His legs make easy strides. A bootheel rubs. Leather creaks. Arms rocking, calves bunching. Heart pumping lungs whooshing skin warm boot turning on a stone sky flat shirt tugging in the damp armpits waxy cactus in the path canteen rattling as he turns—

From this awareness Nigel selects. The being does not. He eats it all.

A rabbit bounds to the side. A claret-cup cactus beckons. Nigel stops. Unscrews canteen. Drinks.

—feels the rushing silvery quilted reddening flavor on his tongue—

—And senses some dim trace of what the other being must feel. It honored the sanctity of living creatures; it would not have bid Alexandria to rise again, but she was already gone, already dead to her own world. So to see this fresh planet, the being used a body that men had already cast aside.

In those first moments of contact with Nigel, on the street in Mexico City, the being had very nearly withdrawn. But when it saw the ruined canvas inside this man, it had stayed. Using the subtle knowledge, learned from thousands of such contacts with chemical life forms, it undertook some brush of contact. And remained. To taste this sweet world. To shore up this man.

—blue custard sky vibrant with flapping life, drifting splotches, writhing clouds—

This place is alien.

Pausing, the sharp jagged horizon dividing this world into halves, he reflects. And sees the rippling weave of Evers and Lubkin and Shirley and Hufman and Alexandria and Nigel. A play. A net. Gravid workings. Each a small universe in itself.

But each together. Exalted. Each a firmament. A clockwork.

So familiar.

So alien.

Deep, buried in the currents of the torrent, Nigel swims.

Swimming, he heals.

The looming presence sat astride the flood of perception and took it all. Before Nigel could apply the filters of his eyes, ears, skin, touch, smell—before all that, the being sponged up this new and strange world, and in the act of taking altered it for Nigel as well.

And someday the being would go. Pass through. Nigel would split his cocoon then. Emerge. Into the splintering day. On doddering feet.

He would pass through that lens. All would pass. But for the moment:

The Snark       feels the booming pulse unfolds the rocks before him carves the dry air smacks boots into yielding earth—

seeing

     tasting

     opening.

Eases him into the warming world.

Pins him loving to the day

—E v e r s L u b k i n S h i r l e y H u f m a n—

AlexandriaAlexandria—

Thinking of them, knowing he will return to that world someday, a weight slips from him and he rolls and basks and floats in these familiar waters of the desert. Evers-Hufman-Shirley—

Alien, they are, his brothers.

So alien.

He woke, staring up into an iron-gray sky glowing with dawn.

He woke alone.

The being was gone. The faint trembling pressure had seemed to ride behind his eyes; now Nigel felt only a hollow absence of something he could scarcely recall.

He sat up in his sleeping bag, felt a buzzing dizziness, and lay back again. A horned lizard froze on a nearby rock and then, sensing his relaxation, darted away.

There were two places, he thought, where people feel closer to the source of things. The ocean, with its salty memory of origins. And in the desert—bleached, carved, turning beneath a yellow flame, a place reduced to the raw edge. And yet it was alive with a fine webbing of creatures. Perhaps that was why the being wanted to come here.

He remembered buying his backpack, goosedown sleeping bag and boots in a Mexico City shop. Remembered the short flight into the high desert. Remembered walking.

And sensed something behind his memories…

Of standing in a high place, looking down on a flat checkerboard of things, of categories and coordinate systems and forms.

He had watched himself. Seen a bird sheltering in a mesquite plant. Watched the first layer: Bird. Wings. A burnished brown. Phylum-order-class-genus-species.

Watched the second layer: Flight. Motion. Momentum. Analysis.

And saw at last that there was an essence in the way he filtered the world. That beyond the filter lay an ocean. A desert.

That the filter was what it meant to be human.

There was something more, something larger. He snatched at it but it…it brushed by him. He dimly saw the fabric of something… and then it was gone.

Nigel blinked. He lay on a shelf of worn rock, his body rubbed and warmed by the goosedown bag. The hill beside him glowed soft and golden; the horizon brimmed with light.

What had he learned? he thought. Factually, nothing. There were glimpsed aspects, nuances, but nothing concrete. The being had come. It provided some cushion for him during those dark hours in Mexico City (had he really fluxed the window? thought of jumping?). And the being had gone, seeped away in the night.

Nigel frowned, stretched, relaxed. His calves ached from walking. His stomach rumbled with hunger. He reached over to his backpack and fished out a dried fruit bar. His saliva wetted a bite and the flavor of strawberry filled his mouth.

What was it? After all he’d been through, Nigel still knew nothing about the alien that was useful. No facts, no data. One does not ask questions of a ghost.

He chewed, watching the filling sky.

Alexandria, Shirley—all behind him now. Ironic, how close you could be to someone, how much he’d thought he loved Shirley. Now, after all she’d done, there was only a dull, sour memory.

And questions. Had he really loved Shirley, or was that another illusion? The only person he had ever been sure of was Alexandria. And she was gone. Through the Snark he had known some faint trace of her, for a while. Perhaps some fraction of her remained in the Snark, some shadow.

He blew his nose on a handkerchief. The cloth came away with a smattering of blood; the night air had dried out his nasal passages.

Nigel smiled. Was the blood a sign of life? Or of death? Everywhere was ambiguity.

And yet…he wanted answers. He needed to know. Of his old world only one fragment remained: the Snark. There he must go. NASA and Evers would be stepping-stones outward and there would be others, other people who could help. There would be some resistance to him at NASA, he knew, particularly after the business about signaling the Snark first. Nigel Walmsley, the mad astronaut. But he would get through that.

He rubbed his eyes, smoothing the fretwork of crow’s feet. What he needed, after these two days with the being-behind-the-eyes, was people. The simple touch of his own kind. And he needed help to deal with NASA. But most of all, people.

Mr. Ichino paused at the entrance to the Pit. The calm murmur of technicians conversing mingled with the ding and chatter of typewriter inputs. The Pit was dark, its air stale. Hooded consoles spread dappled pools of light where men sat monitoring, checking, editing the river of information that flowed from this room, into the dancing rhythms of electrons and then out, riding electromagnetic wings to the Snark.

He noted a wall clock; twenty minutes until the meeting. Mr. Ichino sighed, willing himself to relax and not think of what lay ahead. He clasped his hands behind him in an habitual gesture and walked slowly into the Pit, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom. He paused at his personal console, froze a scrap of the transmission and read:In the service of the Emperor he found life, and fought the barbarians, and beat them into submission. When the Emperor so commanded, he fought strange and evil fairy creatures, and these he conquered. Dragons he slew, and giants. He was willing to do battle with all enemies of the land, mortal or animal or creatures from another world. And he was always the victor.