Here is the second excerpt from my forthcoming novel Otherworld Inc. If you haven't read the prologue, scroll down to the next entry below. If you have, then enjoy ...

Part One: Liberty

Setting Out

 “Did you see the news last night?” Collette is sitting in the driver’s seat of her red humvie, both hands on the wheel and eyes straight ahead, watching the traffic on the wet four-lane highway that connects the Lewis and Clark Memorial Riftport with the new metropolis that has sprung up around the border town of Houlton, Maine. On either side of the road, the New England forest clings to the memory of night, pulling sheets of rain down from low clouds to wrap itself in obscurity.

“Watched it while I finished packing,” David replies from the passenger seat.

“And you’re still going through with this?”

“I’ve accepted the advance.”

“Give the money back. Say the situation’s too unstable. Say you’ll go in next year, after things calm down.”

David draws a slow breath, holds it a moment, and lets it out. “Sweetie,” he says. “This book will make my career …”

“You’ve already made your career,” she cuts him off. “Three books in print, the last two on the New York Times bestseller list. You don’t need to take this trip.”

“I’m a travel writer. Taking trips is my job.”

“Exactly,” she spares him a quick glance, her green eyes sharp, face not quite framed by close-cropped auburn hair. “You’re a travel writer, not a war reporter.”

“There’s not going to be another war.”

“Things haven’t been stable there for years.”

“Which is why this book is going to sell,” David presses. “The feeling of adventure. Danger. Keeps people turning pages.”

“But for your readers, the danger isn’t real.”

“You’re getting upset over nothing. You know how the media works. They can turn a bad day on Wall Street into a world crisis.”

“Sometimes a bad day on Wall Street is a world crisis.”

“You know what I mean.” They drive for several minutes in silence. A mist hangs over the road, kicked up by rain and passing tires. David watches the wipers sweeping back and forth. Their rhythmic shush, and the pounding of raindrops on the roof and glass, drive the silence inward.

“To be honest,” he speaks into the quiet, “I can’t blame them.”

“Blame who?”

“The Separationists. They’re only—”

“I don’t want to hear it, and neither does anyone else. You want to go get material for a book, go get material for a book. You want to follow that damn trail, then follow the damn trail. But keep your mouth shut about politics.”

“Yes dear,” David half smiles.

“I’m serious,” she glares at him again. “Whatever conflicts you find there, stay out of them. They’re not your problem.”

David’s half-smile disappears. “I will.”

“All right.” After another minute of windshield wipers and rain, she adds, “I love you, you know.”

A few minutes later, the forest gives way to the open fields of the Buffer Zone, an cleared of settlement and cover as a precaution against anything slipping through the Rift, or anyone getting close without government approval. Once a region of independent farms carved out of the rugged landscape of eastern Maine, the Buffer Zone is now empty. The farmers are gone—forcibly bought out—and the land itself lies bare. Uncultivated for the last twenty years, it is kept treeless by cutting and controlled burns. The houses and barns have been burned and bulldozed, the land blackened or spotted with decomposing stumps. Hilltops are crowned with scaffold watchtowers, their platforms topped with machine-gun nests. Regular patrols—platoons of infantry—make their rounds through the surrounding lowlands.

For ten miles in every direction from the Riftport, this is the world. The only other activity is to be found on the highway where, depending on the time of day, lines of cars or lines of trucks—container trucks, logging trucks, tanker trucks—make their way to and from McDermitt’s Rift and its promises of endless opportunity.

“Almost there,” Collette says as they pass by a large, recent burn. The scorched earth, darkened by ashes and rain, seems to stare into David. He stares back into it.

“I said,” she repeats, “we’re almost there.”

“Sorry. Mind was wandering.”

“I’d like to feel like more than a taxi driver.”

“Sorry,” he repeats, looking from her to the empty landscape and back to her again. “This place draws you out of yourself.”

“It draws you out of yourself. But that’s never taken much.”

“Look at it, though.” He takes his own advice and cranes his neck to see as much as he can. “Doesn’t it do anything to you? I guess I’m looking for nature to reassert itself.”

“Newsflash, Wordsworth. Nature threw us a curve ball. We don’t know how the Rift got here, and most of what’s on the other side is still a mystery. That’s nature. This,” she looks out the window, “this is just common sense.”

“I suppose.”

“So,” she adopts a more measured tone. “Let’s run through this one last time. Have you brought everything?”

“I think so, yes.”

“You think so, or yes?”

“Yes.”

“Camera and lenses?”

“Yep.”

“Note pad and voice recorder?”

“Yes.”

“Two changes of clothes?”

“Got ‘em.”

“Rain gear?”

“Check.”

“Tent and sleeping bag?”

“Check.”

“Rations? First aid kit?”

“Yes and yes.”

“Maps?”

“Maps.”

“Riftpass?”

“Right here.” He reaches into the breast pocket of his red plaid shirt and pulls out a  black booklet stamped in silver with the insignia of the Riftport Authority: an infinity symbol with the continents of Earth's western hemisphere in the right circle, the known lands of Neverland in the left, and the American coat of arms over all.

“Good.” She spares the pass a glance. “Promise me you’ll be careful?”

“I’ll be careful,” he tells her. “As careful as I can be.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

The riftport building is bland. Broad and low, it sprawls across several acres of former farmland. The only glass David can see as Collette pulls into the parking lot is in the row of doors that mark the civilian entrance near the left end of the structure. Otherwise, it is white walls punctuated with closed steel cargo doors and watched by mounted security cameras. Soldiers in black rain gear patrol the perimeter of the roof.

Along the top of the wall facing the parking lot, a row of billboards is mounted. Some are commercial, with ads for fast food chains and firearms manufacturers, while others offer friendly warnings to would-be sojourners of the otherworld: Dreamberries Kill, Jesus Saves, Security = Freedom.

When the humvie comes to a stop in a parking space fifty yards from the door, between a white Corvette and a lime green minivan, David and Collette step out. Collette makes for the concrete awning in front of the doorway while David dashes around and pulls his pack from the cargo space, slinging it over his shoulder and closing the hatch. Splashing across the lot, he joins his fiancée by the row of glass doors.

She is standing to the side to avoid the crowd. As David approaches her, hunching against the rain, she looks up at him, green eyes narrow and lips tight with concern.

“You worry too much,” he tells her. “Thousands of people cross through every day.”

“They don’t go traipsing along some wilderness trail. They live in communities or take tours in groups. And if they do go into the bush, they go in groups and carry lots of ammunition. What are you packing? Your camera?”

“I’ve been all over the world and never needed a gun.”

“You’re not going to be in the world.”

“I’d better check in.”

The riftport is bustling. From what David can see as he and Collette enter, the public section consists of a corridor running toward more glass doors about two hundred yards distant. Both sides of the hallway are lined with shops and counters, fast food stalls, and bank machines. All are crowded, and progress is slow. A gaunt-faced woman in a business suit bumps his ankle with her luggage cart, then glares as he stumbles under the suddenly unbalanced weight of his pack. Righting himself, he waits a few seconds for an apology, but she has already turned away.

Halfway to the next set of doors, they come to a sign reading, ‘Check-In: Temporary Departures.’ The sign is suspended over a white counter attended by half a dozen clerks in black blazers with silver name tags. The line-up in front of the counter, snaking back and forth as directed by a series of pylons and red felt-covered ropes, looks about seven years long. T.V. screens hang from the ceiling.

“Good thing we got here early,” David comments.

Collette doesn’t reply, her attention drifting up to one of the screens.

“You don’t have to stay, you know. This could take a while.”

She glances at him— “You’re mine until the end of the hall”—then looks back up at the television.

The line moves slowly, and David and Collette don’t say much. Little remains to be said: every time they talk these days, it seems that they argue about his trip, and at the moment, neither feels like arguing. Overhead, the screens show the coverage of a debate, and in a matter of moments, it has monopolized David’s attention.

“Then tell me, Senator,” a middle-aged man with dark hair and a light suit is saying. “How can this government justify the continued denial of basic rights to our citizens in the Neverland Colony?”

“Let’s get one thing straight, Professor Faraday,” the man addressed as Senator replies. David recognizes his large-cheeked, gray-suited bulk as Senator Billy 'Bull' Donovan of Mississippi, expected by many to run for the next Republican nomination. “The Neverland Colony is an American territory, not an American state. It's similar to Puerto Rico. There's a federally appointed governor, and residents don't vote in presidential elections. I don’t hear you bellyaching on behalf of the Puerto Ricans.”

“I’m hardly bellyaching, Senator,” Faraday replies. “Nor am I talking exclusively about the vote.”

“What exactly are you going on about, Professor?”

“I am talking about a violation of our core values—about this country, counter to the very reasons for its foundation, forcing people of another land to live as subjects.”

“Well, Professor Faraday, thank you for the history lesson, but let me tell you some cold hard facts about this nation of ours today. We are—make no mistake—the dominant power in the world. Our economy is growing faster than it has since the boom that followed the Second World War. And a new spirituality is sweeping the nation. Our people are going back to church. Back to God. The bottom line is that the American people—American families—are more stable and prosperous than they’ve been since the 1950s. But twenty years ago, we were on the ropes. We were under pressure from Asia. We were under pressure from Europe. And we were under pressure on the home front from a godless tide of New Age liberal intellectuals—little better than spiritual communists. And do you know what turned things around? Neverland, plain and simple. The resources that we have access to, the endless expanses of virgin land—”

“Interesting choice of words, Senator.”

“As I was saying, if we want to maintain our economic and spiritual strength, Neverland must remain American. And these subversives, these Separationists as they like to call themselves … Well, in the opinion of this administration they are no better than terrorists and ought to be treated as such.”

“But Senator,” Faraday counters as the camera zooms closer. “Does it not strike you as odd that while some Americans on the other side of the Rift are growing closer to the indigenous population, our policies toward these same Neverlanders are becoming increasingly draconian?” There is a brief pause as the camera shifts to a silently blinking Senator Donovan and then back to Professor Faraday. “That means totalitarian, Senator. Dictatorial?”

“Our government’s policies,” the Senator counters, recovering as his face fills the screen, “are aimed at the well being of the American people. That means all American people, not just those on the other side of the Rift. As for the Neverlanders living in the colony, a few have taken the Oath of Allegiance and are now enjoying some privileges of citizenship. Those who have not chosen to do so, are responsible for the consequences of their choices.”

“You mention choices, Senator. So let me ask you: do members of the other intelligent races living in the Neverland Colony have access to those same choices? Can an elf take the Oath of Allegiance? Or a giant? Or a dryad?”

“The existence of dryads has yet to be confirmed.”

“The question stands. Can an elf or a giant become an American citizen?”

“Not at the present time,” the senator replies. ”And if I have anything to say about it, not ever. To speak frankly, I have doubts that any loyal citizen could ask such a question. This is one nation under God—under God, Professor—and revealed Word makes no provision for non-humans.”

“Yet it was not many decades ago, Senator, that African Americans, or Native Americans, or women of any ethnicity, did not enjoy the rights and privileges of citizenship—were not recognized as ‘persons’ under the law.”

“They are recognized now.”

“After generations of struggle.”

“What say we stick to the present? The issue now is different from the struggles of a few special interest … a few tragic mistakes that our nation in its growing pains has had to correct. The issue now is how we as Americans want to define not only our nation but also our world. You say elves and giants are intelligent and should be eligible for citizenship. What about chimpanzees? Dolphins?” The senator pauses for a murmur of laughter from the audience. “Growing evidence suggests that we may not be the only intelligent species in this world. But no one is suggesting that dolphins should have passports.”

“That’s different. I’ve spoken to several elves, myself.”

“I’m sure you have. That was your mistake.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Anthropomorphization, Professor. What, you didn’t expect a Republican from Mississippi to understand so big a word? It means seeing human qualities in non-human creatures. Elves may look like humans, but they are not. They may be able to speak like humans, but from what we’ve seen of their values—their ideas about society, commerce, God—they are incompatible with the ideas that form the moral backbone of this nation.”

“And yet they have ideas, and as great as it is, our country does not have all the answers to its problems.”

“But it is our country, and they are our problems. Speaking of problems, try this one. Imagine a race living among us, whose lifespan exceeds a thousand years. How long, if we let those people be our equals, would we remain equal to them? Elvish society, by all reports, is static. Things change slowly, when they change at all. Our world is dynamic. Fortunes can be made, power seized, in the blink of an eye. How long do you think it would take, with a race of virtual immortals, before it would be us, our children, our grandchildren, fighting for equal rights in the country that our own forefathers made? Is that your vision of the future, Professor Faraday? Your vision of this nation? Because—make no mistake—it isn’t mine—”

“David?”

“Hm?” David pulls his eyes from the screen. A large gap has opened up in front of him. “Sorry.”

Collette nods. On the television overhead, the debate goes on without him.

“Can I help you, sir?” a small blond-haired man calls out from one of the open stations. His hair is short, parted on the left. When David gets to the counter, he sets his pack on the floor. “Passage for two?” the man asks.

“Just me,” David replies.

“Name?”

“David Burns.”

“Riftpass?”

David pulls out the little black booklet, setting it on the white surface. The clerk flips it open and runs it over a scanner.

“Departure at nine hundred hours?”

“Nine o’clock,” David agrees.

The clerk turns his attention to a monitor. “It says here that you live in Portland.”

“Yes.”

“It also says you have a degree in journalism?”

“That’s right.”

“And that you are not a member of any recognized church?”

“That wasn’t on the application form.”

“What is the purpose of your visit to Neverland?”

“Business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Research.”

“What kind of research?”

“I’m writing a travel book.”

“And where will you be traveling?”

“Some sites along the Providence River. Probably spend some time in Dyn Fyrael. And Liberty, of course.”

“I have to caution you to avoid contested areas, sir. For national security as well as personal safety.”

“Of course.”

“Just a few more questions.”

“Fine.”

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a communist?”

“I beg your pardon?” 

“Are you a communist, sir?”

“I thought McCarthy was dead.”

“Answer the question.

“I’m not a communist.”

“Socialist?”

“No.”

“Anarchist?”

“No.”

“Do you belong, or have you ever belonged, to an organization considered subversive as defined by the Shawnessy Goreman National Security Act?”

“To the best of my knowledge, no.”

The clerk picks up a stamp and pounds the exposed page of David’s riftpass. “Have a good trip.” Looking past David then, he calls out, “Next.”

David and Collette walk the remainder of the corridor together. Passing the rest of the temporary departure counters, they come to the stations labeled ‘Permanent Departures.’ The differences between the line-ups are stark. While David’s line had been filled with people in business suits, with sharp eyes and smooth voices, or people in shorts and colorful shirts and the almost frantic relaxedness of vacationers setting out on a holiday, the people—the bodies and the faces—in the Permanent Departure line have a somber aura. Their clothing is rough. Sullen men and women in work boots, in loose-fitting jeans and khaki pants, in work shirts and plain cotton T-shirts, stand glaring at passers-by or staring straight ahead. David sees several forearms with muscles bulging under taught, tanned skin, and in the people’s eyes, he sees mingled anger and sorrow and hope. In some, he thinks he sees something like relief; in others, a robust and quiet air of self-worth that makes him look twice, so seldom has he encountered it in the cities where he has lived. These are people, he realizes, who have lost a lot, and who are taking the only path that they still see open to them. If this were eighteenth century Britain, these would be the peasants at the docks, embarking for the colonies.

“Senator Donovan should check this out,” David mumbles.

“Pardon?” Collette’s voice is impatient.

“Donovan. All of them. Going on about the new prosperity. Why are so many people leaving?”

“It’s not like they’re emigrating,” Collette says.        

They are emigrating, he wants to tell her. To a whole other world. But he doesn’t say anything. They’ve had this conversation before, and besides, they are at the end of the corridor. “I’m going to miss you,” he says instead, stopping to put his arms around her.

“You’d better.”

A few paces ahead, the black-blazered clerk at the doorway rolls his eyes.

Kissing Collette once, David begins to let her go and then kisses her again, pressing her close.

“That’s more like it,” she whispers, resting her head on his chest. “Come back to me soon.”

“I will.”

“Now get out of here.”

Reluctantly, he turns and holds out his riftpass for inspection.

A few seconds later, Collette’s scent clinging to his shirt, he is through the door.

Here, there are no shops—no counters, fast food stalls, bank machines. There are white walls, a white ceiling, and a black moving sidewalk. Every twenty yards, a pair of white security cameras hangs from the ceiling, one aimed toward the entrance and the other toward the far end of the hall. The sidewalk is crowded by people leaning against the handrail and talking in small groups, or staring up at the cameras.

At the far end is another set of doors, these ones made of gray-painted steel. The doors are propped open; David files through.

The chamber is huge. At first, it looks like an empty warehouse, but a quick look dispels the illusion. Aside from the way he came in, there are only two other doors, both of painted steel and both closed. The closer of the two, just to the right, is big enough to drive a truck through. The other takes up much of the right wall. The amount of military hardware housed within the riftport is supposed to be impressive, and though the details have never been made public, David is sure that the largest door opens into the adjoining army compound.

Lifting his eyes from the level of the doors, David notices several more cameras and, spaced evenly around the edges of the room and hanging as well from an inverted turret in the center, a dozen or so machine guns. Soldiers in combat fatigues are stationed around the perimeter, on a metal catwalk. The floor is concrete scarred by tire tracks, though at the moment these are largely obscured by the shoes and boots of recent arrivals.

From the entrance, David cannot see the Rift, though looking over the heads in long zigzagging queue, he sees the top of a gray metal frame.

“Makes you feel like a criminal, don’t it?” someone behind him mutters.

“Guns ain’t for us,” another speaker replies. “They’re in case the Dermies try anything. Or terrorists from one of them Middle Eastern countries. Or the Chinese. Or the Africans. Mexicans. South Americans. Anybody.”

“Yeah? What happens if the shit hits the fan and we’re still here?”

“Chance you gotta take,” the second speaker pronounces as though puffing out his chest.

“I suppose.”

The Rift, he sees as the line snakes closer, is a flat gray absence in the air, like fog but without the depth that fog suggests. His photographer’s eye tells him that the color is neutral in every way, no closer to black than to white, no closer to dark than to light. It holds the potential for every hue but offers none. He had imagined that when he first looked at it he would feel excitement, maybe eagerness or maybe fear, but emotionally, too, the Rift is neutral: it neither entices nor repels. He is tempted to think that it neither exists nor doesn’t exist, is neither present nor absent, but the thought seems mystical, and David has never considered himself a mystic. And the idea of stepping into something that both does and does not exist—the implication that the idea has for his own existence—is unsettling, so he instead he concentrates on physical details.

The gray space is surrounded by a broad metal frame. More than twice as wide as the Rift, the frame is also thick, almost like a monumental arch. At first, David wonders at the thickness, but as he comes closer he notices a wide rut cutting across the floor in front of the portal. The rut runs from one edge of the frame to the other. Doors then. Sliding steel doors: a mechanism for sealing off the otherworld. Makes sense, David tells himself, but the knowledge makes him uneasy. He knows that no radio communication is possible between worlds: signals will not carry across the gap. No sound. No light. No electricity. So the doors, once closed, would leave the people on the other side to fend for themselves. Not a comforting thought, considering reports of unrest in the colony. Maybe Collette had been right.

The line moves forward.

When they reach the front, travelers are instructed by officers in black and silver to board an open tram. The tram is five cars long, and each car has twelve rows of padded benches, with compartments in the front and back for luggage. Seats fill; the line contracts. When the small train is full and the passengers sit facing forward, expressions invisible but the backs of their heads stationary as they stare into the flat half-thereness of the Rift, the officials step back and the cars inch forward. As the front row approaches the gateway, some passengers flinch. Others take quick looks back into the chamber, while still others hold their heads high and their shoulders square. None looks relaxed as one row after another disappears into blank non-promise.

Finally, the tram is gone. No sound emerges, nothing to indicate whether the transport has gone well or poorly, and though no transport has ever gone poorly, the sight of the little train returning several minutes later with a load of luggage and new faces does little to quell the unease in David’s stomach. Soon, the arrivals are out of their seats and heading toward the exit, watched by black-clad figures with good manners and holstered side-arms. A check of the tram cars follows, and the line is moving forward again. When the people in front of him—a family of four with Georgia accents and bright, excited faces—have been instructed to their seats, it is David’s turn.

“This way, sir.” The Riftport Authority officer is about his own age, with brown eyes and a bland expression. David follows her gesture to the second car and sets his pack down in the rear bin, taking a seat just in front of the luggage. The pad on the bench is still warm with someone else’s body heat—someone whose presence, he thinks as he sits there, has just been translated to a place still lacking mathematical definition or definite location. In order to avoid being drawn into pointless conversation, he closes his eyes.

Why so nervous? he wonders. No one has ever been lost, and medical examinations have revealed no changes in body chemistry, DNA, anything. While queasiness is common, every physician who has looked into it has attributed the condition to nerves. David finds that diagnosis easy to believe, but is not reassured. What he is feeling, he decides, is the fear any sane person would experience while staring the unknowable in the face. As bland as crossing the Rift has become in the media, looking at it, waiting to enter it, is horrifying.

When the tram moves, David is not the only one who jumps. His eyes snap open, and he stares transfixed by the erasure bearing down at a walking pace. When the forward baggage disappears, he squeezes his eyes shut but opens them again, watching as row after row of people cease to exist, bodies and minds disappearing without a ripple. Beside him: a nervous giggle.

His car is starting to disappear; he fights the urge to leap out and run. How badly does he need to write this book, anyway? True, he has already spent much of the advance, but there are other ways to get money.

The seat in front of him is gone, and he is pressing himself back as far as he can. There is no room to move, and his toes are disappearing, his knees, his thighs. He opens his mouth to take a last breath, and—

Checking In

—finds himself entering a chamber that could be a mirror image, or even the other side, of the one he has just left. The high ceiling, the walls with three metal doors, even the guards in their black uniforms—all are identical. The only obvious differences are in his orientation and direction, and of course in the other passengers. Instead of moving toward the Rift, he is moving away. Instead of being overcome by a sudden but reasonable horror, he can feel himself calming. And instead of lining up to get into the tram, the other travelers are climbing out and making their ways alone or in clusters to the pedestrian door in the far wall, watched by guards and cameras.

Following their example, he slides out of his seat and stands, reaching into the bin for his pack. As he turns, he glimpses the Rift and averts his eyes, trying not to think about the unreal and fragile proximity that now separates him from everything he has known. The building, the room, the guards—even the cameras and the guns—blend into the suggestion that getting home will be easy, that he has not come far, that the outskirts of Houlton are still just a short drive away. The Rift itself, though—that says something other. The Rift says that whatever he sees around him and however familiar it might look, his own being is tenuous at best, and the life he thinks of as his own—his condo in Portland, his engagement, his career—can be taken from him by nothing more and another simple shift in the balance of the universe. 

“Are you all right?” The voice—a young voice—brings him back to himself.

“Fine,” he replies, shouldering his pack and turning toward the speaker, a skinny woman with short blond hair and a black uniform.

“First time through?”

He nods, and she offers him an efficient smile. “Door’s over that way,” she gestures. “You’ll feel better outside. Take the belt, then the doors on the right. Exit’s on your left. You can get a taxi there if you need one.”

“Thanks.” He balances his pack and starts walking. As he starts toward the door, the tram begins to move back into the Rift. David does not watch as it disappears, focusing instead on the reassuring rectangle of the doorway and the retreating backs of his fellow passengers. Stepping through the door, he relaxes against the rail of the moving sidewalk and lets it carry him forward under the reassurance of cameras and T.V. screens, all showing the same commercial.

*

Once the door has shut behind him, David steps out of the Lewis and Clark Memorial Riftport’s Liberty Terminal and hails a cab. As the yellow car separates from the slow game of traffic and glides to a stop, David looks around. The familiarity of what he sees is at once a comfort and a disappointment: a four-lane road bordered by glass towers, broad sidewalks, and well dressed pedestrians. Across the street is the regional office of the First United Bank, and in the same building, David knows he can find the offices of half a dozen real estate firms, three mining companies, two logging companies, one resort chain, and a handful of prospecting firms. Looking toward the nearest intersection, he sees two sausage vendors and a pan handler, none of whom seems to be doing much business.

The cab stops, and the driver, a thin man with a dark beard, climbs out, walks around to the back, and pops the trunk. “Want a hand with the luggage?”

“No thanks.” David slings his pack into the trunk. As he slips into the back seat and closes the door, he glances at the terminal exit. The riftport is unassuming from this angle—just one building among the many in the downtown core, lower than most and wider than any. What he cannot see from out here is the moving sidewalk, or the military barracks and industrial holding areas that make up most of the complex on the Neverland side. Something else unseen from here is the heli-pad on the roof, and the heavy arms warehouse that rumor has it is in there somewhere, in some underground bunker, being held in readiness for the last defense of Liberty.

“Where to?” the cabby asks.

“New City Hotel.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“Business.”

“Don't look that way.”

“Not that kind of business,” David says. “I'm a writer.”

The cabby glances into the rear-view. “Out to write the great Neverland novel?”

“I'm a travel writer.“

“So you just … what … take trips and write books about them?”

“Something like that.”

“Nice work if you can get it.”

“Actually, it is.”

“You government or corporate?”

“What?”

“Government or corporate,” the cabby repeats. “Who do write for? BOA? One of the big hotel chains? Logging company hire you to write a better-life-through-deforestation piece? What?”

“I’m here on my own.”

“Good luck then.” The cabby grins rough sympathy. “Independents are kept on a tight leash.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. Not where I’m going.”

“If you say so. But I haven’t seen anything on the news in a long time that hasn’t been cleaned up. I imagine the same’s true of books. You do e-books or paper?”

“Both.”

“Sell any movie rights?”

“Not yet.”

The cabby returns his attention to the road.

When it is obvious that the conversation is over, David looks out the window. They’ve come a few blocks from the riftport, past office buildings and sidewalks filled with busy people in suits, and are turning onto a wide boulevard with young trees lining the grassy divide. The buildings are smaller, mostly stores and offices, the people on the sidewalk more varied. A gang of boys in leather walk shoulder to shoulder, smoking. A middle aged man in jeans and a gray sweater adjusts his sidewalk display of handicrafts. From the shadow of a doorway, a woman with a strangely thin face stands watching passersby.

The road slopes toward the river. David can see the greenbelt that lines this part of the riverside, tame with lawns and flowers, and as the cab turns onto the road that curves  parallel to the shore, the view opens into a panorama. Upstream to the left, the green stretches for another half mile, where it gives way to piers crowded with craft ranging from single masted sailboats to yachts to tugboats and barges and fishing boats. A row of two  and three story buildings overlooks the piers, their decks and patios shaded by a cloud of bright umbrellas. Beyond these, arcing over the river in a pastel-shaded curve, gleaming white suspension towers reaching higher than the tallest office buildings, is the mile-long span of the Rainbow Bridge, carrying its burden of traffic between the fashionable districts of Liberty proper on the north shore of the river, and the industrial environs of South Town. Downstream to the right is the hotel district, where smooth sided buildings rise ten or twelve or twenty stories, overlooking private beeches, private docks, and private patios. The line of hotels follows the curve of the river mouth as it opens into the blue green mystery of Neverland's ocean.

“How long you in town?” the cabby asks.

“Long as it takes to arrange transportation.”

“Didn’t do that ahead of time?”

“I want the full Neverland experience.”

“You’ll have an experience all right.”

The cab glides past the first in a long line of hotel driveways.

Standing in the lobby of the New City Hotel, David is again struck by familiarity. He knows he is in another world, but the marble plated pillars hiding cinder blocks and girders, the thick brown carpet, the redwood veneered reception desk, and the plush chairs and couches in the waiting area all argue against any difference he might imagine or desire. The  bell he rings for service could have been sitting on any reception desk back in the Realworld, and the overabundant perfume on the tall, brown haired receptionist smells anything but otherworldly.

“Can I help you?” she smiles coolly, brown eyes leaking boredom.

“David Burns. I have a room reserved. View of the river. Single, non-smoking.”

“All of our rooms are non-smoking, sir,” she informs him.

“Guess I’m in luck,” he smiles.

She declines to smile back, and punches buttons on the terminal in front of her. “One moment,” she intones. “I have to confirm it.”

“I confirmed it before I left.”

“Standard procedure, sir.” She punches a few more keys. “Name please?”

“I told you. David Burns.”

“Occupation?”

“Journalist.”

“Age?”

“None of your business.”

“I’m afraid it is my business, sir. We have to keep detailed records.”

“I answered these questions on my Riftpass application.”

“I realize that, sir. But if you want a room, you’ll have to answer them again. It’s policy at every decent hotel in town.”

“Thirty-five,” he sighs.

“Home address?”

“Eleven-twenty-one Commerce Park, apartment fifty seven nineteen, Portland, Maine.”

She punches a few keys. “May I see your riftpass?”

He pulls out the little black booklet, and slaps it down on the desk. “Anything else?” he asks as she flips the booklet to the front page and runs a scanner over his photograph and the numbers above and beneath it.

“So,” he says when the scanner beeps. “Am I who I say I am?”

“Apparently, sir.” She sounds indifferent. “Here’s your key-card. You’re in seventeen forty-six. Please sign here enjoy your stay thank you for choosing …”

The room is plain. A queen-sized bed with a heavy night table on either side juts out beneath a print of a pastel colored vase. Against the opposite wall, a small desk with telephone and computer terminal sits beside a broad dresser with an equally broad mirror. By the window, two chairs flank a round table, while on the other side of the room, the doors to the closet, washroom, and hallway line three sides of an alcove. The window offers a view of the river, its far side edged with docks and warehouses that, despite the city’s youth, manage to look run-down. Gray boards scarred by weather and graffiti, ash colored brick walls with steel doors and no windows, fences lined with barbed wire enclosing lots chaotic with crates and trucks—again, he could be anywhere. And maybe he is. An infinite distance and no distance from home, he is, he supposes, exactly where he imagines himself to be.

Turning from the view, he looks back into his room. It is early still, and he has work to do. He wants to fly upriver as soon as he can, and he still needs a helicopter and pilot. Despite the cabby’s pessimism, he is looking forward to tackling those details. But before he gets where he is going, he needs to know where he is. Walking to the armchair where he has thrown his pack, he fishes out a fresh black notebook—he always buys a fresh black notebook at the beginning of a trip—and tucks it into his breast pocket with his favorite black pen. The fit is snug. Going into the main pouch, then, he pulls out one of the two cameras he has brought—his battered old Nikon digital—and slings it over his neck and shoulder.

The door locks as he leaves.

*

He has been walking for hours, getting a sense of place, vague impressions. At the moment, he is standing on an empty dock, in the light of a single lamp, looking into the shadows upriver. He pulls his notebook and pen from his breast pocket, clicks out the ink, and begins to write:

Day One:

On an empty dock looking upriver. In the dark, I can still imagine the ‘other’ in ‘otherworld.’ I can imagine Conrad’s Romans sailing up the Thames, knowing themselves visitors in an alien place, their world reduced to a boat, their crew-mates, and an inflexible code of discipline. I can imagine Conrad’s Europeans sailing up the Congo. But we didn’t just bring a boat—we brought a whole damned city. And where we go, one way or another, it goes.

Ha—

Haven’t seen much, and already I'm drawing conclusions. Premature?

So what have I seen?

I’ve walked the sidewalks around the hotels and resorts and seen people paying big money for a bigger lie. Tourists in gaudy clothes watching dances performed by tame natives, or taking scenic cruises of the nearby riverbanks and coastlands. Sports cars and mountain bikes, tanned faces and bleached hair. Too many smiles to feel comfortable. Too many smiles considering where we are and what the political situation is, with just one small hole through an unknown impossible distance keeping us from being overwhelmed.

I’ve walked through the business district, and in my jeans and T-shirt was ignored so astutely by the suits that I started to feel at home. Stepped into a pub on the first floor of one of the office buildings: glass walls outside, and inside the synthetic warmth, dark-wood tones, and polished brass of a traditional North American style mock-English drinking establishment. Found an empty table in a corner. The music—some neo-Celtic jazz fusion ensemble—was low enough that I could hear conversations around nearby tables. One stands out. Served over a mediocre over priced pale ale, it was between two guys in gray, one with a shiny blue and red striped tie, and one in a tie that might have been choked up by a motion sick kaleidoscope. They were talking real estate. A piece of land down the coast where the guy in the striped tie hoped to strike it rich by setting up a resort and the guy in the bright tie hoped to strike it rich by making a fat commission. Some impressive ruins down that way that striped-tie thinks he can clean up and market. That got me thinking—how much of this place is already ‘owned’?

But enough about the pub. I left when my beer was finished, deal still in progress.

Outside the colony’s original compound, an open market has grown up in a square surrounded by low-end shops, restaurants, and drinking holes. The market stalls are run by locals selling everything from their own handiwork—some impressive wood carvings and sculptures, and some obviously fake ‘authentic’ costume jewelry—to finger food, baking, and fresh fish. I think a number of other things are sold there as well—the place reeks of black market, and there are shadowy gaps between buildings where it’s easy to imagine a whole other economy hovering behind the façade that everybody sees—but all I have are impressions.

One thing that surprised me was how much the Neverlanders look like us. I’ve seen pictures and news clips, obviously, but because they aren’t allowed through the Rift anymore, I’d never seen one in person until today. They really are human. Sounds like a stupid thing to say as I’ve known it all along, but it’s always been hard to accept that people from another world, in God only knows what part of what universe that we never knew existed, could be the same species as us. They are, though, and part of me does not want to accept the fact. There have to be built-in differences: the world can make no sense otherwise.

But I haven’t seen an elf—they’re not allowed into the city—so maybe when I do, my faith in the sense of creation will be restored.

I’m babbling.

Besides, I’ve been standing on this dock long enough. Late, cold, and I don’t feel like getting mugged.

David closes his notebook and slips it into his pocket. Beneath him, beyond the circle of light cast by the low-hanging lamp, small waves lap at wooden pilings, while behind him, drifting upstream from the patio-bars and restaurants, come fragments of laughter and conversation, words blurring into a patchwork of sound that wraps around him with the comfort of familiarity. Somewhere on the water a boat motors past—tugboat or fishing boat by the sound of it—its engine-growl muffling the voices until it carries its rumble upriver, chugging toward the well-lit arc and towers of the bridge.

David wishes he’d brought his tripod.

The bridge at night seems to hover, poised not for motion but for evaporation, a coalescence of the light of unfamiliar stars pulled down and molded, and held in place by an invisible strength that at any moment might open its hand. The only thing of its kind in this world, it stands as a visible symbol of the new—the spirit of reaching, finding, and uniting that defines the more optimistic views of the colonization of Neverland. At least that was the intention of the people who designed it. And skeptical though he is of all things symbolic, David has to admit, looking at the bridge as it hovers in the dark, the space underneath it beckoning in a silent compulsion that echoes through all of his quiet places, that it is effective. The most imposing structure in Liberty, and something purely of Realworld origin, it unites everything in sight of it. The polis of Athens, he reflects, was defined as all the lands within sight of the Acropolis; the Rainbow Bridge is this city’s Acropolis: temple of its gods, focus of its devotion, manifestation of its vision of itself.

But there is another vision, David realizes as he stares at the bridge, its rippled reflection opalling the surface of the river. Between the lighted structure above and its shifting reflection below, there is darkness, a mouth, open and waiting, its long throat trailing inland.

He closes his eyes and opens them again, lets them drift back into focus until the bridge is just a bridge again and the river just a river.

Later—

Back at the hotel, sipping room-service generic drip coffee priced like cappuccino.

Did I mention that there were a lot of beggars in the market? Don’t think I did. Some were just kids in filthy cast-off clothes, some of it third-or-fourth hand army surplus, with hands out not looking at anyone.

When I asked for directions to the old market, the woman who gave them to me said I should stay away on account of all the Dermies—that’s what she called them, probably contracted from the name of the farmer who found the Rift. She wasn’t impressed with anyone who would want to go where they were. What she is doing on this side with that attitude I have no idea. On the other hand, people who like to think of themselves as settlers, aren’t known for their sympathy for those whose land they’re settling.

I was still in the market around supper time. Stopped at a row of food stalls. Everything from fresh bread to fish cakes to meat pies to what was labeled in big red writing as dragon-on-a-bun but which, when I bit into it, turned out to be the toughest piece of beef I’d ever eaten, overcooked and smothered in a runny red goo that was probably a mixture of ketchup and Tabasco sauce, topped with a sprinkling of sliced raw garlic. Whether it was dragon or cow, I was definitely breathing fire by the time I finished. Didn’t begrudge the old woman the price of the sandwich: she taught me a lesson about gullibility, and another or maybe the same lesson about the local economy.

That’s it for now. I want a good night’s sleep: tomorrow I look for a pilot to fly me out of this tourist trap.

David closes his notebook, then flips it open again and scribbles down a question:

Where does wonder give way to indifference?

—and later—

Why are we not amazed by everything we see?

A Second Look

 Morning. Not quite eight, and David is sipping dregs of coffee and swallowing the last cube of melon that came with his continental breakfast. The en-suite computer has been on for the last hour. He has visited the homepages of almost every charter transport company he could find, and all have specified that they service BOA-approved destinations only. Down to the last name on the list, Zack Angus Charters, he clicks on the link.

When the page comes up, David wonders whether it is a joke—nothing but the name Zack Angus, an address, a phone number, and a single line of large bold, uppercase print:

I FLY ANYWHERE.

But it seems to be his only option, so he writes it in his notebook, then calls up the city map to see where he has to go—

—and is not surprised to find himself, an hour later, back in the market square outside a locked steel door with a sign on it reading,

Zack Angus Charters

Hours of Operation

Mon - Thurs, 9 – Noon.

He checks his watch to confirm that 9:00 has passed, then leans against the wall by the door to watch the market as he waits. Out in the square, life is hard at work. He thinks he sees the woman who sold him his supper last night, but she is gone before he is sure, tangled in the knot of hand-to-mouth commerce that shifts and bulges like a snake wrestling its dreams. He recognizes other faces from yesterday as well—a one-eyed beggar dressed in dirty army surplus pants and black T-shirt, a young man in the sharp-edged suit selling something to a couple of kids in the temporary calm between two junk stalls, a woman in what are not quite street clothes leaning against the wall between storefronts scribbling in a green notebook. One of ours or one of theirs? he wonders, then pushes away the knowledge that he can’t tell.

“You here for work or holding up the wall?”

“What?” He turns toward the voice to find the face it came from pondering him with short-tempered indifference and about five days’ growth.

“You Zack Angus?” he asks.

“You from the government?”

“No.”

“Then yes. What do you want?”

“To hire you.”

“Work then.” He hawks up a gob of spit, discharges it at the pavement, and smiles. “Call me Zack. Where you headed?”

“Why don’t we talk about that in your office?”

“You want to go where?” Zack pauses in the middle of spiking his coffee with some yellow liquid that David hopes is not as strong as it smells.

“Headwaters of the Providence.”

Zack continues pouring, a little too long for what is left of David’s comfort. “Not much up that way. No legitimate business.”

“I’m legitimate. I just don’t give a damn about business.”

“Good answer.” Zack’s eyes twinkle. “When do you want to go?”

“Tomorrow’s good.”

“Booked till Thursday.”

“Friday, then?”

“Don’t usually work weekends.”

“I’d rather not stick around until Monday.”

“Afraid you might miss something?” Zack grins through his scruff and takes a sip from the bottle he had not quite emptied into his cup.

“My job is to travel.”

Zack shrugs—“Friday at ten, civilian airport”—and offers the bottle.

Looking quickly around the cramped disaster of an office, David smiles what-the-hell and accepts. The liquid is electricity on his tongue, and he stifles a convulsion as he swallows, then forces out a scarred whisper: “What’s your fee?”

“Depends,” Zack fingers his stubble. “You want pick-up or just drop-off?”

“Drop-off.”

“Might want to be reconsider. It gets strange out there.”

“Strange is good.”

“Payment in advance. In cash.”

“How much?”

“How much you got?” Zack responds with a grin, shuffling through a mound of papers until he finds his desk, and pulling out a dog-eared blue ledger.

*

The transport circles for a landing—has been circling for over an hour as troops and ambulances assemble on the tarmac and the onboard medic uses a secure channel to talk to the physician on the ground.

“I told you, we don’t know what caused it. They just dropped what they were doing and started babbling, staring into nowhere.”

“Any sign of enemy activity?” the physician asks.

“No,” the medic sighs. “Like I said. They just started. No reason. The whole company.”

“And you couldn’t detect any physical cause?”

“No.”

“Tox scans?”

“Best we could do with a field kit, but we couldn’t find anything. Hell, sir, these men haven’t even been drinking. They’re regulation to the letter. Clean. Fit. Experienced. One of the best units this side of the Rift.”

The physician clicks off the mike and turns to the general standing beside him—General Benjamin Jakes, commander of ground forces in Neverland. “Same as the last batch, sir. But we haven’t identified a cause, and the others are not recovering.”

“No sign of physical contagion?”

“None, sir.”

Jakes turns to a young captain standing beside him. “All units are in position?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Clear them to land.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Full escort on the way to the hospital. No civilian vehicles within a hundred yards. No chatter on unsecured channels. And no one says a word to the media.”

“Yes, sir.”

The order is given, and the transport begins its descent. In the cargo bay, the stricken soldiers do not stir. They stare at the top of the bay, wide eyes bloodshot, murmuring over and over words no one can understand, filling the bay with a whisper as quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass.

*

David leaves Zack’s office half an hour after going in: nothing signed, and little decided except for their destination. Friday at 10:00, he is to meet Zack at the Liberty Civilian Airport, just outside town, with his gear and a wad of bills. Nothing will be signed there either. Zack likes to keep track of numbers, but he does not like assigning names to them. He calls this caution common sense, and thinks anyone who values privacy should do the same. For now though, David is again at loose ends. The door is closed behind him, Zack reclining behind his desk sipping spiked coffee. The market is in front of him.

This is the part of the story-gathering process that David has trouble with. He knows what has to happen next, knows when it is going to happen, where it is going to happen, and with whom it is going to happen. But how to fill the three days between now and then? He wants to be on his way, immersing himself in the part of this otherworld that is still other, not this sanitized shopping-mall version. For now, though, he is confined to Liberty and the BOA-approved façade that the city presents to the majority of people passing through. So, as people a loose ends tend to do in waterfront towns, he heads for the waterfront, drifting through streets slowly becoming crowded with a repetition of yesterday’s activity.

At first glance, the little man does not look human. He is sitting in a small park across the street from a block of low-rise office buildings. The center-piece of the park is a carved stone fountain—a broad basin surrounded by statues of people in postures suggesting, David supposes, daily life. Some are sitting, some standing, some looking toward the jet of water shooting five or six yards into the air, and some looking away. Some are men, some women, some old, some young, some apparently wealthy, and some apparently not. The stone of the fountain is gray and the carving lifelike, and when one of the figures—an old-looking man with long beard and long gray overcoat, who had been sitting in a posture of surly concentration—turns its head to glare at the back of a well-dressed passer-by, David finds himself staring. The first thing he does, after wrenching his eyes from the statue that is not a statue, which by now has resumed its hard-eyed contemplation, is to look again at the other figures lining the basin. When all still appear to be made of stone, he returns his attention to the old man, sidling up to one of the thick-trunked oaks that populate the park—trees that must once have been part of the native forest before Liberty burst its initial bounds and engulfed them. When he feels safely concealed, he reaches for his camera.

Zooming as close as he can get, David examines the sitting figure through the single eye of his lens, snapping pictures as he looks.

Image: A slouching man with a gray complexion. Gray from age? Illness? Dirt? Wrinkles around his squinting eyes hinting at long hours thinking in solitude: crows’ feet, not laugh lines. Wiry hair. Beard to the middle of his chest. Strong-looking hands clenching knees. Wrinkled overcoat.

Image: Dark eyes looking into the lens, crow’s feet deepening as the muscles about the eyes constrict and the heavy brow turns down.

Image: Gray man half standing, glare deepening and mouth half-open, right hand raised, thick forefinger pointing; a startled pigeon caught mid-flap above the tangled mess of his head.

And a voice—“What are you doing?”—deep and rough, like granite might sound if it woke up in a bad mood.

“I’m sorry?” David replies as the little man stumps toward him, the top of his head coming barely to David’s chest.

“Deaf as well as rude?” A thick hand reaches for the camera, but David’s reflexes are quicker, and it disappears behind his back. The eyes, black as bold-face type, look slow murder up at him. “Give me that.”

David steps back. “I’m a journalist.”

“I’m not a story.”

“I won’t print these ones.”

“They will still cost you.” The stranger steps closer—an impatient, expectant look.

“I’m not giving you my camera.”

“Give me something else.”

“I don’t have any change,” David lies.

“It would be best for you if you did.” The eyes are smiling now, ill humor glinting under craggy brows. “Nothing here comes for free.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you.” David begins to back away. “Sorry. I have to go. Have a nice day.”

The hand sinks down to the little man’s side, into his overcoat pocket, and his feet stay rooted to the earth. He says nothing more as David backs off of the grass and onto the sidewalk, but his eyes seem full of unpleasant promises. “I’m sorry,” David repeats, but the eyes do not change. With both feet safely on the concrete, he retreats down the block.

Walking the remaining distance to the river, he tries to push the statue man from his mind, but the harder he pushes, the harder the old guy hangs on. He has heard of places—been to a few—where people object to having their pictures taken, believing that a photograph captures a part of their soul, but there had been no superstition in this stranger’s eyes. And he has been to places where the taking of a picture is followed by a demand for payment. At times as well, his camera has been demanded of him, but those were places where he was not supposed to be, and the people taking his hardware were usually soldiers or police: certainly not homeless men beside fountains in city parks.

What’s different here? he wonders. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out. The attempt to take his camera has always come with the assumption of something the general population should not see. So what in the park was supposed to remain hidden? There was a fountain: no harm there. Grass, trees, benches, people on the benches. Birds. Probably insects—he doesn’t know, doesn’t think much about insects. What else? Nothing he can recall. All right then: what about the people? Can he remember them? Did any stand out? Again, no. The only person he can remember is the little man, and the reason he remembers him is the confrontation he initiated. It makes no sense. Unless he himself did not want to be seen. But if he did not want to be seen, why was he sitting beside a public fountain?

One lesson David has learned so far is that all things make sense. They may not happen for a reason, at least not in the superstitious sense that most people intend when they make such a claim, but when seen from the proper angle, with enough facts in hand, nothing is without a rational explanation.

Besides, he tells himself: as mysteries go, this is a small one.

Still, when he arrives at the stretch of parkland that lines the north bank of the river, he finds himself looking differently at what yesterday he had dismissed. The policeman who passes him a few steps away makes his pulse race. The young couple holding hands, looking out over the river where sailboats ride an ocean breeze upstream, never look at him, but in their hands they might hold a secret older than memory. Or maybe they just want to get laid: he doesn’t know. And his ignorance pastes a grin on his face that draws questioning glances from the people walking by. Yes, he decides: the world can still be a mystery.

True, the flower arrangements in the gardens are like a thousand others back home, but the flowers are not the same. Above the roses, little bell-shaped blossoms hang like bunches of white and purple grapes from vines wrapped around arcing trellises whose feet are cloaked in creeping plants with flowers like sky-blue cherry blossoms, while the borders are such a collage of the familiar and the unfamiliar that David is not sure which ones are native and which from home.

And true, the people he sees here look vapid, stupid, self-indulgent. But how does he look to them? Maybe, as he had assumed yesterday, they have spent their time here wallowing in the superficial pleasures of this commercial outpost, pretending to be someplace different while in their minds they’ve never left home. But maybe they’ve been, some of them at least, upriver to Dyn Fyrael or the mountains, or into the forest where the beasts of Neverland still live in stands untouched by chainsaws. Maybe they’ve been up the coast or down the coast, past the resorts, to places where his own country is not yet a name. After all, it only took him a morning to arrange for independent transport. Who else has made other arrangements, and where have they gone?

Turning left, he heads for the restaurants, patios, and piers that form the backbone of the riverfront economy. Maybe, he decides, he can learn something there, after all.

*

“Tell them anything.”

“But Secretary Henworth, a lot of them have lost people in the skirmishing.”

“That’s a problem for P.R. …”

*

David sits alone at a table on the fourth pier, sipping blond ale from a pint mug. The other tables are occupied mostly by couples, either his age or younger, or well into their fifties—before and after raising children. Most are drinking—beer, wine, cocktails—and talking in quiet voices. A few sit looking upstream, where a high-prowed boat with a blue-canopied deck is cruising toward them. On the prow, written in black, are the name Riverman’s Mistress, and a ten-digit registration number.

David takes a swallow of beer, places his mug back on the table, and looks past the boat to where a flock of gulls dives in its wake, hoping for the easy meal they’ve come to expect from the fishing boats they usually follow. Taking another mouthful, he returns his attention to the crowd. His eye lands on someone sitting alone at the bar: man, mid-fifties, in beige pants and a white golf shirt. His head is almost empty of hair, and what remains is gray. Still looking at him, David pulls out his journal and begins to write:

Two Visions of a Fat Man—

1. He is here alone—probably never had time for anyone else: maybe too busy earning money, though ‘earning’ is a questionable word. Maybe ‘getting’ would be better: he is here on the proceeds of respected theft. The factories under his authority never stop, and since the unions were broken, he has posted record profits at the cost of minimal compensation to the workers, or in some case the families of workers, who were careless around the machines. Not that he employs people if he has a choice: machines are cheaper, and they never complain.

But why is he here?

He is not that old—probably at the peak of his career. Looking to expand? Maybe he’s checking out local resources and has taken the afternoon to survey this brave new buffet. His eyes are hungry—I can see that from here—and as he looks over the river I think I can also see a glint of ownership, that hands-off look that the driver of a Lamborghini gets when someone who hasn’t washed in a few days walks close enough to sully the wax job. He doesn’t like the fact that when the boat leaves the dock he’ll have to share it with the rest of us. Too much humanity reminds him of too much that he doesn’t have. That slender, well dressed couple holding hands will probably make him look away. But he has to see it: has to be around the flesh and voices of the ‘beautiful people’ because they are the ones who buy what his machines make, and he has to know what they want.

He licks his lips.

2. When he was a boy, he loved stories of wild lands with wild people and creatures that spoke with voices of earth and sky. Stories of kingdoms and villages where the beautiful was loved for both the pleasure and the truth it revealed, where a hero could be a boy who knew a secret song or a young woman who was born to lead her people to a safer place or a deeper understanding. Stories where a pudgy kid with no close friends could find them, for a while at least, and they would show him their worlds as their worlds were shown to them, without judgment or accusation, and always with some revelation before the end. And as he grew up, a pudgy young man with no close friends, he found himself more and more often retreating to those other worlds, where beauty and truth, if not the same, could at least be reconciled.

Then one day, when he was in his early thirties, another world was found, and the only thing he wanted was to go there. But at first no one was allowed, and later, when the place was opened up, his job—maybe as a night-shift security guard or factory worker—didn’t pay enough for the cost of the trip. He could have gone there to settle, and he talked about it with some of the guys he worked with, but that would mean clearing land and farming, or maybe working in a mine or a logging camp, and they all agreed he wasn’t up to it. So he stayed home, read his books, dreamed, and tried to save his money in a city that didn’t seem to want him to have any.

And finally, as he was sagging into the latter end of middle age, he had enough, and for two weeks the boy who had dreamed of magical worlds and felt like an exile in the place where he lived, would be able to go home.

So he got his riftpass, booked his ticket, and packed his bags—

—to find himself in a city governed by the same rules, surrounded by the same people who had been leaving him behind for all the years of his life. And now, as he sits in his chair watching the tour boat approach, all that is left in his eyes is a bashful curiosity that knows better than to hope for something beautiful, but that flickers anyway with a momentary hope.

David stops writing. The boat is pulling up to the dock, passengers gathering by the rail to disembark. He slips his pad back into his pocket and stands to get in line.

*

“Welcome to the Riverman’s Mistress,” the woman recites into her headset as the boat slips from the pier. Twenty passengers sit under the canopy in plastic chairs bolted to the deck. “My name is Susan O’Donnell, and I’ll be your guide this afternoon. The captain is Rick O’Donnell. Rick and I have been living on the river as long as civilians have been allowed on this side of the Rift. We’ve traded and guided as far upstream as a boat can go, and further on foot. We’ve seen a lot, and I’ll be sharing some of it with you today.

“The tour will last about five hours, including an hour-long stop at A’Shennach, a native ruin upriver and probably the reason most of you are here. In the meantime, I’d like to draw your attention to the Mistress’ many safety features. Under your chairs, you will find personal flotation devices in wire racks. To remove the PFD’s, simply …”

After about thirty seconds’ instruction, David's attention drifts. Far more interesting is the view of the river. The watercourse runs straight for several miles inland, and David can see the small craft docks and patios give way to the tangled mess of commercial jetties and warehouses, and beyond them—beyond the enigmatic arc of the Rainbow Bridge—the gray piers of the naval yard. On the far shore is the already familiar mess of the industrial South Town.

As they reach the channel and the captain aims the boat into the current, a small sailboat coasts by, close enough that David can see the beer in the hand of the tanned man at the tiller. Further away, in the shadow of the southern shore, the gray-green shape of a naval patrol boat slips upriver ahead of them, the man at the bow-mounted gun lounging at his post, hat off and sunglasses on.

“The river as you see it,” Susan is saying, having finished with the safety features, snack bar, and sanitary facilities, “did not exist twenty years ago. Then, there was nothing but trees, with the occasional village hugging the shore or huddling inland. Now, if you look to the left, you will see …”

He sees the pilings of the bridge towers, little waves lapping against them. He sees the thin trails of catwalks that line the underside of the roadway. Beyond the bridge, he sees the naval yard close up: docked patrol boats with stern- and aft-mounted guns; a helipad with half a dozen helicopters sitting on it; a radar tower; squat plain buildings for barracks, mess, and ordinance.  Nothing like the destroyers he has seen back home, but one empty dock bigger than the rest.

“…  on our left,” Susan is telling them, “is Liberty’s naval base. It doesn’t look like much, but against wooden hulls and sailing technology, those patrol boats are very effective. In fact, over whole Territorial War, we didn’t lose a single battle at sea …”

And so it goes hour. The engine drones, and Susan with it, conveying a sanitized  history. As she speaks, the shore fades from city to farmland. The banks in places are higher, and behind the trees David sees a line of hills. As they cruise by, they are told of the first farmers, of their heroic efforts—that’s the word Susan uses, ‘heroic’—to clear the land and make it useful, of their often brutal conflicts with natives unwilling to acknowledge their king’s treaty with the land’s new owners. They are told of the militia groups that grew into the battalion known as the Liberty Guard, of life in the logging camps, of skirmishes with forest dwellers human and non-human, and the massacre in the Greenback Hills that sparked the Territorial War. They are told of the bravery required by life on the new frontier, and the dangers inherent in facing the unknown. They are told what they already know, what they are comfortable hearing, and the telling sees them through miles of sprawling farmland. As they slip past the last barn, the tone changes.

“Now,” Susan says, “we’ve come to the heart of the tour. The trees to starboard are an outlier of the forest that once covered this part of the world. This stand has been left as a memorial to life before civilization. The trees, many of them, are hundreds of years old, and the ruins of A’Shennach are quite possibly older …”

David looks at the trees, unidentifiable at this distance. He knows some people can tell a tree’s species from the growth pattern of its branches, but he is not one of those. As the boat takes them closer, though, and the unstable perspective of distance over water adjusts itself in his mind, he realizes that these trees are different from the ones back home in an obvious way: they are huge—as big as some redwoods in old pictures from California. And they are dense with age, enough to make him think that Susan’s hundreds of years are an understatement. He can see that he is not the only one to think so. A young couple beside him sits holding hands, not noticing the hands, or themselves staring. An old woman for a second remembers the girl she used to be, standing from her seat and walking to the rail to grip it with unshaking fingers.

“The ruins are inland,” Susan interrupts. “Most of them at least. The sharp-eyed among you will notice smaller buildings among the trees near the river, but I’ll have to ask you not to stop at them. There will be plenty to see once we reach the center. Before we land though, I should tell you about the site.

“A’Shennach is a mystery. Its discoverers thought it was built by the locals. But early studies showed that it was older than anyone thought—maybe thousands of years—and that the people living there were just the most recent squatters. It’s not even clear that the place was built by humans. Elves may have built it—why, no one knows. So when you set foot in the ruins of A’Shennach, you are not only stepping into a time before the pyramids of Egypt were built: you may be stepping into the relics of a non-human society. Now please,” the boat bumps against a wooden dock, “watch your step and stay with the tour. It's easy to get lost.”

David is the first off the boat. He waits as everyone gathers on the platform, many too busy talking to see much of their surroundings. Either they’ve been here before, or they are the kind of people—David has known several—who make a virtue of being bored. In any case, he sees carefully indifferent faces scattered among the wide eyes and open mouths, hears one or two cultivated yawns among the impressed whispers and the sudden exclamations of “God, they’re so big.”

And they are. The trees. Standing in their shadow, he gawks up the dock at a shoreline knotted with roots thicker than he is tall. Some trunks are three and four yards across, tapering up to boughs around which two people could not touch hands. Their bark is gray-brown, green in places with dark moss. High overhead, the branches gather into an almost solid canopy, entwining like arms and fingers. The forest floor is shadowed, dim, and as he steps off the dock onto the land David feels as though he is walking into a subterranean stronghold. Giant roots curve up to eye-level and higher, converging on trunks that seem to reach up from the depths of the earth.

“It’s so mystical,” someone gushes. He turns to see a middle-aged woman in flowing scarves and a long, loose-fitting skirt. She is talking to a friend in similar attire. “I can feel the energy here.”

“I know what you mean. My psychic said I’d find my spiritual home on this trip.”

David does his best to not hear them as the others gather, but it’s no use. “My crystal was warm this morning. It must have been a sign …”

Apologizing to the person he bumps into, David steps away, putting a few bodies between himself and the two voices, to find himself standing beside the man he’d been writing about back in town. He is standing quietly, looking up at the branches with an expression like a boy turned loose in his favorite dream.

“All ashore?” Susan’s voice cuts through the chatter. “Now if you’ll follow me …”

Among the Ruins

 The path leads in from the dock, its beginning marked by a green metal trash bin half full of pop cans, candy wrappers, and chip bags. A white and green sign above the bin proclaims, Now we have two environments to protect; around its base the ground is littered with cigarette butts, many smeared with lipstick. David, bringing up the rear of the tour, pulls out his journal and makes a note. Ahead, Susan is talking, but he cannot hear her, so he has to draw his own conclusions.

So what does he see?

There is the forest itself: the size of the trees and the depth of shade beneath them, the moss on their trunks, the way their roots bulge out of the earth like the half-unburied bones of giants. A hovering silence lurks, like deep water under thin ice, beneath the veneer of the tour guide’s voice. Birds seem to peer from the silence, watching with dead black eyes. The ground, when he steps off the path by accident, gives underfoot like skin over old muscle.

There are also, before long, the outliers of the ruins.

At first, because he cannot hear Susan’s explanation, David does not notice any difference. But as he walks, half expecting some creature from forgotten stories to come striding from the trees, he sees that the forest floor is not what it was a few hundred paces back. Where before it was broken only by trunks and roots, now mounds rise up in some of the spaces between. At first they are small, and could pass for the stumps of trees long fallen and decayed. But as he walks, here and there a corner of squared rock—gray, or blue-green with lichen—juts from the soil and rotting leaves. Further still, where the mounds become larger, he sees places where the forest’s skin has been cleared away to expose long-buried masonry lying in heaps.

He looks ahead to where the gaggle of passengers from the Riverman’s Mistress is disappearing around a curve, then opens his notebook again.

Crossing the outskirts of A’Shennach. I know nothing about the place. We’ve been told it’s thousands of years old, but I have to wonder about the dating. Who were the archaeologists? What were their methods? Obviously ‘old’ sells, so I can see why the people running the tour would want their customers to be impressed. That’s part of what draws a lot of people to Neverland—its blend of antiquity and novelty. Actually, this reminds me of Stonehenge or Giza—people looking at the things around them, but really looking into themselves. Not that that’s always bad, but it makes it a lot easier on the con artists marketing departments.

Closing the journal, he picks up his pace. Looking around, he admits to himself, if not to his notebook, that he is impressed; this is the first time since coming through the Rift that he has felt like a foreigner. As he walks between two large mounds, one three times his height with an opening dug into the side and leading to what or when he cannot guess, he grins and lets himself feel the excitement that has eluded him since his arrival.

*

“… just closed the deal.”

“The usual fee?”

“A little extra. It’s prime land, and he knew it.”

“When can we move in?”

“As soon as we want. There’s a small indigenous population there though, and …”

“You say that like it’s my problem …”

*

The trees do not give way, but David has no doubt about the border between the outskirts of A’Shennach and the place itself. Where before he had been passing houses and outbuildings, here are the remains of a wall four or five times his height. The rock is crusted with lichen, crumbling at the top where the parapet is collapsing in slow decay, or where the trunk of a falling tree has left gray blocks heaped at the foot of the stonework. And here, where he thinks an archway should span the gap in which a gate no longer stands, a rising and falling in the path marks the site of an old collapse.

Looking through the gateless gateway, he is surprised to see nothing but more forest. Even the mounds are lacking. Peering deeper, he cannot see where the wall completes the enclosure, though when he looks again at the structure, it is clear that it curves inward like an arc in a broad circle. Still, the path is clear, so, stepping over the fallen archway, he enters. Catching a glimpse of people in bright clothes up ahead, he picks up his pace.

Deeper in, a new feeling overtakes or encloses him. Maybe—probably—it is just him, just his knowledge of the wall sliding further behind into the trees, but he knows he is on someone else’s ground. This is less like being foreign, more like trespassing.

Reminding himself that they were told to stay together, he eases into a trot and finds himself blinking on the edge of a meadow large enough to hold thousands of people. At its heart stands a circle of nine stones—eight around the outside, about five yards tall, and another twice that height in the middle. The stones are black at first glance, smooth and irregular, sparkling in the sunlight. But as he approaches the cluster of people gathered around the nearest monolith, he sees a glint like sunlight through young leaves. The closer he gets, the surer he is, and by the time he rejoins the tour he can pick out flecks of green in the stone.

He stops beside a young couple in new clothes and listens to Susan.

“—original purpose is unknown, archaeologists think it has been used by at least seven cultures. Most recently, the local humans used to gather here at the changing of the seasons. I witnessed two festivals, both on the summer solstice—one the last of its kind. They would meet at dawn and spread out their food—wild game, fish, bread. In the grass on the far side of the circle, you can find the remains of the fire pit. They roasted whole animals on spits—deer, boars. All day, there was music and dancing. Then, just before sunset, everyone would gather outside the stones. Four musicians would stand around the central stone and play. The music began slowly to signify the waking of the earth winter, and grew faster as it went on, climbing to a frenzy of life in flutes and drumbeats. When the last light of the sun faded from the sky, the music would end, and people would, uh … embrace … in the darkness.

“But as I said, that was only the most recent use of the place. Excavations have turned up evidence of activities as varied as fertility ceremonies, monasticism, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. But no one knows who put the stones here, or why, or even where the rock, which is unlike anything discovered here except in other circles, came from. Now, if anyone has any questions ...”

*

“… going on, Colonel. We don't know what, but the insurgents are planning something.”

Colonel Jedadiah Timson regards the young intelligence officer. Her record is spotless, her instincts good. “All right, Captain Avery. What are we up against?”

“We don't know yet. So far it's just rumblings and rumors. More Neverlanders in the city. Relative calm around the outer bases. Nothing solid, sir. Nothing we can quantify. But something is in the works. I think we need to be ready. Ready close to home ...”

*

A hand goes up in the crowd. Its owner is a small man in shorts and a bright shirt.

“Yes?”

“Yes.” The man speaks in a voice hinting at a lifetime of shyness. “How do you know the place was used for cannibalism?” he asks. “And how recent was this?”

“Good questions,” Susan replies. “As for how, that’s easy. Human graves have been found outside the walls, with bones showing human tooth marks. Some also have had the marrow sucked out. As for when this happened, archaeologists have several dating techniques. Cannibalized remains have been carbon dated to about a thousand to twelve hundred years ago. These dates match similar finds from other sites.”

The little man nods thank-you and looks around.

“I have a question,” a loud voice proclaims. The voice comes from a big man with a white cowboy hat, and a potbelly drooping over a thick, wide-buckled belt.

“Yes?”

“How much is this little thingy worth?”

“Thingy?”

“Yeah.” The man waves a large arm. “The wall, these little stone-hengy things. The whole shebang. What’s it worth?”

“Well-l-l-l,” Susan replies slowly. “The government owns the property, if that’s what you mean. Otherwise—I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to answer. A’Shennach is valuable as a source of knowledge, but,” she pauses. “I don’t honestly think its value can be measured in money. And anyway, it isn’t for sale.”

“Everything’s for sale, missy.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken, sir.”

“Hm.” The man snorts and mumbles under his breath. On the other side of the crowd, another hand goes up—a woman’s hand, but David can’t see the woman clearly.

“Yes?” Susan turns to her.

“I was wondering,” the woman begins. “If the natives—I mean aboriginal residents. If the aboriginal residents aren’t holding ceremonies here anymore, where are they holding them?”

Susan answers with a carefully bland face. “The local native population was involved in the uprisings ten years ago. As a result, their lands were appropriated.” Many of the people around David nod. “Also, several real-world churches have sent missions. Many natives in the Liberty area have converted.”

“Oh.” The woman sounds disappointed. “You mentioned other circles like this one. Are they still in use?”

“Some. Farther away from Liberty. But within the settled zone, no.”

“How sad,” the woman says, provoking some hostile looks in the audience. Susan asks if there are any more questions, but there are none. Several people look hopefully at their cameras.

“We have some time left,” Susan continues. “So feel free to look around. We’ll start back in half an hour.”

There is a general mumbling and shuffling as people try to decide what to do first— look at the central stone, hunt for the cooking pit—and the crowd gradually thins out. David watches as people with cameras beyond their abilities snap shots of the standing stones from unoriginal angles, then walks out into the meadow.

Stopping at the far edge of the clearing, he turns back and watches. The ruins stand aloof. As he stares at the tourists bumbling around the stones, David wonders what difference anything he might write about the place—about anything in Neverland—could possibly make, besides offering a momentary distraction from daily life. With this thought in mind, he opens his notebook and asks it—What am I doing here?

When Susan calls them in, he hasn’t moved.

*

“—can’t hold us forever.”

The voice slides out from behind the steel door. The guard stops to listen.

“You can’t hold us forever,” the voice says again. And again, “You can’t hold us forever.” There is no intonation, no variance from the way the words were spoken yesterday or the day before that. “You can’t hold us forever.” It is like a chant, the guard reflects with a shadow of curiosity. “You can’t hold us forever.”

When he first got here, he used to talk to them through the doors. No harm, he had thought, and it seemed to make them feel better. That was good. He liked to think of himself as a good person, liked to think that there was more to him than this uniform and the things he had to do when he wore it. Maybe there used to be more. He used to be sure. Now he is not: does not think about it much. He does his job, and when he goes home he keeps to himself. It is hard to make friends these days—not much he wants to talk about. Mostly, he drinks beer and watches TV.

“You can’t hold us forever.”

The voice brings him back. He looks at the door, then looks away down the hallway lined with doors just like this one.

“You can’t hold us forever.”

He thinks part of him wants to agree—the part that used to dream of better things, he is no longer sure what—but he does not let it. The world is as it is. No point in wishing otherwise. He is one small man, and the more he knows the smaller he gets.

“You can’t hold us forever.”

He starts walking again, putting the words out of mind, but they follow him in echoes until they seem to come from everywhere at once.

“You can’t hold us forever.”

And without really noticing at first, he finds himself whispering along.

“... can’t hold us forever ...”

“... hold us forever ...”

“... forever ...”

The hallway is long; sometimes it seems that he will never come to the end.

In Others’ Words 

i   Drustan

Liberty’s artists’ ghetto is small. It is not listed in the guidebooks, and few seek it out. Most activities there are not forbidden, but they are not encouraged and at times are quietly suppressed, and while the people who live and work there are not entirely despised by the more practical-minded citizenry, their efforts are generally seen as wasted. David stumbles into the place by accident while ambling along a narrow road twisting out from the profitable chaos of the market square.

It is Wednesday morning, halfway between breakfast and lunch on his third day in Neverland, and he is continuing his exploration of Liberty. The first sign that he has wandered into someplace different is the mural, painted on the side of a low white building on a street corner. Set in a forest, at first glance the scene seems nothing more than a landscape, tranquil and unimposing. He stops to look at it, the cool green highlights that play over everything—over the age-solid browns of roots and trunks and the tentative gray-greens of clinging and hanging moss—reminding him of yesterday’s walk along the path to A’Shennach. It is a nice painting, he thinks. Peaceful. Comforting. But a closer look reveals more. One of the trunks in the middle ground, left of center, hints at the features of a person. After a few seconds, the person is a woman, her body suggested by the contours and shadows in the bark, explicit in no detail but undeniable in the whole. She is naked, or rather wearing nothing but the form of the tree itself, a form that at once conceals and reveals the spirit abiding within. Her face is peaceful, with a suggestion of closed eyes, and her long, thin hands are folded across her stomach.

Pulling his glance back, David sees traces of other figures in other trees—all women, but by no means all peaceful. One, closer to the foreground, seems to scream in pain or terror, and another, off to the right, is weeping. Still another has her mouth open in a shout of what looks like defiance, while the face nearest her, peering out of a twisted old gray-skinned birch, has a mouth set in a snarl bearing long, pointed teeth. The shadows of her eyes open into an unplumbed depth of rage and violated love and a raw unreasoning hunger for the eyes and flesh of passers-by. On the verge of falling into those shadows, David pulls his own eyes back out into the world of his surroundings—toward the graffiti scrawled in dripping black spray-paint from the upper left to the lower right corner of the mural: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Stepping back, he slips the lens cap off of his Nikon and snaps a few shots.

Looking around, he focuses on lets other details: the bright fronts to the three- and four-story buildings—the unidentifiable mass of welded car parts and intertwining vines on the sidewalk—the posters and playbills covering every lamp-post as high as a tall person can reach—the storefront with the hand-painted sign above the door reading, What You Need, beside the window display of brushes, paints, canvasses, easels, books of all sizes and ages, and coffee beans. A few doors down, another shop, Twilight Sunrise, offers ‘the latest in used clothing’, while a little further still, a folding sign in front of the Seven Trumpets Café reads, ‘The Apocalypse Dixieland Quartet, One Night Only.’

The people, too, are different. Fewer than a few blocks back, they are not looking around in that aimless drifting way that hollers ‘taking in the sights’ to everyone who sees them. Some walk briskly; others amble at a drowsy pace. Some move with an air of purpose, and others just move. But even the slowest, most aimless-looking project a sense of belonging that David has not yet seen here. Across the street, a woman in black and another woman in all the other colors cross paths with a young man in faded jeans and a paint-spattered t-shirt that might once have been pale gray. They exclaim in surprise, and share hugs. The three walk into a patio with round tables and folding wooden chairs, and sit down together under an umbrella. This is their home, their community.

“Pathetic, isn’t it?”

The voice surprises him. He turns in its direction and finds himself looking at a man about his own age, tall and muscular, holding himself with an air of self-conscious rectitude—straight-backed and uncompromising. He is dressed neatly in gray slacks, a blue blazer, a white shirt, and a gray tie: black shoes spotless, light blond hair cut short and parted on the right. He is looking at the mural.

“Takes all kinds,” David evades, looking back toward the painting but averting his eyes from the raging woman-birch.

“It’s disgusting that people get away with such obscenity at all,” the other pronounces, “let alone in a public place. Especially at a time like this.”

David shrugs. “It’s a shame some idiot with a spray can, can ruin so much effort. I’m no art expert, but ...” He trails off as the stranger glares, blue eyes cold and hard. “Oh,” David realizes his mistake. “Excuse me. I have to go.”

Not waiting for a reply, he turns and walks away, crosses the street without checking for traffic, and heads for the nearest place that looks like it might offer asylum.

The inside of What You Need is dim, lit as much by the light flowing in the window as by anything provided by the few working bulbs. True to the window display, the place is filled with painting supplies—brushes of all lengths and thicknesses, oils, acrylics, watercolors, thinner—though any order that might exist is not apparent to the uninitiated. Everything appears scattered in clusters on the shelves or on the wooden table that takes up the center of the room—a selection of brushes beside boxes of pastels, a can of thinner between a stack of hardboards, an open glass jar full of pencils. Also true to the window display, the area behind the narrow counter with the single till is stocked with an impressive variety of coffees. Unlike the art supplies, the coffee is meticulously ordered. Fine, extra fine, espresso. Columbian, Viennese, Kenyan. Everything a dedicated coffee-drinker might want, at about the price David pays for one bland cup from room service.

The person behind the counter—frizzy red hair in a thick ponytail, dark brown eyes, freckles—is staring at him. “Can I help you?” he asks when David stares back.

“Sure,” David replies. But instead of finishing with the truth—I’m on the run from an offended missionary in front of whom I just embarrassed myself horribly, please give me sanctuary—he adds, “I’m looking for something to read.”

“Back room.” He gestures with his head. David follows the gesture toward a doorway into a room even dimmer than this one. Hoping that the other room is organized more like the coffee display than the art supplies, he is disappointed on crossing the threshold. True, there are shelves—dark wood, dusty and unpolished—and the shelves are full of books. But so is the floor. On one shelf, an old hardback copy of War and Peace nestles between A Comedy of Errors and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. On another, Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time leans up against Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which itself is perched on a horizontal copy of Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home.

David scans the shelves for category labels, but there is nothing: just random titles in a collage of dis-focusing curiosity. The only shelf that provides any information is in the darkest corner of the room, down near the floor at the back, and the label is half hidden by a business text: Shaking the Invisible Hand. Bending down and shuffling the thick tome aside, David uncovers two simple words: ‘Local’ and ‘Interest.’

In the bookstores David shops in back home, the Local Interest sections are filled with glossy picture books, sketches of local history, biographies of local heroes, and guides to whatever activities, attractions, and distractions that the particular area fancies itself to be known for. In the vanishing smaller, locally owned shops, moreover—maybe out of hometown pride or maybe in a bid to display the one tangible advantage they have over the big impersonal chains—these sections are often given precedence over everything else, with huge displays of standing hardcovers, signed first editions, pictures of the local literati. Here, though, the section is one shelf wide, with not a single glossy cover. In fact, he notices as he leans in for a closer look, most of these books have the distinctive look of self-publication. The paper stock, the binding, the monochrome ink on the covers—all lack the glitz of the big publishing houses and in most cases the studied professionalism of the good smaller ones. Some—thin little pamphlets and chapbooks—are only held together by staples. Back home in the real world, he would not give them a second look. Here though, he picks one up.

It is one of the thinner volumes, maybe thirty pages thick, its cover the same matte white paper as its pages, the typing on the cover a simple functional black in a dated font: Outside Looking Away, by Drustan Harper. Another book by the same author, this one saddle-stitched and printed on brownish recycled paper reads, I’ve Been Thinking. David picks both up without perusing their contents, stands, and re-emerges into the brighter chaos of the front room. With a quick glance out the window to make sure the missionary has moved on, he approaches the counter. The frizzy-headed clerk or owner looks a little surprised when he rings the purchase in, but says nothing.

“Any place quiet around here?” David asks on receiving his change. “Someplace where I can get a coffee? Do a little reading?”

The younger man smiles a cool smile that might or might not be patronizing. “Dramatic Pause is about halfway down the block. Little place. Not busy this time of day.”

“Thanks,” David mumbles as the other slides his purchases into a thin brown paper bag with no writing on it.

“Enjoy.”

From the outside, Dramatic Pause is unassuming—brown front, one small table in the picture window beside the door, and the promise of more small tables, but not too many more, retreating through a long thin interior. Stepping in, David finds that the promise is fulfilled. The café is lit softly, and the chairs surrounding the glass-topped tables at a ratio of two or three to one are deep and plush. The walls are hung with photographs—black and white—of stage performances, with actors caught in tableaux the silence of which tugs at the mind with a nibbling sense of discontinuity. David finds himself drawing parallels between photography and taxidermy, but stops.

“Have a seat,” the woman at the counter says. Aside from him, she is the only one in the place. Black jeans, black t-shirt, black nails, black hair, black lips, pale skin—he wonders what she’s doing awake this time of day. She looks like she should be in bed, or maybe in her coffin, until well after sunset. “What can I get you?”

“Coffee,” he says, settling into the seat in the window. “Uh, black.”

“You trying to be funny?”

“Just trying to get though the day.”

She says nothing, but walks back behind the counter, returning to his table a few seconds later with a big brown mug on a bigger brown saucer. “First re-fill’s free,” she tells him, setting it down with the utmost respect, not for him, he is sure, but for the contents of the mug. “After that, they’re half-price each unless you order something to eat. Want to see a menu?”

“Not just now, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” She turns around and walks back to the counter, picking up the paperback she’d set down when he came in. David looks at her for a few seconds, trying unsuccessfully to guess what her age might be, then pulls one of his new books—I’ve Been Thinking—out of the bag. When he flips open the cover, he finds no table of contents, no publication information, no ISBN. The first piece begins on the first page, so David does the same. Inhaling the aroma of his big dark coffee, he starts to read:

Under Different Stars

Our minds grew under stars named for gods and heroes, pictures projected from the heads of our ancestors onto the receptive unrealized order of everything outside ourselves. When I was a kid, I knew Orion had a belt, though I wasn’t sure who Orion was. I knew that Cassiopeia sat in a chair, and I imagined her waiting for someone neither she nor I was ever quite sure we’d live to see, but whose arrival would change everything. I knew the planets took their labels from creatures—people, gods—once believed to have guided history. I knew that when the sun and moon moved through certain constellations, the effect on people just getting around to being born was supposed to have something to do with the character whose picture had been paint-by-numbered onto a handful of celestial bodies. What I didn’t know was why. I asked an astrologer once and was told that it had something to do with gravity, and at the time the explanation seemed plausible. Later, I learned that the chair across the room from me exerts a stronger gravitational pull on me than any star outside the solar system, or any of the planets within it except for my own and its substantial moon. So much for astrology. If she wants to maintain her illusion of connectedness, no astrologer should study science: she should let her field remain what it is, a figment of the human imagination—like gods, God, nations, and money.

So what do I see when look up at the familiar stars of home? Well, what I see is obvious. Same as everyone else: more specks of light than I could count in a lifetime, and black spaces between where more lies hidden than my eyes will ever be able to reach.

But what do I project? What fragments of me do I splatter against the static-dynamic tabula rasa (fabula rasa?) of everything outside myself? That one’s less obvious: I project a graveyard. Orion is there, stripped of life and meaning. Cassiopeia finally got tired of waiting and took the easy way out. Pisces’ water ran dry, and Scorpio stung himself in the back in despair when he finally realized he didn’t exist, and all of his power was an illusion. Also though, I project the fixed eternal order that the ancient Mesopotamians saw when they not only realized the stars moved in repeating patterns but conceived of their own society—and all society—as reflecting the motions of the heavens. I project the exhilaration of that first moment of knowing, and the soul-crushing awe that must have followed and has followed in one form or another through all the long years since that moment, wrestling its way through every religion and every psyche for the glory and consumption of the spirit. I project everything I know about everything that has ever happened, and it is reflected to me in pieces.

But that was before I came here.

The stars here are different, and that difference raises a question: What pictures will we project onto the multiverse from this new vantage point? Now, when I look up at the night sky, I see dots—thousands upon thousands of white dots hungry for names and meanings, new connections over impossible distances realized in the eyes and minds of unborn generations. I don’t see a graveyard: I don’t see history. And while I see with awe something like the vast impersonal order of the early myth-makers back home, the awe isn’t crushing. There is room on the page for me.

Sometimes, I try my hand at making constellations. Why not? Our whole presence here is based on getting stuff out of or off of the ground. Metals, fuel, lumber. We’re here for the resources. Why shouldn’t the stars be my resource?

Last spring when I was out for a walk in the woods, I stopped by the river and looked up, and there it was, clear as a comic book: the helicopter. Nearby, not so clear at first but unmistakable once you notice it, there was a bulldozer. Higher up, you can see a chainsaw, and a little to the left, one man sitting with one hand out. I think he must be a beggar. Above the beggar’s hand, a small bird is either landing or flying away.

What would an astrologer have to say about a child born under the sign of the chainsaw?

Potential sings in unnamed starlight, too pure

to hold with words. The sky

becomes ourselves,

shrinks

to fill

our eyes.

David looks up from the page, setting the book aside and taking a sip of steaming coffee. He looks out the window, watches a couple of scruffy-bearded bare-chested guys in their early twenties stroll down the sidewalk hand in hand, then turns back to the book. The next piece is a poem, and he is not in the mood for poetry, so he closes the book and slips it back into its bag. Then he pulls it out again, opens it to page one, and starts the first piece over.

ii   Simon

“Hello.”

The voice surprises him. He has been staring at the last lines of ‘Under Different Stars’—“to fill / our eyes, to fill / our eyes, to fill / our eyes”—for he does not know how long. His coffee stopped steaming ages ago.

“Mind if I join you?”

The stranger is dressed in loose-fitting jeans and a purple T-shirt faded from many washings, or maybe from a lot of time in the sun. His lean face is clean-shaven, gray eyes clear, black hair not quite disciplined. Every other table in the place is free.

“Why?” David tries to sound neither hostile nor inviting. “You in trouble?”

“No,” the stranger smiles an open smile. “You’re new. I like to meet new people.”

“Plenty of those in the market.”

“Too hectic. Besides,” he settles into the chair across the table, “the people you meet here are usually more open-minded. I’m Simon.”

“David.” He realizes as soon as he gives it that his returned introduction is as good as an acceptance. Besides, this is as effective a way as he can think of, of getting to know the place. “Have a seat.”

“Thanks.” Simon rests his elbows on the table and leans on his hands. “So, David, what brings you to Neverland?”

“I’m a travel writer,” David gestures toward the waitress with his fingers to let her know she should bring them two fresh cups. She rolls her eyes and ambles back toward the coffee pot. “You?”

“I know you'd never guess by looking at me, but I'm a missionary.”

“Shouldn't you be out among the Neverlanders?”

Simon smiles almost shyly. “I've spent time outside of Liberty.” David waits for him to add to this line of thought, but no addition follows. “What brings a travel writer to this brave new world?”

“The 'new' part, mostly. Lure of the undiscovered story. You?”

“For me, this is the land of opportunity.” Simon grins. “Quest, treasure-hunt, and baptism of fire all rolled into one: the final frontier. Found your story yet?”

“Just got here. Found any treasure yet?”

“It's everywhere.”

“You sound like a land developer. No offense.”

“I'm a developer of sorts, with endless capital.”

“You have corporate backing? Most big churches do, these days. Those that aren't corporations themselves.”

Simon shrugs. “My fault. The financial metaphor. You must have taken me for part of the religious right.”

“What makes you different?”

“I'm a free agent,” Simon replies. “No links with any church. I just see a job to do.”

“What job?”

“Salvation, of course. But not just for humans. That's where the big missions have it wrong. I'm after the Neverlanders, themselves. Elves, giants. Dryads if I can find any. I think they are the whole reason the Rift was opened to begin with. To give the Kin of Cain a second chance.”

“Kin of Cain?” David cocks his head. “Never heard that one before.”

Simon leans forward. “Every church here sees the non-humans as demons. Evil incarnate. Or as angels who stood neither against God nor with Him when Lucifer fell. But they're forgetting the marking and exile of Cain and his descendants. I think the Neverland creatures bear that mark in their bodies, in all that makes them different from us. What this means is that even the most monstrous—except for the dragons, about which Revelation is clear—have souls and can be saved.”

David sips his coffee. “Sounds like a hard sell back home.”

“It is. Do you have any idea how much our nation depends on war? Hot war, cold war. Even war on abstract ideas. The War on Poverty turned out to be a war on the poor, and as for the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, you can see how those are going. Now we have millions of people, some in high office, ramped up for a war on the devil himself, and here I am spouting love and compassion.” He stops for breath, but does not look as wild-eyed as David might expect.

“Made any converts?”

Simon glances out the window. “Hard to say. I've convinced a handful from home. But as for our, uh ... well, my target market ... it's hard to get them to accept salvation from a human when they don't accept their own basic humanity.”

“So you've spoken with them?”

“I've—we've—found an elvish community in the forest. Can't say where: it's a matter of trust. They let us in and talk to us sometimes. If we can win over even a few, that will get things started.”

“You sure that's a good idea?”

“Pardon?”

“What do you talk about?”

“It's sort of a cultural exchange. They tell us about their culture, we tell them about ours, and we try to point out common ground.”

“Again, are you sure that's wise?”

“It's the only way we can get anywhere. As long as they see us as alien, they’ll never accept what we say. So we have to show them that we're not entirely alien.”

David looks down into his coffee. Part of him wants to argue, and part wants to leave. But he needs to get a sense of the people who live here, so he listens as Simon lays out his approach to conversion. Words such as tolerance, humility, and re-interpretation fill the space between them amid visions of a missionary bands voyaging further and further afield. Eventually, though, Simon pauses and checks his watch. “Well,” he says. “Tempus fugit. I've got a Bible study to get to. Care to join me?” He begins to stand.

“No thanks.”

“Fair enough. I hope you find a story.”

“And I hope you find what you're looking for.”

iii   What’s-her-name

“We’re going to lose. In the long run. No other outcome is possible.”

“What do you mean?” David asks. It is closing in on midnight; he is at a table in a dark corner of the Unicorn’s Feather, a shadowy pub a block up from the river, that he was told is a hang-out for journalists. The woman he is talking to—damned if he can remember her name—is drunk. He has met her back in the real world. She is about his age but has no reputation. He thinks he has read some of her work. Her ash-blond hair is held back in a ponytail, and her gray eyes, despite the alcohol lurking behind them, are clear. She plunked herself down at his table about five minutes ago.

“How long you been here?” she asks.

“A few days.”

“Been here six months—came in from the frontier last Friday. You religious?”

David shakes his head.

“Probably good,” she looks down at her beer, momentarily drifting out of focus.

“You were saying?” he prompts.

“Was I?”

“You were saying we were going to lose.”

“Were are.”

“Why?”

She looks up from the darkness of her stout, opens her mouth and closes it, then tries again. “Because we’re not really here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She gestures around the room. “This,” she says. “Places like this. We haven’t come to a new world; we’ve just brought our old world with us. In the deepest parts of ourselves, we’re still back home.”

David sips his pale ale. “We’ve had people living here for twenty years. The first kids born here are have finished high school. Some have never been to the real world.”

“Not what I mean.” She takes another swallow and sets her glass down. “What we see, how we see, it’s all from back home. And as for those kids—everything they learned in school was imported. They may as well have grown up in Nebraska.”

David shrugs. “Their day to day experiences are on this side, so whatever they learn about life back home, the simple fact that they’re here will change the context. When you change the context, you change the meaning. Besides, cultures have their own values. That’s what makes them cultures. It’s when they lose their values that they start to disintegrate.”

“Or grow. If the world outstrips your values, your values had better adapt.”

He looks at the pale liquid in his glass, then looks up again. “Still doesn’t answer my question. You said we’re going to lose, and now you’re talking about values. Simple fact: we have bigger guns. Sorry if that doesn’t sound deep—I don’t like a lot that goes on here, myself—but if you want to talk about winning and losing, let’s talk about how winning is achieved.”

“All right,” she drains her glass and signals for another. “If we hang on, but instead of making them more like us, we become more like them, who wins?”

“Who’s talking about becoming? We’re talking about who controls the land.”

“And the people on it. Don’t kid yourself. This isn’t just a conflict over land. It’s a conflict over ways of life. Why do you think the government is funding so many missionaries? You want to talk about how winning is achieved, let’s talk about that.”

The waitress appears out of the faces and small-talk and sets another stout on the table—a pint of black under a layer of beige foam. The woman—he still can’t remember her name—takes a long swallow. After a minute or so without words, David speaks up. “You’re probably right about the missionaries. But the number of converts among the human population argues against you.” She opens her mouth to say something, but he resumes. “While the flakier elements in our society have latched onto a few native beliefs, the church is making bigger inroads among the Neverlanders than anything they have is making among us. We out-gun them both physically and spiritually. So why are we going to lose?” He sips his beer and clunks it down. How many of these has he had, anyway?

She stares at him, tanned brow furrowing. “Because,” she says at length. “Because the place itself is so far outside our experience that we don’t know how to see it. Because dragons here are real, and any world that can give birth to dragons can swallow every gun, bullet, shell, and cross we throw at it.” She looks into the darkness of her glass and pronounces slowly: “Because someday that Rift is going to close.”

David blinks. “They’ve run tests. They’re running tests all the time. It hasn’t changed.”

“What are they testing for?”

“Damned if I know. But they wouldn’t let people through if they thought it might …”

“Disappear?” She smiles. “I know your reputation, David Burns. I’ve read all your books and several of your articles. I didn’t think you’d be naïve. What do you think would happen back home if, right now, we were cut off? Like you said, they’re running tests all the time. So they can’t be at fault. And what have they got invested in the place? The government, I mean. What do they stand to lose? A big chunk of the population is people who didn’t like it back home. So some malcontents go missing. You think they’ll care? As for the money that’s been sunk into the place, it’s mostly private. Our so-called representatives in Washington just collect the kickbacks. And they’ve had a big windfall already.”

“What about the military?”

“You think soldiers aren’t expendable? There’d be memorial services, a few days of national shock, then the government would tell everyone to go shopping and bomb some middle eastern country. Outrage would be directed outward. The nation would feel better about itself. Life would go on. No.” She shakes her head and looks around the crowded room. “They know this is temporary. They’re just grabbing what they can before the candy store closes.”

David empties his glass, thinks about ordering another, doesn’t.

“Pleasant dreams,” she smiles as he holds up cash to catch the waitress’s attention.

Three minutes later, he is standing outside the pub, leaning against the wall and staring at the stars. Scanning the sky with his back to the cool solidity of the bricks, he looks for something that might resemble the big dipper, and when he cannot find it, has to stop himself from shaking.

*

In his dreams, little men with long gray hair crawl naked from the bowl of a fountain. They slip onto the grass, water running from their skin like liquid shadow dragged from the depths of the earth, and creep into the spaces between trees, slouching, making their ways by stealth and malice to an empty sidewalk full of well-dressed ghosts. The ghosts do not notice them—do not realize that they are ghosts at all—just keep going about their business. But the little men are watching, whispering among themselves.