"I don't think so," said Molly. "Anyway, my eye is tired."

  "Poor Raven." His tone was gently mocking, but his smile was warm: the old Tex. He rubbed her temples the way she liked, and she leaned back against the rail of the flying bridge, letting the sensation ripple through her.

  "Sometimes," she said, "just lately, you know? I feel like I could float away from here."

  The fingers at her temples pressed for a second harder. Tex said: "Better not. Not just yet. We've got stuff to take care of."

  Molly made a noise between a hmm of pleasure and a moan of dread. Her emotions seemed to be converging into a single, multihued energy.

  In the galley, Gene was staring at Ludi, who was licking the smeary remains of a mystery cheese sandwich off her fingers. She took her time about it. "And no," she said when she was good and done. "You're not stuck with the poor little bear forever. Just till he's ready to go out on his own."

  "Which will be when?" said Gene. "When we're all dead?"

  Tex grumbled something not even halfway audible. Why doesn't he give up speaking, Molly wondered, and just growl?

  They hung there, two invisible presences, at the door of the galley. Gene and Ludi were so close that Molly could have stuck her hand right through them.

  Tex said, "So this guy is a real scientist?"

  "He's a botanist," said Molly. "Is that real?"

  Gene said, "What do I think about what?"

  "This place," said Ludi. She brushed past him, waving a hand around the Bee. "Tex and Molly's houseboat. All their cool stuff. Isn't it great?''

  As she spoke she stepped into the living quarters; one elbow passed through Tex's chest. He sighed. Ludi frowned, as though a peculiar thought had niggled at her mind. Then she went the rest of the way to the sitting area, turning in the middle of the room. "Can you imagine living here?" she asked Gene. Her slender arms spread wide. "I think it would be swell. Don't you? I thought you'd get a kick out of it."

  Gene entered the room with much less enthusiasm. "You're starting to sound like a Cole Porter song," he said.

  "Really?" The thought made her faintly smile. "That radio station, I guess. I've gotten to like it, though. Except the commercials, which are all for like Buicks and pharmacies. And you've got to be careful you don't accidentally hear Paul Harvey."

  Gene chuckled grimly. "Yeah, that can blow your whole day." His eyes passed over the bookshelf, flashing »tth recognition at The Complete Marijuana Grower's Home Handbook. "Hey, look," he said, "this is a classic." He pulled it out, too quickly: the binding had come onglued and pages fell everywhere.

  "I'll say." Ludi stooped to examine a black & white photograph of a plant so happy-looking it appeared to be humming to itself. She said, "What's Durban Poison?"

  "Ah: the first really excellent strain bred for the small-scale grower." Gene's hands were now full of loose pages which he was attempting to place in order. "That was on the West Coast somewhere, working mostly with sativa. Then the major breeding work shifted to the Netherlands, aod indica came into play. Personally I would have stuck with sativa and tried to get a natural dwarf with a quick flowering cycle. But that's just me."

  Ludi settled onto the couch. She examined him from a new angle. "Why does a totally square guy like you know so much about growing marijuana?"

  "Square?" He looked at her in annoyance. "That's worse than swell. Do you object to people taking an interest in things? I am a botanist, after all."

  "All I was asking was why. It doesn't seem to fit, is all."

  "Oh, it doesn't?" He spread the disassembled parts of the Home Handbook on the coffee table. "I suppose what you want is things to be—what was it? Nice and orderly. Well, it might interest you to know that I am one of the few people in the United States legally certified by the Food and Drug Administration to cultivate Cannabis."

  She studied his face—completely serious, though that could have been routine dweebishness—and at last she said, "Are you trying to bullshit me?"

  "Not at the moment. It's part of my work at Goddin. There's been interest lately in the potential of Cannabis as a fiber crop—to feed paper mills, and also for textile applications, because it isn't water-intensive like cotton. There's a real need for something to plug the hole in the pulp supply, now that loblolly pines are dying in Carolina. Hemp is a logical candidate. So yeah—I'm growing marijuana. It's only a day job."

  Ludi's look of amusement was drifting (perhaps unwittingly) toward fondness. Molly smiled, too. Gene was so young—not even born yet when smoking pot was something you did as a gesture of tribal affiliation: not just for the sake of getting high but for the different way it made you look at things. Of course Molly had now been looking at things that way for so long that it was hard to remember what had been so different about it.

  "I bet you've never smoked a bud," said Ludi.

  Molly came around to rest beside the younger woman on the sofa. The view of Gene's face was better. She liked watching him react to Ludi's constant challenges. He surely could not have understood what this was all about. As perhaps Ludi didn't, either.

  "How about it?" Ludi pressed him. "Tell me all about your wild and crazy life."

  On Gene's face, a struggle unfolded. Two opposing groups of facial muscles were involved—one of which wanted to lift his brow and narrow his eyes in a look of savoir faire, while the other wanted to clench his jaw and flash his eyes in denial. The contending forces tugged back and forth, until a third (more Gene-like) expression broke through them. Baffled and boyish—science whiz flunking out of English 205, Absurdity in Contemporary Drama—he flopped on the sofa, a safe enough distance from Ludi.

  "I don't get it," he said. "Why can't we pick a topic and have a conversation without the whole thing coming around to being about me? What is this weird fascination you've got with whether I have antennas growing out of my head?"

  Ludi fidgeted deeper into the sofa and said, "Hey, don't take it so personally. I was just—"

  "Just what?" said Tex, hovering across the room.

  "Shh." Molly laid a hand supportively on the young woman's shoulder.

  "Tell me," said Tex. "You can let me in on these woman secrets now that I'm dead, can't you?"

  Molly shook her head. "That's why they're called secrets."

  "You were just," Gene repeated carefully. He stared at the coffee table covered with photographs of pot. The wake of a passing lobster boat caused the Bee to rise a few inches, swaying to starboard. Through a porthole came the noise of a radio tuned loudly to the country station that called itself 92 MOOSE.

  "She's actin' single," the singer lamented, "I'm drinkin' doubles."

  "Yeah," said Ludi. "I was just."

  The two of them looked at each other. Gene looked at her eyes and she looked at his mouth. From its place in the sky the sun hurled down enough thermonuclear energy to satisfy the needs of humankind for a couple of weeks. Photosynthetic organisms captured a fraction of this, but as with most of the blessings of Nature, the planet blew 99 percent of it.

  Gene hadn't shaved this morning and his upper lip was shadowed by a pale brown moustache. Ludi's hair was a lovely mess. Their mutual blood pressure rose and they smelled like a pair of healthy young animals. Molly felt her own immaterial body quivering.

  "Um," said Gene.

  Ludi moved closer to him. Not touching. But into his bubble of private space. She tossed her head, as though getting something out of the way. "Hey," she murmured.

  "Hey," he said. Scared to death—but the kind of scared that might instantly snap over to medal-winning bravery. His eyes were large and brown and they seemed to deepen, to enfold things.

  Her hand was almost on his arm and his lips were moving to hers when a beeper went off.

  "You've got to be kidding," groaned Molly.

  "Yes!" shouted Tex. "Saved by the bell!"

  Ludi practically leapt off the sofa. She said, "What's that?"

  Gene's eyes fell shut. If he was trying by force of will to make the beeper self-destruct, he failed. Like a man waking up from the greatest dream ever, he moved his hand to his belt and unclipped the plastic box. One-eyed, he stared down at it. "It's the Antichrist," he said. "I am being summoned to the Underworld."

  "Watch yourself, buddy," said Tex. "That's nothing to joke about."

  Molly could not believe she was hearing Tex say that anything was nothing to joke about.

  Afterlife Factoid #15

  It's amazing the effect death has on people.

  "Would it be okay," said Gene, considerately looking away, "if I used your friends' telephone?"

  "Their what?" She smiled in a familiar, mocking way.

  He blinked at her. "They don't have a telephone?"

  "This is a boat, Doctor."

  "So what? They could get a cellular phone." "A cellular phone?" Ludi smirked. "Tex and Molly?"

  "Oh, excuse me. They're friends of yours, aren't they. What was I thinking of?"

  They looked sardonically at one another: comfortable again. Back on familiar territory.

  Gene said, "I guess I better go find a pay phone somewhere. Or maybe I should just drive out to Goddin."

  "On a Saturday?"

  "Is it Saturday?" Gene shook his head. He was not accustomed to losing track of time. He shrugged. "Probably it's nothing that will take very long."

  Ludi bit her lip. She said, "I've got to work later this afternoon."

  "You do?"

  "Not for a while, though."

  The beeper went off again. Gene switched it off and stuffed it deep in a pocket.

  Ludi smiled. "The Antichrist always rings twice?"

  He didn't get it. Biology major. He took a step toward the hatch. A narrow slice of sunlight fell onto his face, and he raised his hand to block it. Then he turned back to Ludi and said: "Why don't you come? It probably won't take long and then we can do something."

  "Do something?" she said. Like a kind of dare. A challenge.

  Blithely he accepted it. "Maybe if you behave," he told her, "I'll show you my marijuana fields."

  Ludi seemed not to be listening. Her energies were devoted to recomposing herself. This involved mostly her hair, which she gathered in a sort of bundle that she then could not decide what to do with.

  WILD BLUE

  "Where are you going?" Molly asked the raven perched on the railing of the flying bridge.

  Quoth the raven: "Never mind."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Nothing."

  Molly didn't believe this for a minute. She had half a mind to grab the pesky bird and clip his wings. "You're going to spy on them, aren't you?"

  The raven did not deny this. He lifted one clawed foot and then the other, edgily.

  Molly said, "How did you learn to do this, anyhow?"

  "Do what?"

  "Do what?" She shook her head. "Are you aware that you have turned into a bird?"

  "Oh, that." The raven made a funny wing gesture: sort of a shrug. "Just an old motewolon thing."

  Molly thought, Who says you can't teach an old Bear new tricks? "Just be careful," she said.

  "Ha!" he cawed at her. "What's the worst that can happen—I die and get eaten by a Worm?"

  The raven took flight. He circled the flying bridge a couple of times, blatantly showing off. Molly pretended to be unimpressed.

  "This shouldn't take long," he squawked.

  And Molly stood there watching

  until the magic bird

  disappeared.

  or

  maybe it'll take a while

  * * *

  after all, thought Tex, when he was away from the Bee and staring down at the immensity of creation. Something about being up here made you want never to touch the Earth again. Like something about dropping acid made you want never to come down. You never wanted to lose this feeling of clarity, of freedom from constraint, of boundless perspective.

  He had lost sight of Gene and Ludi. But by spiraling higher he could make out the Goddin base, a quilt of green fields and cinder-colored runways spread across the countryside to the west-northwest. Tex glided for a minute or two, taking a look at the world he had known.

  To the east he saw brownish, boulder-strewn expanses that looked like desolate moors but were actually profitable blueberry fields. He saw clusters of white houses, and among them the occasional obligatory steeple. In the middle distance rose the blue hump of Awonadjo Mountain, with the insectile antenna of WURS on top. Past that lay Cadillac Mountain, the first spot in the U.S.A. to catch the rising sun. Southward, hundreds of islands drifted like ice floes. Beyond them lay the great murky ocean he and Molly had sailed in upon.

  Turning inland, he saw land so deeply green that it might have been black. The Great North Woods, rolling all the way up to Canada and then still rolling on until the last stunted spruces gave way to sedges and mosses and stunted ericaceous shrubs of the treeless tundra. It looked so mighty and endless that you almost couldn't make yourself worry about it. But it was not the forest that had been. It was trammeled and weakened and reduced. Even so, it remained a forest: home to moose and coyotes and eagles and bears. (And wolves! but that was Tex's secret.) The day was coming when none of those creatures could survive there, when the forest became a vast monocultured tree farm, and ultimately when even the trees themselves succumbed to a surfeit of nitrates in the rain, leaching of mineral cations from the soil, steady bombardment of unfiltered ultraviolet radiation, and a thousand other daily insults from an increasingly hostile world.

  The Worm would have the whole thing, before it was over.

  And then it would be over.

  What can a raven do? Tex turned westward and tucked his wings in close and lowered his beak and stiffened his resolve. He was going to be a good trouper. He was going to make Molly proud of him.

  But first, he was going to see what Gene and Ludi were up to.

  A.C.

  A beaten-up brown Suburban sat in the outermost of the parking lots of the old Goddin base. From his tree-high approach altitude, the raven's eyes could make out only one of the many stickers that occluded its windows.

  BAN FIREARMS—

  MAKE THE STREETS SAFE FOR

  A GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER

  A government takeover? thought Tex. Followed by what: the government installs itself as ... the government?

  In the back of the Suburban, fenced off from the passenger seats by a steel mesh like that in city police cars, was a large and unusual-looking dog.

  No time for that. Gene Deere's Rover sat outside the huge sliding doors of a converted hangar, retrofitted with rows of skylights. Some of the skylights were open for ventilation, and Tex could detect the characteristic odor of a greenhouse: peaty, nitrogenous, oxygen-rich and watery closeness. He flattened his wings and slid down on currents of humid air, feeling like a hugely cool hang glider.

  The aluminum struts that supported the hangar roof made an impressive though somewhat dangerous perch. Below Tex hung banks of high-intensity-discharge lamps, their output blue-shifted from that of natural sunlight. Waves of heat rose from them, and the air hummed with the kind of buzz you get from an improperly grounded amplifier. Through the buzz Tex made out the sound of voices, somewhere below. The humidity and the HIDs together created a ceiling-level haze that was difficult to see through; so Tex (with misgivings duly recorded) stepped off the strut and fluttered downward, into the blinding upper cavity of the hangar.

  Now he could see that the greenhouse held hundreds of parallel arrays of hydroponic tubs, linked by fat black rubber hoses and transparent plastic nutrient tubes, with an overhead matrix of ABS pipes that dispensed carbon dioxide. From a certain perspective the whole thing looked like a massively magnified computer chip, so that for an instant Tex—still descending in a wobbly spiral—felt like one of the reluctantly downsized kids on The Magic School Bus.

  Then his sense of proportion flipped around and he felt awed by the hugeness of the operation. Thousands—no, millions—of tiny evergreen plants stood calf-high in the endless rows of water-filled tanks. Their needles were dark green, nearly black, and their stubby limbs stuck out in cone-shaped patterns that appeared identical from one baby tree to the next.

  Clones, Tex supposed. An entire army of willing and able troops being readied for a blitzkrieg on the North Woods. As with well-made war movies, you had to admit there was a certain pulse-quickening grandeur about it all. You found yourself, even against your will, stirred by the martial hymns. Your feet tapped in time to the goose-stepping storm troopers. The next thing you knew, your popcorn was gone.

  Tex snapped out of it. He heard the voices again, and he saw two men and a woman walking between ranks of seedlings on the opposite side of the hangar—far enough that Tex couldn't see their faces, though he figured they must be Gene and Ludi and (at last we meet!) the Antichrist. He swung himself around and flew in for a closer look.

  Gene appeared to be annoyed and slightly flustered.

  Ludi looked bored, ready to get out of here.

  As for the A.C., he was as handsome, tanned and impeccably tailored as Tex had always (subliminally) supposed he must be. Sort of a Bar Harbor Yacht Club type.

  Forgetting that he was visible, Tex glided close enough that Ludi, distracted, took notice of him. She stared up as though grateful to find something to look at, besides these rows of plants and soughing fluid lines. The two men were locked in arcane discussion—

  calcium ion levels ... root-temperature spikes ... morphological impairment...

  —so Tex circled back, giving Ludi another fly-by. She smiled when she saw him. She waved with one whole arm.

  "Hey, Jack," she called. "Is that you?"

  Jack? thought Tex.

  quoonnk, he called back to her. Just by way of making small talk.

  Gene looked about, as though sensing that another conversation was taking place. He saw Ludi gazing toward the ceiling but did not follow her eyes up to Tex. "Are you talking to yourself?" he said.