"I invoke Gort," the priestess declared, "spirit of Ivy, the tree of protection. I invoke the Twrc the boar, ruthless and red. I invoke Geis, the mute swan. I call upon you to join your power with ours, so that we may accomplish the working that lies ahead of us."

  The women felt a tingling move among them. They shivered pleasurably.

  Syzygy fished in another pocket and pulled out a medicine vial, the kind eardrops come in. She squirted this liberally about the altar, nearly extinguishing one of the candles.

  "By this tincture of male fern, whose uncurled fronds we gathered today at Midsummer Dawn, I call upon Flidais, protectress of woodlands and wild things. I invite her to attend with us also, and help us in our task."

  The women shared an inquisitive look. Syzygy was famous for issuing wake-up calls to obscure and long-slumbering deities. Sometimes she got an answer and sometimes she did not. Out on Route 1, an RV horn bleated. A chancy breeze swirled through the stand of rugosa roses that blocked the view of the I.G.A. parking lot. Their smell was heady.

  Syzygy scratched in the ground with her athame. She inscribed a circular form, a spiral or labyrinth. Then she spat into the center of it.

  "I call upon Nantosuelta," she said loudly, "keeper of holy wells, attendant at troubled births, patron of the domestic arts, friend of bees and doves, cousin of the great dark goddess Morrigu, also known as Battle-Raven and as Morgan la Fay."

  The women perked up at this. Something about the invocation seemed right to them. At least the resume was impressive.

  "Nantosuelta," repeated Pippa.

  The Witches murmured the name. Syzygy laid her athame on the altar. She ran a hand through her disorganized hair.

  "All of you who have come to our circle," she said, "mortal and ever-living, visible and unseen: hear me. Today we reach a turning point in the wheel of the year. The energies of growth and fertility that were born at Beltane are today coming to full flower. In a few weeks the flower will bear fruit and we will celebrate Lugnassad, the beginning of the harvest. But today is the turning point. Today is the day of election. At Midsummer, the Earth moves from a time of opening to a time of enfoldment. We pass from the open petals of the flower, which welcome the sun and the pollinating bee, to the closed and secret world within the pistil, where the embryo of the seed is nurtured. Midsummer is the instant when the infinite possibilities of the past converge into the singular destiny of the future. The open bid becomes the sealed contract. The wave packet collapses to reveal the particle. Do you follow me?"

  Yes & no. The Witches understood Midsummer in their hearts and their bones and possibly in their wombs; not necessarily in their minds. Syzygy knew it as a song in her blood.

  She said, "This is where we must put our energies, then. We will help Nature choose the best outcome. So that when the many grains of pollen race down the style to reach the innermost sanctum of the ovule, the best grain will win."

  "That sounds pretty heterosexist," one of the Witches said.

  Syzygy shrugged. "It's Nature's way. If we're going to have a future, somebody's got to get fucked."

  The women, for the most part, enjoyed this sort of thing—the Earthy touch. They smiled and shook their neads. Syzygy, they thought. That Syzygy.

  "Are we going to do scrying or something?" asked Pippa.

  "Better than that," said Syzygy. "We're going to cast a spell."

  So saying, she whipped her violet sweatshirt over her head and kicked out of her jeans. It was the Witches' custom to perform spell-workings naked, or (to use the ecclesiastically correct term) skyclad. Happily the women pulled their clothes off. Sunshine and a chancy breeze danced across their skin, made them feel deliciously free, stoked on power, at one with the ecstatic spirits.

  Then they cast their spell. But we may know nothing about that, because spells are secret.

  WORLD BEAT

  Sefyn Hunter took the day off. He wanted to get a little drumming in. Anyway he had been working hard lately, picking up the slack for Gene Deere—whom, please don't take this wrong, he absolutely adored. But let's face it: Gene just wasn't cut out to be an organization man.

  On a bluff overlooking the ocean, surrounded by boulders and naturalized heather and an occasional candelabra of woolly thistle, Onopordum acanthum—which would have been the first thing Sefyn planted in his own backyard garden, if he had one—he carefully folded his clothes and stacked them in a soft pile. He took a tube of woad blue cream makeup and smeared it over his cheeks, around his eyes, down his throat, around his nipples, and in a line bisecting his stomach, crossing the navel, and terminating in his pubic hair. Then he sat cross-legged and placed his double-doumbek between his knees. Lightly, tentatively, he tapped the acrylic skin. He listened to the wind that scoured the hillside, distant applause of the surf, occasional cries of gulls or squonks of ravens that circled in the sky before him, apparently for the fun of it.

  After a few minutes he picked up the pulse of the day. It was strong but changeable, now moving slow deep in the Earth, now picking up speed and racing skyward. Sefyn followed it as best he could, bending low over his drums and then arching back, stretching his spine into an inverse comma. Staring in wonder at the glassy cerulean of the heavens. After a while he ceased to hear his drumming as a thing separate from the rest of the world. The air that entered his lungs took on a rich and nutritive quality. He felt he could live on it. Of course, in a sense he was living on it. Heedlessly, Sefyn laughed.

  After an hour or so his arms lost all feeling and his back was sore and his stomach felt tight, his eyes dry, his mind empty. He saw nothing now and heard nothing outside the infinitely resonant life-sound of his drums, which seemed more intimately connected to the essence of Sefyn than his own heartbeat.

  The sun reached its highest point in the sky. Sefyn's penis followed it, pointing upward, tilting slightly south. All his blood seemed to have gone there, because his head felt empty and for a moment or two he wondered if he actually had fainted—whether he was lying on the ground, and if so, whether he had fallen onto his drums. Then he understood that he hadn't fainted; he had had an orgasm. It had knocked him just about senseless, but even so, he remained upright. The drums were silent. All he was doing was sitting there. More or less in amazement.

  Watching his millions of fallen sperm cells

  swim down into the body

  of the Earth.

  or

  maybe the world is not a stage

  * * *

  at all. Maybe the world is a totally real and very serious place, and all the people in it are exactly what they appear to be. Maybe the Normal People (i.e., who think their jobs are important, get regular haircuts, mow their lawns) are the ones who have it right, who really understand the way the Universe is wired.

  Maybe having a sense of humor is okay—at least in your own private time—but not strictly necessary for a good and valuable life. Maybe life, in the end, is no laughing matter. Maybe death is no laughing matter. Maybe God does not make jokes, does not laugh at your jokes, and is not amused by this sort of speculation. Maybe the way teenagers feel is just a phase. Maybe you have to give up your youthful illusions sooner or later.

  Maybe the suburbs are really good, healthy environments.

  Maybe young minds need to be shielded from dangerous ideas and pictures of naked people touching each other.

  Maybe the thinning of the ozone layer is due to natural cyclic factors unrelated to the Gulf Atlantic quarterly earnings report.

  Maybe rich people need a tax break so they can save and invest and create a climate of economic vitality which will benefit all Americans in the long run.

  Maybe people like you should go live somewhere else. Maybe humankind's destiny is in the stars. Or in digital circuits. Or pure thought. So the "natural" world is not that big a deal, in the long run.

  TEX & MOLLY DELIBERATE UPON THESE AND

  OTHER ISSUES, FINALLY REACHING A VERDICT

  Nah.

  THE THING; THE PLAY

  Ludi could hardly have been more nervous if she were trapped between a baby bear and its mommy.

  She passed through the crowd of people who had gathered around the gazebo at the center of the Dublin green: one of those quaint New England photo ops that serve no known function in modern community life. In her arms she clutched a cardboard box scrounged from the back of the I.G.A. and filled with drama-related paraphernalia:

  Masks

  Silly hats

  ID tags to be hung around people's necks

  Sheets of paper summarizing the Start-up Conditions

  Index cards bearing the title and meme of each character

  Flyers

  Fireworks

  Noisemakers

  Child-safe plastic light sticks

  Noncompetitive judging cards

  Fabulous prizes! (remaindered copies of

  I'm OK, You're DOA by Franz Bibfeldt)

  "Drama in a box," Gene had declared, surveying the contents happily.

  But that had been this morning, before he drove off to attend something he called, in the bleakest tones, a power breakfast. Leaving Ludi alone today of all days. She had tried calling Eben, who was not home, and then Pippa, who was getting ready for a ritual. Finally she reached Deep Herb, hanging around Dan Dan's apartment upstairs from the Pizza Scene, having apparently forgotten to go home the previous night. Deep Herb agreed to come help her get set up on the green—which was no guarantee that he would materialize. Somewhat to her surprise, he not only showed up—3 reefers later, however—but also brought along Dan Dan, Sara Clump (who had splintered from Guillermo's splinter group after a quarrel over ideology), and an off-duty deputy sheriff whom they had found puzzling over the bumper stickers on Sara's illegally parked car.

  "I keep seeing this little rainbow decal everywhere," the deputy had said. His name was Doug. "Does it mean anything? Or I mean, is it just pretty or what?"

  "Come with us," Deep Herb told the deputy. "You'll see."

  And because of the way Deep Herb was—guileless, unthreatening—Deputy Doug consulted his watch and scratched his closely cropped head and climbed into Deep Herb's backseat. They left Sara's car where it was parked (illegally), figuring they now had official Sheriffs Department sanction. By the time the four of them finished the drive to Dublin, Dan Dan and the deputy had discovered a mutual interest in tattoos, and Sara and the deputy had discovered a mutual interest in Ludi. Nobody discovered any mutual interest with Deep Herb, other than perhaps a shared hope that his car not execute an auto-da-fe.

  "What a perfect day!" Sara exclaimed, extracting herself from the backseat.

  Ludi handed her a stack of flyers. "Maybe you could start passing these around," she said. "So people will know about the performance."

  "Maybe it should be a surprise," said Sara, who only wanted to hang in the sunshine.

  "It'll be a surprise," said Ludi. "Don't worry about that."

  "Yeah," said Deep Herb, gravely. "Spontaneous, man."

  Dan Dan took off his shirt. Ludi could not help admiring the spiderweb that (in lieu of actual body hair) filled in the space between his nipples. His stomach was as flat as a boy's. What is the matter with me? she wondered.

  Deputy Doug tried to engage her in conversation. She thought there was something strangely mechanical about him. Cast him against type, she decided.

  "Here," she said, pulling a mask-and-meme set out of the grocery box. "You be the Lipstick Lesbian."

  "Pardon me?" he said, courteously.

  "Remember the rainbow sticker?" Sara Clump reminded him.

  He nodded, still somewhat perplexed.

  "You don't have to put the mask on yet," said Ludi. "Wait till dark."

  Dark would not come for another few hours. No one was sure how many. Something about the way time moves at this time of year—jaggedly, like a sailboat tacking into the wind—keeps you in a state of chronic uncertainty as to such matters as duration, minutes elapsed, hours yet to go. It is as though you are traveling across some unvarying, though beautiful, landscape. There is no way to gauge your speed or the rate of your progress. Suddenly you have arrived someplace. How did it happen? Is this a good place to be? Could you have stayed in that other place, that unbroken journeying, forever? You aren't sure.

  They handed out flyers, hung streamers from the gazebo, took breaks to stroll to the Real Food Co-op for raspberry-creme soda. Eben Creek arrived with Indigo's boom box. It was tuned to WURS, where Bad Cathy was playing a totally inappropriate Leonard Cohen set. "Jazz police are looking through my folder," sang the Buddhist in black. Ludi spun the dial. Soon they were swirling around to the theme from the Warner Brothers classic Unchained. Deep Herb and Dan Dan got more spaced. Ludi assigned a Fleet Bank loan officer the role of Gun-Toting Survivalist, and asked an elderly tourist from Delaware if he would like to be a Rock. He examined the meme card, which read:

  Meme R

  Dresses down-market; regards political change with equanimity.

  The tourist agreed. Ludi suggested that he might want to sit in the middle of the green. "Where you'll be in everybody's way," she said. "That's what rocks do here in Maine."

  The Rock seemed to grasp this readily. A natural, empathetic performer.

  Things were falling into place. Anyway, that's what Ludi thought.

  IN THE WINGS

  Wild Jag Eckhart drove his Suburban slowly along the road just inside the perimeter fence of the Goddin Forest Research Station. He passed the trial plots containing X dawkinsia. He passed stands of mixed softwoods, spruce and pine and fir. He passed plots where spruce trees were planted on a low-density grid, interplanted with transgenic fiber-maximized Cannabis sativa. He came at last to the plots where hard- and softwoods grew together in considerable diversity, approximating conditions in the wild. One of these patches reminded Eckhart of the woods around the Sovereign Citizens' Militia Training Camp and Nature Preserve (tax and land-use classification pending). He braked the Suburban. He decided that here was where the first canister ought to go.

  Eckhart had been, regrettably, too young for Vietnam. By the time of the later, more limited overseas engagements he had lost interest in organized governmental forms of warfare. Too tame, he thought; like fighting in a ring with gloves on, surrounded by ropes, and watched over by a referee. Besides which the government was not to be trusted.

  Nonetheless Eckhart retained certain military or paramilitary enthusiasms, most of them acquired from watching movies like Platoon and Apocalypse Now. One of his greatest fascinations was with napalm. He had read articles about napalm in Soldier of Fortune and had ordered a book from Paladin Press on how to make the stuff yourself, right in your own workshop or garage. It was pretty easy, though you had to understand that you were violating a Dow Chemical Corporation patent if you followed the standard recipe. Eckhart was basically a law-abiding man, when it came to laws he considered just. So he tinkered with the recipe, scorching a number of acres of marketable timber in the process, until he hit upon a formula he could live with. It was a little slower to ignite, but when you got it going it burned like a son of a bitch. He had happened to mention this personal interest of his to Chas Sauvage one day—it was funny how that man could get you talking, even though he seldom showed much interest in what you were actually talking about—and Sauvage had come up to him later, months later, and said, "Wild Jag, I think I've got an interesting application for that hobby of yours."

  Now, Eckhart understood without having to be told that he was getting into kind of a tricky area here. Because on the one hand you could say that what he was about to do was all in the line of duty, following orders from the boss, et cetera. But on the other he knew something sneaky or shady was going on. You didn't have to be a gene-splicer to figure that out. Just the way Sauvage acted when you talked to him—slipperier than a snake in a bucket of snot—was enough to put you wise. Beyond that, there was the strange assignment itself.

  "Take out," Sauvage had said, speaking slowly and clearly, as though explaining something to a child, "the mixed-growth plots. All the naturalistic or quasi-naturalistic areas. I want them taken out of the equation. Do you understand?"

  Sure thing, boss. Eckhart found it entertaining when people underestimated him. That put you in the position of knowing something they did not, which was always an advantage.

  "Then you can go for the hemp stands, the SPF plots—whatever seems appropriate. I don't care so much about that. Only, it should not look specifically targeted, you understand? It should not look as though any particular area had been singled out. As though the station itself—the whole operation, the Company—were the target."

  He had not asked Eckhart if he understood, after that. Presumably because Eckhart was not meant to understand. Whatever this was about, it was Chas Sauvage's little secret. Eckhart guessed that much, but little more. Though he could have made a few guesses, if the question had been put to him. Not that he expected it ever would be; especially now, when the blame would fall so clearly on that band of greenie hackers. But if the question had been put to him, hypothetically, he might have guessed that the whole thing had to do with this very quiet struggle that was being waged between Sauvage and his chief of research, Eugene Deere. Eckhart was not sure what the struggle was all about; and between the two of them, Deere and Sauvage, he could not have said whom he cared for less. Mostly they were both the kind of people he didn't waste time thinking about. But he suspected that Deere was turning out to be a little too touchy-feely for Sauvage's liking: too much i, tune with the times, sympathetic to the demonstrators that showed up outside the front gate now and again. Too close to being a pointy-headed McNeil-Lehrer type of person. And somehow this had translated into a disagreement over the trial plots and what to make of them. Which in turn probably fed into the visit by the Mondo Jefe from Texas, and from there into God knew what little twists and turns in Chas Sauvage's personal career plan.