For a moment she cannot speak; her throat aches. “What does he have to do?” she whispers.

  “He has to grow old, very fast. He’s put it off as long as he can.” Benarra turns, looking out over the deserted hall. In a corner, the old cloth drapes trail on the floor. “Go to Napol, or to Timbuk. Don’t call, don’t write. You can’t help him now. He has to do this all by himself.”

  In Djuba she acquires a little ring made of iron, very old, shaped like a serpent that bites its own tail. It is a curiosity, a student’s thing; no one would wear it, and besides it is too small. But the cold touch of the little thing in her palm makes her shiver, to think how old it must be. Never before has she been so aware of the funnel-shaped maw of the past. It feels precarious, to be standing over such gulfs of time.

  In Winthur she takes the waters, makes a few friends. There is a lodge on the crest of Mont Blanc, new since she was last there, from which one looks across the valley of the Doire. In the clear Alpine air, the tops of the mountains are like ships, afloat in a sea of cloud. The sunlight is pure and thin, with an aching sweetness; the cries of the skiers echo up remotely.

  In Cair she meets a collector who has a curious library, full of scraps and oddments that are not to be found in the common supply. He has a baroque fancy for antiquities; some of his books are actually made of paper and bound in synthetic leather, exact copies of the originals.

  “ ‘Again, the Alfurs of Poso, in Central Celebes,’ ” she reads aloud, “ ‘tell how the first men were supplied with their requirements direct from heaven, the Creator passing down his gifts to them by means of a rope. He first tied a stone to the rope and let it down from the sky. But the men would have none of it, and asked somewhat peevishly of what use to them was a stone. The Good God then let down a banana, which, of course they gladly accepted and ate with relish. This was their undoing. “Because you have chosen the banana,” said the deity, “you shall propagate and perish like the banana, and your offspring shall step into your place...” ’ ” She closes the book slowly. “What was a banana, Alf?”

  “A phallic symbol, me dear,” he says, stroking his beard, with a pleasant smile.

  In Prah, she is caught up briefly in a laughing horde of athletes, playing follow-my-leader: they have volplaned from Omsk to the Baltic, tobogganed down the Rose Club chute from Danz to Warsz, cycled from there to Bucur, ballooned, rocketed, leaped from precipices, run afoot all night. She accompanies them to the mountains; they stay in a hostel, singing, and in the morning they are away again, like a flock of swallows. Claire stands grave and still; the horde rushes past her, shining faces, arrows of color, laughs, shouts. “Claire, aren’t you coming?”... “Claire, what’s the matter?”... “Claire, come with us, we’re swimming to Linz!” But she does not answer; the bright throng passes into silence.

  Over the roof of the world, the long cloud-packs are moving swiftly, white against the deep blue. They come from the north; the sharp wind blows among the pines, breathing of icy fjords.

  Claire steps back into the empty forum of the hostel. Her movements are slow; she is weary of escaping. For half a decade she has never been in the same spot more than a few weeks. Never once has she looked into a news unit, or tried to call anyone she knows in Sector Twenty. She has even deliberately failed to register her whereabouts: to be registered is to expect a call, and expecting one is halfway to making one.

  But what is the use? Wherever she goes, she carries the same darkness with her.

  The phone index glows at her touch. Slowly, with unaccustomed fingers, she selects the sector, the group, and the name: Dio.

  The screen pulses; there is a long wait. Then the gray face of an autosec says politely, “The registrant has removed, and left no forwarding information.”

  Claire’s throat is dry. “How long ago did his registry stop?”

  “One moment please.” The blank face falls silent. “He was last registered three years ago, in the index of November thirty.”

  “Try central registry,” says Claire.

  “No forwarding information has been registered.”

  “I know. Try central, anyway. Try everywhere.”

  “There will be a delay for checking.” The blank face is silent a long time. Claire turns away, staring without interest at the living frieze of color which flows along the borders of the room. “Your attention please.”

  She turns. “Yes?”

  “The registrant does not appear in any sector registry.”

  For a moment she is numb and speechless. Then, with a gesture, she abolishes the autosec, fingers the index again, the same sector, same group; the name: Benarra.

  The screen lights: his remembered face looks out at her. “Claire! Where are you?”

  “In Cheky. Ben, I tried to call Dio, and it said there was no registry. Is he—?”

  “No. He’s still alive, Claire; he’s retreated. I want you to come here as soon as you can. Get a special; my club will take care of the overs, if you’re short.”

  “No, I have surplus. All right, I’ll come.”

  “This was made the season after you left,” says Benarra. The wall screen glows: it is a stereo view of the main plaza in Level Three, the Hub section: dark, unornamented buildings, like a cliff-dwellers’ canyon. The streets are deserted; no face shows at the windows.

  “Changing Day,” says Benarra. “Dio had formally resigned, but he still had a day to go. Watch.”

  In the screen, one of the tall building fronts suddenly swells and crumbles at the top. Dingy smoke spurts. Like a stack of counters, the building leans down into the street, separating as it goes into individual bricks and stones. The roar comes dimly to them as the next building erupts, and then the next.

  “He did it himself,” says Benarra. “He laid all the explosive charges, didn’t tell anybody. The council was horrified. The integrators weren’t designed to handle all that rubble—it had to be amorphized and piped away in the end. They begged Dio to stop, and finally he did. He made a bargain with them, for Level One.”

  “The whole level?”

  “Yes. They gave it to him; he pointed out that it would not be for long. All the game areas and so on up there were due to be changed, anyhow; Dio’s successor merely canceled them out of the integrator.”

  She still does not understand. “Leaving nothing but the bare earth?”

  “He wanted it bare. He got some seeds from collectors, and planted them. I’ve been up frequently. He actually grows cereal grain up there, and grinds it into bread.”

  In the screen, the canyon of the street has become a lake of dust. Benarra touches the controls, the screen blinks to another scene.

  The sky is a deep luminous blue; the level land is bare. A single small building stands up blocky and stiff; behind it there are a few trees, and the evening light glimmers on fields scored in parallel rows. A dark figure is standing motionless beside the house; at first Claire does not recognize it as human. Then it moves, turns its head. She whispers, “Is that Dio?”

  “Yes.”

  She cannot repress a moan of sorrow. The figure is too small for any details of face or body to be seen, but something in the proportions of it makes her think of one of Dio’s grotesque statues, all stony bone, hunched, shrunken. The figure turns, moving stiffly, and walks to the hut. It enters and disappears.

  She says to Benarra, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t leave any word; I couldn’t reach you.”

  “I know, but you should have told me. I didn’t know....”

  “Claire, what do you feel for him now? Love?”

  “I don’t know. A great pity, I think. But maybe there is love mixed up in it too. I pity him because I once loved him. But I think that much pity is love, isn’t it, Ben?”

  “Not the kind of love you and I used to know anything about,” says Benarra, with his eyes on the screen.

  He was waiting for her when she emerged from the kiosk.

  He had a face like nothing human. It was like a turtle’s face, or a lizard’s: horny and earth-colored, with bright eyes peering under the shelf of brow. His cheeks sank in; his nose jutted, and the bony shape of the teeth bulged behind the lips. His hair was white and fine, like thistledown in the sun.

  They were like strangers together, or like visitors from different planets. He showed her his grain fields, his kitchen garden, his stand of young fruit trees. In the branches, birds were fluttering and chirping. Dio was dressed in a robe of coarse weave that hung awkwardly from his bony shoulders. He had made it himself, he told her; he had also made the pottery jug from which he poured her a clear tart wine, pressed from his own grapes. The interior of the hut was clean and bare. “Of course, I get food supplements from Ben, and a few things like needles, thread. Can’t do everything, but on the whole, I haven’t done too badly.” His voice was abstracted; he seemed only half aware of her presence.

  They sat side by side on the wooden bench outside the hut. The afternoon sunlight lay pleasantly on the flagstones; a little animation came to his withered face, and for the first time she was able to see the shape of Dio’s features there.

  “I don’t say I’m not bitter. You remember what I was and you see what I am now.” His eyes stared broodingly; his lips worked. “I sometimes think, why did it have to be me? The rest of you are going on, like children at a party, and I’ll be gone. But, Claire, I’ve discovered something. I don’t quite know if I can tell you about it.”

  He paused, looking out across the fields. “There’s an attraction in it, a beauty. That sounds impossible, but it’s true. Beauty in the ugliness. It’s symmetrical, it has its rhythm. The sun rises, the sun sets. Living up here, you feel that a little more. Perhaps that’s why we went below.”

  He turned to look at her. “No, I can’t make you understand. I don’t want you to think, either, that I’ve surrendered to it. I feel it coming sometimes, Claire, in the middle of the night. Something coming up over the horizon. Something—” He gestured. “A feeling. Something very huge and cold. Very cold. And I sit up in my bed, shouting, I’m not ready yet!’ No. I don’t want to go. Perhaps if I had grown up getting used to the idea, it would be easier now. It’s a big change to make in your thinking. I tried—all this—and the sculpture, you remember—but I can’t quite do it. And yet—now, this is the curious thing. I wouldn’t go back, if I could. That sounds funny. Here I am, going to die, and I wouldn’t go back. You see, I want to be myself; yes, I want to go on being myself. Those other men were not me, only someone on the way to be me.”

  They walked back together to the kiosk. At the doorway, she turned for a last glimpse. He was standing, bent and sturdy, white-haired in his rags, against a long sweep of violet sky. The late light glistened grayly on the fields; far behind, in the grove of trees the birds’ voices were stilled. There was a single star in the east. To leave him, she realized suddenly, would be intolerable. She stepped out, embraced him: his body was shockingly thin and fragile in her arms. “Dio, we mustn’t be apart now. Let me come and stay in your hut; let’s be together.”

  Gently he disengaged her arms and stepped away. His eyes gleamed in the twilight. “No, no,” he said. “It wouldn’t do, Claire. Dear, I love you for it, but you see... you see, you’re a goddess. An immortal goddess—and I’m a man.” She saw his lips work, as if he were about to speak again, and she waited, but he only turned, without a word or gesture, and began walking away across the empty earth: a dark spindling figure, garments flapping gently in the breeze that spilled across the earth. The last light glowed dimly in his white hair. Now he was only a dot in the middle distance. Claire stepped back into the kiosk, and the door closed.

  VI

  For a long time she cannot persuade herself that he is gone. She has seen the body, stretched in a box like someone turned to painted wax: it is not Dio, Dio is somewhere else.

  She catches herself thinking, When Dio comes back... as if he had only gone away, around to the other side of the world. But she knows there is a mound of earth over Sector Twenty, with a tall polished stone over the spot where Dio’s body lies in the ground. She can repeat by rote the words carved there:

  Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of man; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edges of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil. Then are they borne away; like smoke they vanish into air; and what they dream they know is but the little that each hath stumbled upon in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all that they have learned the whole. Vain fools! For what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man.

  —Empedocles (5th cent. B. C.)

  One day she closes up the apartment; let the Planner, Dio’s successor, make of it whatever he likes. She leaves behind all her notes, her student’s equipment, useless now. She goes to a public inn and that afternoon the new fashions are brought to her: robes in flame silk and in cold metallic mesh; new perfumes, new jewelry. There is new music in the memory units, and she dances to it tentatively, head cocked to listen, living into the rhythm. Already it is like a long-delayed spring; dark withered things are drifting away into the past, and the present is fresh and lovely.

  She tries to call a few old friends. Katha is in Centram, Ebert in the South; Piet and Tanno are not registered at all. It doesn’t matter, in the plaza of the inn, before the day is out, she makes a dozen new friends. The group, pleased with itself, grows by accretion; the resulting party wanders from the plaza to the Vermilion Club gardens, to one member’s rooms and then another’s, and finally back to Claire’s own apartment.

  Leaving the circle toward midnight, she roams the apartment alone, eased by comradeship, content to hear the singing blur and fade behind her. In the playroom, she stands idly looking down into the deep darkness of the diving well. How luxurious, she thinks, to fall and fall, and never reach the bottom....

  But the bottom is always there, of course, or it would not be a diving well. A paradox: the well must be a shaft without an exit at the bottom; it’s the sense of danger, the imagined smashing impact, that gives it its thrill. And yet there is no danger of injury: levitation and the survival instinct will always prevent it.

  “We have such a tidy world....”

  Things pass away; people endure.

  Then where is Piet, the cottony haired man, with his laughter and his wild jokes? Hiding, somewhere around the other side of the world, perhaps; forgetting to register. It often happens; no one thinks about it. But then, her own mind asks coldly, where is the woman named Marla, who used to hold you on her knee when you were small? Where is Hendry, your own father, whom you last saw... when? Five hundred, six hundred years ago, that time in Rio. Where do people go when they disappear... the people no one talks about?

  The singing drifts up to her along the dark hallway. Claire is staring transfixed down into the shadows of the well. She thinks of Dio, looking out at the gathering darkness: “I feel it coming sometimes, up over the horizon. Something very huge, and cold.”

  The darkness shapes itself in her imagination into a gray face, beautiful and terrible. The smiling lips whisper, for her ears alone, Some day.

  EASTWARD HO!

  William Tenn

  It’s an unclosely guarded secret among science fiction writers that one good method for generating story ideas is to take some very familiar situation, turn it upside down, and see what emerges. That’s what William Tenn has done, most literally, in this tale of a North America in which the Indians control almost everything and the whites are a harried, battered minority clinging with difficulty to an ever-shrinking domain. And because the elegantly convoluted mind of William Tenn was at work, the result is no mere formula job, but a lovely, delectable parable of inversions.

  The New Jersey turnpike had been hard on the horses. South of New Brunswick the potholes had been so deep, the scattered boulders so plentiful, that the two men had been forced to move at a slow trot, to avoid crippling their three precious animals. And, of course, this far south, farms were non-existent: they had been able to eat nothing but the dried provisions in the saddlebags, and last night they had slept in a roadside service station, suspending their hammocks between the tilted, rusty gas pumps.

  But it was still the best, the most direct route, Jerry Franklin knew. The turnpike was a government road: its rubble was cleared semiannually. They had made excellent time and come through without even developing a limp in the pack horse. As they swung out on the last lap, past the riven tree stump with the words Trenton Exit carved on its side, Jerry relaxed a bit. His father, his father’s colleagues, would be proud of him. And he was proud of himself.

  But the next moment, he was alert again. He roweled his horse, moved up alongside his companion, a young man of his own age.

  “Protocol,” he reminded. “I’m the leader here. You know better than to ride ahead of me this close to Trenton.”

  He hated to pull rank. But facts were facts, and if a subordinate got above himself he was asking to be set down. After all, he was the son—and the oldest son, at that—of the Senator from Idaho; Sam Rutherford’s father was a mere Undersecretary of State and Sam’s mother’s family was pure post office clerk all the way back.

  Sam nodded apologetically and reined his horse back the proper couple of feet. “Thought I saw something odd,” he explained. “Looked like an advance party on the side of the road—and I could have sworn they were wearing buffalo robes.”

  “Seminole don’t wear buffalo robes, Sammy. Don’t you remember your sophomore political science?”