“Not you,” Sammy Barber said. “You’ve always got the inn.”

  “And what good is that,” Martin murmured, “if there’s no one to sleep here and no food to feed them if they come?”

  When they carried supper into the common room a man was bearing out the body of a woman who had just died. They stood aside to let him pass.

  “Nobody could help him carry her?” Martin asked.

  “He wouldn’t,” a woman said softly, and then they were in a crowd around the food as Sammy and Martin and Goody Keeper dished it out. There was more than enough, and as the women and children went back to the soup bowl for more, the men refilled their mugs at the ale barrel, saying that ale gave them more warmth to the blood than thin soup.

  Martin was interrupted in ministering to the ale-drinkers by a tug on his sleeve.

  “Take your turn, I’ve got two hands,” he said, but the answer was not in a mans voice.

  “Papa,” Amos said.

  “What are you doing out of bed!” Martin turned away from the keg, and the men lost no time in keeping cups under the free-flowing spout. “Get back to bed if you want to live,” Martin said.

  Amos shook his head weakly. “I can’t, Papa.”

  Martin picked him up in his arms and said, “Then I’ll put you there. I’m glad to see you feel better, but you have to stay A in bed.”

  “But John Tinker’s here, Papa.”

  Martin stopped and set down his son. “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Can’t you see him?” Amos answered, and glanced toward the stairs to the second floor. There John Tinker leaned against the wall, a few steps up and higher than the crowd. Already some had noticed him and were backing away, muttering.

  “He’s come back,” Amos whispered, “to save us.”

  And then the whole crowd fell silent as all of them saw the tinker. They backed farther way, and he staggered down the stairs and fell to his knees on the floor. His chin was caked with ice where his four-day beard had gathered it, and his hands were stiff. He seemed unable to move normally, as if he had no feeling in his arms or legs. Without looking at anyone he struggled to his feet and lurched forward. The crowd made more space for him, until he was alone in the center of the room. He wavered as he stood there.

  The murmuring in the crowd became louder, and then the man whose wife had died came down the stairs from the second floor.

  He walked down the corridor that John Tinker had opened in the crowd until he faced the magic man. They stood that way, face to face, and the crowd fell silent.

  “If you’d been here,” he said softly, “Inna’d be healed now.”

  After a long pause, the tinker slowly nodded. And then the grieved man’s face began to work, and his shoulders began to shake, and he began to cry for the crowd. And then for the crowd he raised his hand up and slapped the tinker across the face. The crowd was silent, except that Amos back in the corner gasped.

  The man lifted his hand again, and struck harder. A few people in the crowd moved in. He struck again, and again, and again until the tinker slowly sank to his knees.

  “Can’t you stop him, Papa?” Amos whispered, urgently. Martin didn’t take his eyes off the man standing in the middle of the floor. “Stop him, Papa, they’ll hurt him!”

  The man stepped back a pace from where John Tinker knelt facing him. He bent over a little, and then kicked the tinker powerfully in the face. The tinker flew backward and sprawled on the floor.

  “Magic-man!” cried his tormentor. “Magic man! Magic man!”

  The crowd picked up the chant quickly, and drew together, making a tight circle where the tinker lay. Magic man. Magic man. Magic man. And as they watched, the tinker rolled over and struggled to his knees, his face bleeding, his nose broken, an eye puffed up and turning brown. But he opened the other eye and gazed unwaveringly at the man who had kicked him. The man backed away. John looked at another man, then slow turned and with one blue eye gazed for a moment into the eyes in the front row of the crowd. The chant died away and there was silence as John Tinker struggled to stand.

  He pulled one leg under him and tried to rise, but he lost his balance and caught himself with his arm. He tried again, and again his legs wouldn’t hold him. Woodenly he tried the other leg. He failed again. And when again he tried he didn’t catch himself at all, but lay on his side, his eyes open, his body shaking.

  For a moment the crowd was still, like vultures unsure whether their prey is dead. Then a few of them stepped forward to where the tinker lay shivering. Silently they began to kick him. They kicked him viciously until they were exhausted and moved away, and their place was taken by others. The tinker never made a A sound.

  At last the crowd dispersed, many of them leaving the room, some staying near the fire, a few others going to where the keg still held a little ale. John Tinker’s body lay in the middle of the room. His skull had broken, as had his skin in dozens of places, and a vast pool of blood lay around him. Footprints of blood led away from the body, following those who had stepped in it, until distance wore the blood off their feet. The tinker’s face was not a face, his eyes were not eyes, his lips were not lips, and his split and splintered hands spread like roots lover the floor.

  After a while Martin Keeper looked away from his cousin’s body and turned to face his son. Amos looked up at his father with no expression whatever on his face. But his eyes were as blue as the tinker’s eyes had been, and they were cold and penetrating and Martin felt accused, condemned, ashamed. He couldn’t hold his son’s gaze. He looked at the floor until Goody Keeper came and quietly took Amos off to bed.

  Then Martin carried his cousin’s body up the stairs, and when he came back he spent the night washing the blood from the floor. Every print. In the morning there was no trace of it left.

  All of Worthing Town lived in Worthing Inn until the spring thaw came. When the weather turned it turned sharply, and suddenly the days were hot and dry. As the snow melted, the people started to drift back to their houses, but soon found a more urgent task at hand. The bodies in the square were starting to rot.

  They couldn’t break the ground yet, and so they took lamp oil and poured it over the bodies and set them afire. The stench was horrible, and the fire burned for days, though they threw wood on it to make it burn hotter and faster. And as it burned they went into the houses and found the bodies of those who had been lost all winter and threw them on the fire too, until all the corpses in town were burned. They might have thrown John Tinker’s body on the fire too, but the birds had come to him during the winter and picked his body clean, so that only bones were left, and those Amos silently gathered up and when the ground was soft he buried them but made no marker.

  The town was not rebuilt at all. The houses that were still livable were few, but they were enough for the few left to live in them. Instead all the people went to the fields and plowed, and then to the fields and planted, and then they hoed. At night a few of them plied their trade, though Sammy Barber nicked a, few faces by candlelight and Calinn Cooper’s weary and little-trained hands made few casks that didn’t leak.

  Most of the people preferred to live as far as possible from the center of town, and when they did come to the square they always walked around the space where the pyre had been. The ashes stayed in the soil until the spring winds and rain washed them away.

  And from time to time a family was seen with a loaded cart passing by the inn on the Linkeree road, or going the other way toward Hux. By summer Worthing claimed only forty citizens, and they were weary to the bone and grieved to the soul and bitter. There were no songs in the common room of Worthing Inn.

  One day when Martin Keeper came home from the field he couldn’t find his son Amos, who was still a boy, of course, but who like all the other boys left in Worthing had forgotten how to laugh loud and play in the streets in the evenings. He and his wife searched through all the rooms of their part of the inn, and out in the yard, until finally Martin Keeper climbed the south tower stairs. As he had at last guessed, the boards he had nailed over the trapdoor in the south tower room had been pried off.

  He climbed the ladder and lifted the door. All the windows were open and the forest spread wide in all directions. Martin found his son standing by the west window watching the sun set near Mount Waters. He’ said nothing, but after a time his son turned to him and said, “I will sleep in this room from now on.” Martin Keeper went away downstairs.

  Fat Farm

  He was grossly fat, tired and old when he went in. He came out a new man—for a price

  The receptionist was surprised that he was back so soon.

  “Why, Mr. Barth, how glad I am to see you.” she said.

  “Surprised, you mean,” Barth answered. His voice rumbled from the rolls of fat under his chin.

  “Delighted.”

  “How long has it been?” Barth asked.

  “Three years. How time flies.”

  The receptionist smiled, but Barth saw the awe and revulsion on her face as she glanced over his immense body. In her job she saw fat people every day. But Barth knew he was unusual. He was proud of being unusual.

  “Back to the fat farm,” he said, laughing.

  The effort of laughing made him short of breath, and he gasped for air as she pushed a button and said. “Mr. Barth is back.”

  He did not bother to look for a chair. No chair could hold him. He did lean against a wall, however. Standing was a labor he preferred to avoid.

  Yet it was not shortness of breath or exhaustion at the slightest effort that had brought him back to Anderson’s Fitness Center. He had often been fat before, and he rather relished the sensation of bulk, the impression he made as crowds parted for him. He pitied those who could only be slightly fat short people, who were not able to bear the weight. At well over two meters, Barth could get gloriously fat, stunningly fat. He owned thirty wardrobes and took delight in changing from one to another as his belly and buttocks and thighs grew. At times he felt that if he grew large enough, he could take over the world, be the world. At the dinner table he was a conqueror to rival Genghis Khan.

  It was not his fatness, then, that had brought him in. It was that at last the fat was. interfering with his other pleasures. The girl he had been with the night before had tried and tried, but he was incapable—a sign that it was time to renew, refresh, reduce.

  “I am a man of pleasure,” he wheezed to the receptionist, whose name he never bothered to learn. She smiled back.

  “Mr. Anderson will be here in a moment.”

  “Isn’t it ironic,” he said, “that a man such as I, who is capable of fulfilling every one of his desires, is never satisfied!” He gasped with laughter again. “Why haven’t we ever slept together?” he asked.

  She looked at him, irritation crossing her face. “You always ask that, Mr. Barth, on your way in. But you never ask it on your way out.”

  True enough. When he was on his way out of the Anderson Fitness Center, she never seemed as attractive as she had on his way in.

  Anderson came in, effusively handsome, gushingly warm, taking Barth’s fleshy hand in his and pumping it with enthusiasm.

  “One of my best customers,” he said.

  “The usual,” Barth said.

  “Of course,” Anderson answered. “But the price has gone up.”

  “If you ever go out of business,” Barth said, following Anderson into the inner rooms, “give me plenty of warning. I only let myself go this much because I know you’re here.”

  “Oh,” Anderson chuckled. “We’ll never go out of business.”

  “I have no doubt you could support your whole organization on what you charge me.”

  “You’re paying for much more than the simple service we perform. You’re also paying for privacy. Our, shall we say, lack of government intervention.”

  “How many of the bastards do you bribe?”

  “Very few, very few. Partly because so many high officials also need our service.”

  “No doubt.”

  “It isn’t just weight gains that bring people to us, you know. It’s cancer and aging and accidental disfigurement. You’d be surprised to learn who has had our service.”

  Barth doubted that he would. The couch was ready for him, immense and soft and angled so that it would be easy for him to get up again.

  “Damn near got married this time,” Barth said, by way of conversation.

  Anderson turned to him in surprise.

  “But you didn’t?”

  “Of course not. Started getting fat. and she couldn’t cope.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “That I was getting fat? It was obvious.”

  “About us, I mean.”

  “I’m not a fool.”

  Anderson looked relieved. “Can’t have rumors getting around among the thin and young, you know.”

  “Still, I think I’ll look her up again, afterward. She did things to me a woman shouldn’t be able to do. And I thought I was jaded.”

  Anderson placed a tight-fitting rubber cap over Barth’s head.

  “Think your key thought,” Anderson reminded him.

  Key thought. At first that had been such a comfort, to make sure that not one iota of his memory would be lost. Now it was boring, almost juvenile. Key thought. Do you have your own Captain Aardvark secret decoder ring? Be the first on your block. The only thing Barth had been the first on his block to do was reach puberty. He had also been the first on his block to reach one hundred fifty kilos.

  How many times have I been here? he wondered as the tingling in his scalp began. This is the eighth time. Eight times, and my fortune is larger than ever, the kind of wealth that takes on a life of its own. I can keep this up forever, he thought, with relish. Forever at the supper table with neither worries nor restraints. “It’s dangerous to gain so much weight,” Lynette had said. “Heart attacks, you know.” But the only things that Barth worried about were hemorrhoids and impotence. The former was a nuisance, but the latter made life unbearable and drove him back to Anderson.

  Key thought. What else? Lynette, standing naked on the edge of the cliff with the wind blowing. She was courting death, and he admired her for it, almost hoped that she would find it. She despised safety precautions. Like clothing, they were restrictions to be cast aside. She had once talked him into playing tag with her on a construction site, racing along the girders in the darkness, until the police came and made them leave. That had been when Barth was still thin from his last time at Anderson’s. But it was not Lynette on the girders that he held in his mind. It was Lynette, fragile and beautiful Lynette, daring the wind to snatch her from the cliff and break up her body on the rocks by the river.

  Even that, Barth thought, would be a kind of pleasure. Anew kind of pleasure, to taste a grief so magnificently, so admirably earned.

  And then the tingling in his head stopped. Anderson came back in.

  “Already?” Barth asked.

  “We’ve streamlined the process.” Anderson carefully peeled the cap from Barth’s head, helped the immense man lift himself from the couch.

  “I can’t understand why it’s illegal,” Barth said. “Such a simple thing.”

  “Oh, there are reasons. Population control, that sort of thing. This is a kind of immortality, you know. But it’s mostly the repugnance most people feel. They can’t face the thought. You’re a man of rare courage.”

  But it was not courage, Barth knew. It was pleasure. He eagerly anticipated seeing, and they did not make him wait.

  “Mr. Barth, meet Mr. Barth.”

  It nearly broke his heart to see his own body young and strong and beautiful again, as it never had been the first time through his life. It was unquestionably himself, however, that they led into the room. Except that the belly was firm, the thighs well muscled but slender enough that they did not meet, even at the crotch. They brought him in naked, of course. Barth insisted on it.

  He tried to remember the last time. Then he had been the one coming from the learning room, emerging to see the immense fat man that all his memories told him was himself. Barth remembered that it had been a double pleasure, to see the mountain he had made of himself, yet to view it from inside this beautiful young body.

  “Come here,” Barth said, his own voice arousing echoes of the last time, when it had been the other Barth who had said it. And just as that other had done the last time, he touched the naked young Barth, stroked the smooth and lovely skin, and finally embraced him.

  And the young Barth embraced him back, for that was the way of it. No one loved Barth as much as Barth did. thin or fat, young or old. Life was a celebration of Barth: the sight of himself was his strongest nostalgia.

  “What did I think of?” Barth asked.

  The young Barth smiled into his eyes. “Lynette,” he said. “Naked on a cliff. The wind blowing. And the thought of her thrown to her death.”

  “Will you go back to her?” Barth asked his young self eagerly.

  “Perhaps. Or to someone like her.” And Barth saw with delight that the mere thought of it had aroused his young self more than a little.

  “He’ll do,” Barth said, and Anderson handed him the simple papers to sign papers that would never be seen in a court of law because they attested to Barth’s own compliance in and initiation of an act that was second only to murder in the lawbooks of every state.

  “That’s it, then,” Anderson said, turning from the fat Barth to the young, thin one. “You’re Mr. Barth now, in control of his wealth and his life. Your clothing is in the next room.”

  “I know where it is,” the young Barth said with a smile, and his footsteps were buoyant as he left the room. He would dress quickly and leave the Fitness Center briskly, hardly noticing the rather plainlooking receptionist, except to take note of her wistful look after him, a tall, slender, beautiful man who had, only moments before, been lying mindless in storage, waiting to be given a mind and a memory, waiting for a fat man to move out of the way so he could fill his space.