He caught a swirl of movement in the dark. Beside the storage shed.

Odd.

"Tom."

The voice was clearer this time.

He opened the door and squinted into the night. "Who's there?"

Gravel crunched. "It's me, Tom."

His limbs went cold. He knew the voice. "Who are you?"

She stepped out of the gloom. Out of a time long past. "Corey?"

She nodded. "h.e.l.lo," she said.

He stared. "What are you doing here?" His voice was thick, and he had to make several attempts to get the question out.

She was as he remembered her. The years had left her untouched.

"I've always been here," she said. She smiled and took a tentative step toward him. "You're letting the cold into the house."

Lasker came out onto the porch. Closed the door. Moonlight fell across her shoulders, shadowed her eyes. "I don't understand this," he said. The porch railing was solid under one hand. The night air was cold, and a car droned by, throwing its lights briefly across the top of the barn.

"I don't either," she said. "I think we're getting a second chance." She pushed her hands down into her pockets.

Lasker came cautiously down the steps, not trusting his sense of balance. For the first time since his fortieth birthday, he felt acutely conscious of his age. He murmured her name and she watched him and his heart beat so loudly he could hear nothing else.

They stood facing each other briefly, and then Lasker reached for her, touched one shoulder and gently drew her forward. She looked up at him, and a tear rolled through her smile.

The old emotional storm froze his soul. The wind, the trees, the stars fell silent. He wanted to ask questions, but could only hold on. The world seemed rickety underfoot. In Lasker's long existence it was a place constructed of splintered wood and solid earth, laid out in precise mathematical juxtapositions. No room for the supernatural.

"It has to do with the boat, doesn't it?"

"It fixes things," she said. "I don't know how."

The sound of the television leaked out into the night air. Trembling, Lasker traced the line of her jaw with his fingertips. She lifted her face and their eyes locked and she gripped his shoulders. He placed his lips against hers, without pressure, so that he could feel her breath whisper in and out. "Corey, are you real?"

"Do you need to ask?"

They kissed. Warmth poured through him: adolescent pa.s.sion, first love reignited. Whatever.

"I love you," he said.

"I know." She pushed against him. "I'm sorry. I was young."

"You're still young," Lasker said. He was having trouble catching his breath.

Her hand curled round the nape of his neck and drew him back for another long kiss.

"What do we do now?" he asked.

She backed off a step, looked up at him. My G.o.d, she was beautiful. "Just go in and pack," she said. "I'll wait in the pickup."

Lasker shook his head. "If you know anything about me at all, you know I can't do that. Twenty years ago maybe." The maybe tasted delicious on his tongue. "It's not that simple anymore."

"It is that simple, Tom. If you really want me."

More than you could ever know. "Listen: we need some time to talk about this. Figure out what's happening-"

"There is no time, Tom. I'm sorry, but you have to make up your mind now."

Lasker shook his head. A burst of laughter issued from inside the house. Ginny.

Ginny.

"Tom: I love you. I always did." Her eyes widened. "You never knew, did you?"

"No," he said. "I never did."

"I didn't think you would give up so easily."

Lasker backed away. The stars burned fiercely. "What did you expect?" He looked away from her. "Anyway it doesn't matter now. You're far too late."

She nodded. "I understand. In a way, I'm part of you. But you can make it up to her later. You loved me long before you knew her. You love me still-"

He stood silent.

"Your decision," she said quietly. "But be right. I can't come back."

Lasker discovered he still had hold of her hand. He hung onto it and looked into her face. And let go. "You're right, Corey," he said. "You've always been here. I suspect you always will." Like the lake, he thought: a lingering image, an impact. But long gone.

He turned away from her and strode back up onto the porch.

"I'm sorry, Tom."

He stopped with his hand on the door. "I'm not."

If Ginny recognized the change in the tone of her marriage, she never said anything to Lasker. But she must have noticed that he no longer hesitated to drive over to Fort Moxie when occasion arose.

For him, the dreams stopped.

And when, several weeks later, the dating report came in, it indicated that the materials from which the boat was constructed were new. No age could be a.s.signed.

But late the following Sat.u.r.day night, at the Prairie Schooner Bar, Lasker told Frank Hall that he had expected no less. "It fixes things," he said.

Transfusion.

JOeLLE WINTREBERT.

Translated from the French by Kim Stanley Robinson M.

ORNING. She lifts her left foot. With deliberate care. And the utmost in determination. Today she will be in a bad mood. That's how she is when she feels blurred. She doesn't like things vague, floating, indefinite. A contained rage allows her to construct clean boundaries; and too bad if the angles are a bit sharp.

She walks past Thomas, chin high, eyes blank, not responding to his cheery h.e.l.lo, not allowing herself to be trapped by the huckster smell of toast. She will breakfast alone, scrounging currants and heart cherries, their acidity a perfect match for an irritation unable to deal with the stickiness of jam and amorous gestures.

She looks out at her garden, and finds it drowned in a fog so dense that all points of reference are gone. She hesitates, but the sound of Thomas's voice thrusts her out. Walking randomly, afraid he'll catch up with her, she moves between the tall silhouettes of the silver birches, the thickset purple ma.s.ses of the hazel trees.

Suddenly it seems the charcoal-sketch shapes form an unfamiliar pattern.

And then she's lost.

Surely the garden isn't this big? It's disorienting, therefore exciting. How, after all this time, can such a familiar place have escaped her? Milky dampness falls on her face, like sails sewn with minuscule pearls; her arms grow taut, her steps groping; she stares, wide-eyed, and recognizes-not a single thing.

Far away, at the end of a long tunnel of cotton wool, Thomas is calling her. She traps the grasping parasite sound under her eyelids, and suffocates it.

When she reopens her eyes, it is watching her. It is suspended in the fog, ringed by a halo of light that crackles, diffracts, explodes. It has a serene, surreal face, which awakens a kind of religious awe in her... But its smile reveals the jaw of a beast, and in its eyes strange keyhole pupils contract to tiny slots, exposing orange-colored irises, as liquid and turbulent as waves on a beach.

Stomach all knotted, she takes a step back. Then another.

The mask of the predator breaks apart, then recomposes in a new face. Because of the contempt in the new eyes, and the brutal rictus of the new lips, she doesn't immediately identify this face; but when she does, she groans with terror. Her face. This other self and its incomprehensible savagery frighten her more than the thing that preceded it.

Centuries pa.s.s. Her fear pours her out in a long viscous flux, until she is nothing but a kind of glue. Finally the sap runs dry; but by then she's been captured. Fertilized.

A strange process distills the wine of fear into a brandy of perverse fascination; but then her other face explodes in a thousand splinters, ending the centuries' stillness, and suddenly it's as if she were transfused into a better body. As if she had been turned inside out, displaced, her atoms wrenched about to conquer her from within. To imprison her. A violent shiver of revolt runs through her, but fails to stop the creation of her new atomic structure. Why struggle against the force that fills everything?

For her unenc.u.mbered heart, for living in the cracks, for feeling the secret sorrows hidden in every corner-for all that, it's the end.

From now on, she is without refuge.

But full. Compact. Sleek.

The fog lifts. She tastes earthy saliva at the back of her throat.

Thomas appears, and she strikes him with a dangerous look; she can feel its impact. Thomas shudders, defends himself with a laugh that instantly fossilizes. He pales, turns his head aside. She knows she can break the orbit he moves in, for she is its centerpoint. Vertigo spins her as she discovers the power of cruelty. She straddles it, rides it, until it becomes a kind of ecstasy.

"Who's there, Barbel? You or the other one?"

The question devastates her. She's helpless before it; she can't keep her hands from trembling. She thinks, Am I possessed?

Thomas puts his lips to her forehead, as if sealing a final letter. He whispers the proof of his frailty: "You frighten me, Barbel Hachereau. That's why I'm leaving. I lied-I haven't been at a conference. Someone will be by to get my things."

He drifts off, a being without boundaries, nothing but a shape, loose, soft, shifting. She watches him disappear with an astonishment that contains no regret. Two bodies cannot occupy the same s.p.a.ce at the same time; it's only possible if one of them becomes blurred, vague. Transparent to the point of fading into the other.

The vapor that called itself Thomas will finish dissipating as it reaches the gate at the end of the garden.

From now on, Barbel is alone. An intense sensation, this liberty. She dilates, she opens wide, becomes a plump darkness, feverish, gasping, waiting. Standing in the blue milk of the sky, she hopes that some extraordinary seed will fill her. Languid but alert, open hands just barely trembling, eyes closed to better seize... what? She's not sure, and yet it's here, it's waiting for her to sense it, she feels it in the rusty smell of the earth's breath, in the heavy, slow acidity of vegetable rot, in the sugars and salts of her skin, touched by the relentless sun.

She falls into herself, discovers the blood's red alchemy, the effervescent flux of atoms; she dances the crazy ballet of the molecules... and then in the secret moisture, in the center of her being, its face reforms.

It's inside me, she thinks.

Inside, from now on. Inside, and looking at her; and its alien eyes are an orange sea, rising to engulf her.

For a long time she circles a stone, insistently rubbing impudent b.u.mps, grainy pleats. Endlessly she polishes her body. She stops when it takes on the sheen of a pebble, ground in the millwheel of time. Dust with a rainbow edge coats its surface; wrapped in this thin silk, the body is ready for the ceremony.

Barbel leaves the garden through a hole in the privet hedge, and sinks into earth. Three days of rain have softened the silt to perfection. The dense and supple mud takes the precise shape of the arch of the foot, then shoves up and tapers out between the toes: three steps more and she's in it to her ankles. Why not abandon herself to the warm, voluptuous suction? All that was dry, immaculate, white as mother-of-pearl-all that can surrender to the clay's annealing.

Barbel lies down. Her nostrils quiver, her body inhales a thick saliva. The slow embrace of the slime closes over her. Gravity. She couldn't move even if she wanted to. Bubbles burst, freeing the giddy scent of vegetable rot. Flush with the earth and its plants, she sees an odyssey of iron browns, greens, minuscule swarmings, crystals of captive light, snares of sticky thistle: a furtive, pitiless universe.

Seal your eyelids. Feel the aquatic kiss on your mouth. Open up wide. Taste. Clay plasters your tongue? Swallow. Let it settle inside you. Don't think of it as armor; it's the body of nature itself that fills you. You must accept the numb, confused stirring, the abrupt sensation of the outside pulsing in you-also the fiery needles, the phantom needles, being placed with sure precision, to b.u.m you.

Don't move. You are an open notch to another universe, which invites you to share its force. Are you going to refuse the power of the G.o.ds?

But what are G.o.ds when you can't name them? Complete strangers. Fabulous brocades, turned into snarls of yarn. Barbel reaches out, pulls the tatters of her instinct around her. She wakes up, chokes, vomits muddy water.

Behind the blurry screen of her tears it smiles at her, bound to her by a cord of pure energy. "Rub it entirely away, Barbel Hachereau. Perhaps it's not too late."

The mouth and its bronze fangs grow and contract horribly. Around the mouth skin cracks and peels, then detaches in rotting shreds, rags that are caught in flight by busy insects.

Barbel feels no triumph at the sight of these sc.r.a.ps of her predator's flesh. She shuts her eyes: the horrible vision is more than she can stand, especially as it contains within it a wild buzz of anguish, of lament. The cord snaps; but glittering fragments of it begin immediately to rea.s.semble.

A streaming ochre golem, Barbel exhumes herself from her shroud of mud. As she returns to the garden, the glistening supple coating on her body becomes dull, rough, gnarled; pieces of it flake off. Just the way she feels. A little less than living. Half-petrified. Worn away. The defeat inside victory.

A thunderstorm pelts her naked body with rain. She runs and dances and runs, in the fat field by the river. She is far from the garden.

Caught again by the demonic face, she spreads her arms, throws back her head, tastes the intoxicating fizz of ozone. A thunderbolt crashes down: encircling flash of blue, hair standing on end, crackling. The storm lessens, washes the twilight. Tirelessly Barbel dances the demon's dance. Her arms unfurl invisible tapestries, the capricious flights of her fingers weave strange embroidery, her head cuts the sky to ribbons, and suddenly four boys are there to a.s.sist at the scene.