"The Worm wonders what service you have promised to the Raven deity."

  "Service?" Tex frowned. He couldn't quite remember. "Nothing, I don't think. As I recall, she said it would entertain her, to grant my wish."

  The Bishop began to rumble, but Tex answered before It could finish.

  "None of your business," he said. "My wish is a secret. And I take secrets to the grave, man."

  Beale stared at him—like, Are you being serious?

  Tex decided that now was the time to seize the monster by the horns. He squared his shoulders, faced the Bishop of Worms straight on—trying to look It straight in the eye, though this was a confusing proposition.

  "Just let me lay this down," he said, "okay? Okay: Beale here has explained to me that you're totally beyond the human realm and all that. So I guess probably you're not too concerned one way or the other with a little insignificant dude like me. But if you're the same Worm that I read about back in, what was it—Songs of Innocence and Experience, maybe?—then probably you are interested in things like growth and decay and so forth. I mean, not human growth and decay in particular. But the whole picture. Life. Earth. The Noosphere. Gaia. Because see, it's like I was telling Beale here, I just don't think it's time to give up on everything. I think there might be some alternatives—short of, I mean, you just sucking everything into your gut and starting over again later, or whatever your plan is."

  The Bishop of Worms made an utterance, and Tex realized that he could actually understand it. It was along the lines of

  I MAKE NO PLANS.

  "Sure," said Tex. "Of course not. Big atemporal guy like you—what are plans when you're as old as the Universe? But see, what I was saying was, I think maybe you're sticking your roots in where they don't belong here. No offense. But it just seems to me that, if what you're doing is reabsorbing all the nature spirits like Beale here who are sort of down on their luck and don't have anyplace to go—well, it might seem like you're doing the best thing, keeping the streets clean and all. But don't you think it's sort of premature? I mean, suppose everything was to turn around? Suppose the trees were to stop dying, for example. Suppose biological diversity were to suddenly start increasing again. You take away all these poor homeless dryads—and all the flower fairies and frog devas and whatnot—and who's going to step in and show all those baby life-forms how to grow? You expect a bunch of stupid DNA to know how to put itself together? Let me ask you, Bishop—did you ever try to build anything out of Legos?"

  The Bishop swelled and shook. Its epidermal layer exuded mucus. It gave a thermonuclear belch.

  "Never mind that," said Tex. "I'm just drawing a comparison here. My point is, it's not the little tiny individual pieces that matter. You need the pieces, sure. But you lose a few, you pick up some extras, that's not what's really important. What's important is like, the picture on the outside of the box. See? Not the stuff in the box at all. Because without the big picture—the like, meta-Lego—you can ruck around all day with the pieces and you've still got diddly-squat. It's the roomful of monkeys with typewriters all over again.

  "So this is what I'm saying. You take away the spirits—the elves, the fairies, the dryads, all the magical higher-plane stuff—and it's like you've wiped the picture off the box. What's left is just a bunch of plastic garbage. You get me?"

  The Bishop of Worms said:

  NO.

  "Story of my life," said Tex.

  Beale took a step forward, in some upper-dimensional way.

  "Your Primacy," he said, in what Tex considered to a kiss-ass tone of voice. "Perhaps I may be able to clarify the matter. What this deceased human entity is suggesting, I believe, is that You might alter Your supremely farsighted and incomprehensibly beautiful intentions, vis-a-vis the morphological entities of the Earth—organizational field-matrices like myself—so that instead of granting us the great fortune to be reunited with Your blessed unmanifest Substance, You condemn us to a further period of wretched and thankless realization on the cursed plane of the Explicate. This former human believes that by so doing, You might improve the chances of there being a continued abundance of dying and putrefying sentient matter upon which to nourish Your divinely necrophagic Self. Whereas the human suggests that otherwise, should the Earth be drained of what he crudely terms its magical components, the reconstruction of its noetic body at some future time is cast gravely into doubt."

  The Bishop of Worms changed color and texture, taking on a wet, pinkish cast suggestive of bloody vomit. It extended Itself into the twisting, flattened configuration of an intestinal parasite. Some kind of brownish-purple fat sweated from Its millions of pores. Clearly, It was deep in thought.

  Tex turned to Beale. The dryad looked wan. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of oomph left in him.

  "Buck up," said Tex. "What's the worst that can happen? We die and get eaten by—"

  The Worm

  suddenly

  hideously

  lunged down

  exposing a set of fangs the size of the Korean Peninsula

  and chomped Tex and Beale and much of the surrounding landscape

  into Its gullet

  and what happened next is not suitable material for a story that might inadvertently fall into the hands of impressionable materialists.

  And that was

  THE END

  (of that).

  the next time Tex came to himself

  * * *

  he was inside the acorn again.

  And he was in the red squirrel's great-great-grandfather's nest. Again.

  And the roots of the yew were shaking overhead.

  And dirt was raining down.

  And suddenly a big hole was torn open in the ground above.

  And a huge paw with claws on it reached in.

  And scooped up the acorn.

  And lifted it up to a great big mouth (but not as big as the Bishop's).

  And the next thing Tex knew

  he was swallowed by a bear.

  the next time Molly came to herself

  * * *

  she was lying on her own bed aboard the Linear Bee next to Ludi, who was tucked snugly beneath the T-shirt quilt, with her golden-tipped hair splayed across Tex's pillow like a pool of fallen sunshine, breathing slowly and deeply, fast asleep.

  And Molly was surprised. Not so much by Ludi's being here. But by the fact that she, Molly, felt so pleased about it.

  She got up from the bed—floating somewhat, as though all this time spent in the Otherworld was making her spirit less substantial—and moved slowly around the living quarters.

  The plants had been watered. The angel-wing begonias were perhaps a trifle too damp, but the hot May sun—or was it June now?—should soon take care of that.

  In the galley, Goblin the Cat-Person lay curled up in a mixing bowl. This was a new trick. Molly felt a funny little pang—something like jealously, but of a gentle sort, and mixed up with fondness—like a mother hearing that her child has performed some miraculous feat at school of which he has given no hint at home. On the floor, Goblin's bowl held traces of I.G.A. dry cat food. Next to the sink, the Majolica teapot and the set of Sun & Moon mugs sat sparkling clean in the wooden dish rack.

  So, Molly thought. Life goes on within you and without you.

  She felt empty.

  Then she felt, more simply, light. Cleaned out of the nonessential. She felt that if she did not concentrate on staying here, anchored in her little kitchen, she might begin to float again. Away, floating away. And what would stop her?

  Molly wondered if she could still turn on the radio— whether she retained that much connection to the material world. Then she imagined how Ludi would feel if she woke up to, say, Indigo Jones dishing out a set of Captain Beefheart. The thought made her laugh, and Ludi made a little noise in her sleep.

  Dreaming:

  Molly caught a whiff of linden blossoms, honey-sweet, the warmth of someone's breath, a tingle of Harmony Ball earrings. Mullioned windows. Muslin drapes hanging blowsily from a brass rod. Hardware. Luff of cotton in the summer breeze. Oily scent of a highway. The softness of a peach. Pearlescence.

  Is this, Molly wondered, really what dreams are made of? Only fragments, jumbled contents of a life? She had always imagined dreams were something beyond that, more meaningful or magical. But perhaps it was ordinary waking life that was full of meaning and magic. And dreaming was only the place where you could savor that, where you weren't distracted by the fussing and quarrelsomeness of the daily routine.

  Insubstantially, Molly sighed.

  Descending from her dream, Ludi stirred within the T-shirt quilt. For an instant—a clear, surprising sliver broken out of time—her mind seemed to brush against Molly's. It was like two hands, waving absently, touching by happenchance. For an instant they held one another.

  The moment fell away. Ludi opened her eyes and she said out loud: "Forever?"

  But that, the sound of her own voice, brought her fully awake, and immediately the dream, that dark touching, fell below the horizon of her consciousness.

  "Ah,'' she said, kind of a sigh, kind of an articulation of pleasure. She smiled at the bed and the quilt and the cozy, sun-warmed, flower-bedecked living quarters of the Linear Bee. Without rising, she stretched across to the built-in bedside table and clicked on the radio.

  It was Bad Cathy. She was playing something by k.d. lang from the soundtrack of Until the End of the World. Molly thought, So much for clairaudience.

  Afterlife Factoid #10

  Even for the dead, psychic powers

  are an iffy business.

  Ludi lay there listening for a while. Finally she made a little groan and lifted herself to a sitting position.

  "What a night," she declared.

  Molly smiled. She laid an immaterial hand on the young woman's shoulder.

  "I hate men," Ludi said.

  She threw the blanket off, newly energized, and Molly thought of Tex's all-time favorite line from a network TV show: "Hatred becomes like energy. It's a kind of food. You can live on it."

  But then Ludi crossed the room toward the tiny ship's head, and she said, "No I don't." And she slumped a little, as though the realization that she did not truly hate men were too terrible to contemplate, this early in the morning.

  Well, that's how men are, thought Molly.

  Ludi took a quick shower and then emerged dripping and naked to put the kettle on. She pulled out Molly's old supply of Earl Grey and spooned it generously into the pot. Molly got the curious sense of her own life being lived at a slight remove—not much alteration of the routine, other than a change of bodies. She tried to get into Ludi's head to see how it felt from in there (besides which, she was not entirely sure what Ludi was doing on the houseboat: hiding from Guillermo?), but she could not.

  Vexed, she drifted forward to the pilot house to brood over the little altar.

  The chart table had been dusted. The candle there and some of the rocks had been slightly displaced.

  Molly put her fingers on the Zuni bear fetish. She could feel its energy, a tingle running through the meridians of her ghostly fingertips; but she could not quite pick it up, only jostle it a little on the altar top. How did poltergeists manage to throw furniture across the room? Syzygy would probably know. The little turquoise bear toted a bundle of medicine rocks on its back, and a tiny red feather, like a tail, which it appeared to jauntily wag. Molly thought you really could see something of Tex in it. Something about the tiny carved and painted eyes. A gleam of irreverence.

  "Bear," she said, "what's happened to you?"

  And the Heavenly Bear replied:

  I AM KEEPING HIM SAFE. HE WILL BE RETURNING TO THE WORLD SHORTLY.

  Molly pulled her hand back from the fetish and thought, Wow. I didn't know it could talk.

  Ludi walked in. She was wearing clothes now, though still damp and barefoot. She stood beside Molly and looked down at the spread of ceremonial objects on the chart table.

  "Did you move?" she asked the little bear.

  Her voice was light, unconcerned; she did not suspect any such thing, really. She reached down and picked up the fetish and at the instant she did so, a little spark of qi seemed to crackle into her hand and up her arm. Her eyes opened wide.

  "That's it," she said. She squeezed the fetish hard: Molly could sense the energies flowing between them. "I knew I had seen that before."

  The bear? No—Ludi's eyes were fixed on something else, an object lost and now found again in a freshly remembered setting.

  Still holding the bear, Ludi walked quickly back into the cabin and tugged on her bright pink high-top All-Stars. She pawed at the pockets of a lightweight jacket she had hung on Tex's giant hookah.

  "Aha!" she cried.

  When you think you're alone, Molly reflected, you actually behave in a rather melodramatic fashion. Like you're playing to an invisible audience. Like you sense that someone is watching, even if you don't believe it.

  Ludi held up the business card of one Eugene Deere, Ph.D., Senior Researcher. She rubbed the heavy-stock paper between her fingers, as though it held the solution to some tantalizing intrigue.

  Ludi said, hi her stagiest voice: "Now where do you suppose I might find you, Mr. Deere?"

  And Molly thought, I can tell you that.

  STORMING THE FORTRESS

  They hit the shore together. Ludi was a jogger and she made good time winding through the streets of Dublin toward her apartment on the other side of town. Molly was a spirit, but nonetheless the journey was tiring for her. She tagged along a pace or two behind, just over Ludi's shoulder, but that wasn't the strenuous part. What tired her out was the effort of keeping her grip on the young woman's awareness. Because Ludi was a Woman Possessed.

  What possessed her, exactly, was hard for Molly to tell. To be sure, the raw facts of the situation were easy enough to assemble:

  1. Guillermo had taken Ludi's car in order to chase down his stolen computer disk.

  2. So Ludi, stranded, had ridden with Deep Herb to Dan Dan's Pizza Scene.

  3. Where she met Gene Deere.

  4. Who was wearing Tex's pendant.

  5. Which Ludi glimpsed (without recognizing it) while dumping pizza in his lap and storming out.

  6. To spend the night on the Linear Bee.

  7. So that she wouldn't have to decide right away how to deal with Guillermo.

  8. Only now, having placed the pendant in its proper context, she was determined to track it down.

  9. For what purpose? At the very least, to demand to know how a corporate toad like Gene Deere had gotten his hands on Tex's treasured belonging.

  10. But 1st she would have to sneak over to her own place and steal her car back.

  11. Without alerting Guillermo, who was probably lying in wait for her.

  12. Though of course, he would be pretending not to.

  All of which Molly more or less easily understood.

  What was mysterious, though, was Ludi's unusual state of—what would you call it? Exalted anxiety? A jacked-up, adrenaline-enhanced condition that did not seem to fit the observed facts of the situation. Like, at all.

  What we have here, Molly decided, is Narrative Tension. A dramatic ploy she had always admired. The tension in this case being created by a disjunction between what is known by the protagonist (Ludi) and what is perceived by the audience (Molly). Which in dramaturgic terms gives rise to a need for resolution, for release—a condition of mounting stress perhaps psychologically related to rising sexual pressure. Molly could hardly stand it. She struggled to hang on while Ludi trotted across town.

  Ludi's apartment, several blocks away in a pleasantly faded residential quarter, was the finished-off second story of an old garage. It was roomy, private, impossible to heat, and eminently affordable. You climbed up to it via a flight of open stairs on the windiest side of the building. At the base of these was a gravel parking area that entirely covered what had been the backyard of the associated house, except for a row of obese lilac bushes full of dead wood.

  Sure enough, there was Ludi's orange Volkswagen.

  Sure enough, there was a light in the kitchen where Guillermo was probably plunked on his butt waiting for her to get home.

  But sure enough, by the time he heard the car fire up and got his face to the window to see what was happening, she was out of there! And Molly was right behind her. It was cool, zipping along just above the roof of the car with the wind whipping right through your face.

  Ludi got lost twice on the way out to the old Goddin Air Force Base. She didn't mind; it gave her a chance to stop and ask for directions, which led to conversations with friendly people hanging out in their front yards looking for someone to talk about the weather with. On mornings in the Maine springtime, this was something you did. Ludi suspected there were people alive who had met their future spouses this way.

  Past a big lumberyard that exuded the fresh smell of sawn wood, past a local sculptor's welded Cor-Ten naiads in their pond of cattails and lily pads, Ludi turned left onto a road that had acquired a Buffalo Commons atmosphere since the base closed down—empty houses, lawn grass grown tall and golden, deserted parking lots sprouting crops of fireweed, a rusting corrugated metal bowling alley—and after a couple of miles she came to the chain-link and barbed-wire perimeter of the Goddin Forest Research station, which looked both desolate and prosperous at the same time. It was like one of those ambitious enterprise zones in the middle of a bombed-out ghetto. Only here at least the air was clean and the sun made you feel optimistic and the sky spread out like there was no end to anything.

  The contract security guy came out of his little shack holding a clipboard. He said, "Good morning, ma'am. Is anyone expecting you?"

  Ludi held out Gene Deere's business card. She said, "I'm doing an interview."