, thinking it was a joke. “And when they find out I’m Mother’s long-lost daughter kidnapped by gypsies and kept by space-pirates, they’ll make me empress after her.”

  “I’m going on somec within the year.”

  And she didn’t laugh. Only looked at him carefully and saw the way worry and work and, perhaps, cruelty had worn certain lines in certain places and given him an expression that made his eyes seem deep and hard to plumb. “You look like you’re drowning,” she said.

  “And you look like you’re drowned.”

  He reached out and took her hand. She was surprised—he had never done that. But the hand was warm, dry, smooth, firm—just as she had thought a man’s hand ought to feel (not like father’s claw) and she didn’t take her hand away.

  “I saw how it was when I came before,” he said. “I’ve been waiting till you were free. The last of your loving siblings left a week ago. Your affairs should be in order. Will you marry me now?”

  Three hours later, they were halfway across the sector in a modest-seeming apartment (only seeming—computers and furniture came, literally, out of the walls) and she was shaking her head. “Ab,” she said, “I can’t. You don’t understand.” He looked concerned. “I thought you’d prefer the contract. It’s so much safer for everyone. But if you’d rather we kept it informal—”

  “You don’t understand. Five minutes before you came I was praying for something like that to happen, anything to get me away from there—”

  “Then come away.”

  “But I keep thinking about my parents. My mother, who can’t manage her own life, let alone lather’s, and father, who does his best to rule everyone and only I can keep him under control and happy. They need me.”

  “At the risk of being thought trite, so do I.”

  “Not much,” she said, waving her hand to indicate the paraphernalia that proved that he was a man of power and wealth.

  “This? In fact, Batta, this is all part of a much grander plan. A direct line leading to something rather fine. But I’d rather share it with you.”

  “You are a romantic idiot like all the other adolescents,” she laughed. “Share it with me nonsense. What makes you even think you love me?”

  “Because, Batta, every now and then my dream fails to keep me warm.”

  “Women are rather inexpensive.”

  “Batta isn’t even for sale,” he reminded her, and then he reached out and touched her as she had never been touched, and she held him as she had never held anyone. For two hours everything was new, every flutter, every smile.

  “No,” she whispered as he was about to end her long sexual solitude. “Please no.”

  “Why,” he whispered back, “the hell not?”

  “Because if you do, I’ll never be able to leave you.”

  “Excellent,” he said, and moved again, but she slid away, slid off the bed, began dressing.

  “You have very poor timing,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t. I can’t leave mother and father.”

  “What, are they so loving and kind to you?”

  “They need me.”

  “Dammit, Batta, they’re grownup people, they can take care of themselves.”

  “Maybe when I was seven, they could,” she said, “But by the time I was twelve they couldn’t. I was dependable. I could do it. And so they lost all their pretenses at adulthood, Ab. I couldn’t go off and be happy knowing they’d disintegrate, having to watch them.”

  “Yes you can. Knowing that if you don’t you’d disintegrate. I can put you on somec, Batta, right now. I can put you under for five years and when you woke up they’d have learned to take care of themselves and you could go see them and know that everything was all right.”

  “Do you have that kind of money?”

  “When you get enough power in this lovely little empire,” Abner Doon answered, “money becomes unnecessary.”

  “When I wake up they might be dead.”

  “Perhaps. And then they’d definitely not need you.”

  “I’d feel guilty, Ab. It would destroy me.”

  But Abner Doon was persuasive, and by small stages he got her to lie down on a wheeled table and he put a sleepcap on her head and taped her brain. All her memories, all her personality, all her hopes, all her terrors were recorded and filed in a tape that Abner Doon tossed up and down in his hand.

  “When you wake up, I’ll play it back into your head, and you won’t even notice that you were asleep.”

  She laughed nervously. “But anything that happens now, the somec wipes out, right?”

  “True,” Doon answered. “I could ravish you and perform all kinds of obscene acts, and when you woke up you’d still think I was a gentleman.”

  “I never have thought such a thing,” she said.

  He smiled. “Now let’s get you to sleep.”

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “I told you. I’m a year away. I’ll be a year older when I wake you up, and we begin our life together, with or without benefit of contract. Good enough?”

  But she began to cry and she kept crying until it was near hysteria. He held her, rocked her back and forth, tried to find out why she was crying, tried to understand what he had done, but she answered, “Nothing. Nothing.”

  Until finally he brought out the somec bottle (but no one has a private supply of somec! It’s the law—) and a needle and reached for her to lay her on the table. She pulled away, retreated to the other side of the room.

  “No.”

  “Why not!”

  “I can’t run away from my parents.”

  “You’ve got your own life to live!”

  “Ab, I can’t do it! Don’t you see? Love isn’t just a matter of liking somebody. I don’t like my parents very much. But they trust me, they lean on me, I’m their whole damn foundation, and I can’t just walk away and let them fall down.”

  “Sure you can! Anybody could! It’s sick, what they’ve done to you, and you have a right to your own life.”

  “Anybody could do it except me. I, Batta Heddis, am a person who does not walk away. That’s who I am! If you want the kind of person who would, then go look somewhere else!” And she ran from the apartment to the tube station, returned home, closed the door and lay on the sofa and wept until her father called impatiently from the other room and she walked in and lovingly stroked his forehead until he could go to sleep.

  When the brothers and sisters were there, Batta could pretend there was variety. Now, there was no pretense. Now, she was the entire focus of their lives and she was being slowly worn down, at first by the constant work and constant pressure (but she grew stronger than ever and soon settled into the routine better than ever until she couldn’t conceive of another way) and later simply by the utter loneliness even while she was utterly unable to be alone.

  “Batta, I’m doing embroidery, they do it with real cotton in the rich houses but there’s no way we could afford that, of course, on your father’s pension, but see what a lovely flower I’m making—or is it a bee? Heaven knows, I’ve never seen either, but don’t you see what a lovely flower it is? Thank you, dear, it’s a lovely flower, isn’t it? They do it with real cotton in the rich houses, you know, but we could never afford that on your father’s pension, could we? So this is a synthetic. It’s called embroidery, will you look at the lovely free I’m making? Isn’t it lovely? Thank you, Batta dear, you have such a wonderful way of making me feel just lovely. I’m doing embroidery, you know. Oh, dear, I think your father’s calling. I must go to him—oh will you? Thank you. I’ll just sit here and embroider, if you don’t mind.”

  And in the bedroom, stolid silence. A groan of pain. The legs starting normally at the hip and then suddenly, abruptly, ending (not two centimeters from the crotch) in a steep cliff of sheets and blankets that fell away and left the bed flat and smooth and unslept-in.

  “Do you remember?” he grunts as she turns the pillow and brings him his pills, “do you remember when Darff was three he came in and said, ‘Daddy, you should have my bed and I should have yours, because you’re as little as I am.’ Damnfool kid, and picked him up and gave him a hug and wanted to strangle the little bastard.”

  “I didn’t remember.”

  “Science has done everything else, but they can’t figure out how to heal man when he’s lost his hams, lost his legs, lost every damn nerve. But one, thank heaven, but one.”

  She loathed bathing him. The tube had caught him slantwise in the mouth of the tubeway. If he’d been turned around it would have ripped out his abdomen and killed him on the spot. As it was, he had lost his buttocks to the bone, his intestines were a mess, he had no bowel control, and his legs were a fragment of bone. “But they left me enough,” he so proudly pointed out, “to father children.”

  And so it went endlessly day after day and Batta refused to remember Abner Doon, refused to admit that she had once had a chance to get away from these people (if only) and live her own life (if only) and be happy for a while (if only I hadn’t—no, no, can’t think that way).

  Then mother decided to make a salad while Batta was away shopping and cut her wrist with the knife and apparently forgot that the emergency call button was only a few meters away because she had bled to death before Batta could get home, a look of surprise frozen on her face.

  Batta was twenty-nine.

  And after a while father began making hints about how a man’s sexual drive doesn’t diminish with nonuse, but only increases. She ignored him with gritted teeth until he, too, died one night and the doctor said it had only been a matter of time, the accident had messed him up so badly, and in fact if he hadn’t had such excellent care he wouldn’t have lasted this long. You should be proud of yourself, girl.