Back at the big red booth in Casa Escobar, Kaplan announced that he had a plan.

"I hope you don't have too much for me to do," I admitted. "I'm bushed."

"Not necessary," Kaplan said. "Bette here's going in."

Kaplan explained that he'd sent Miguel over to the office supply store next door and was faxing over some forged NASA stationery from an FX vault he used to work with. The idea was to mock up a letter from Story Musgrave Junior to Boots Bacci-as Kaplan recalled, Junior had been a guest on Boots's talk show some years earlier during a tribute to his dad. The letter would personally introduce Bette as a talented performer whose career just wanted the kind of help Bacci could provide through his extensive contacts. "Let's see," Kaplan muttered as he scribbled notes. "We'll put in something about using Boots to host an old astronaut special. 'Please give this warm lady your special attention, the Boots Bacci boost we all know about, that big, stiff rocket....'"

Bette was going to take a cab and present herself at the front door of the Brentwood house with the letter in hand.

Kaplan set down his notes. "Then we let Nature take its course."

"What was-uh, is-your career?" I asked Bette.

"She was an exotic dancer." Barbara giggled.

"Use what you've got, honey," Bette said. "Just get me to Casa Charo on the way so's I can get a blond wig and some sungla.s.ses. And I'd like another Margarita."

Kaplan was radiant. "She's gonna be a star."

We all wanted to be there in Brentwood, if only down the block, to see if she'd get into the house.

But we were stumped about the gurneys.

"We could get arrested for hara.s.sment," the judge said. "I'd hate to see them in a cell."

Barbara pointed out that our charges had been in comas for months. Kaplan said he didn't seeanything wrong with leaving the gurneys side by side in the alcove, and giving the busboy a hundred dollars to page us if there was any noticeable change in their condition.

The busboy was not only willing, but even trained in CPR. Though it was a little irresponsible, Barbara and I went along. Kaplan hacked away at the letter, and when it was finished, Miguel moved the van around and helped us in.

I really was tired. There in the back of the van, I settled in for a bit of a nap. I woke up with the mid-afternoon sun in my eyes and realized that we'd stopped. My companions were hushed. When I looked down the street, I saw a blonde in a leopard skin outfit at the front door of the Brentwood house-the blonde was Bette-falling into a big hug from Boots Bacci and being ushered in.

"I still don't get it," I admitted.

From the front of the van, Kaplan placed a call to Studio City, telling Monica that Boots had had a seizure and was unable to get out of bed and that she needed to rush right home.

What really frosted Monica, she told us later, was the way Boots hadn't even folded back the family quilt (an heirloom in colorful interlocking circles, the cla.s.sic "wedding ring" pattern). When she burst in, distraught, limping on a shoe whose high heel she'd broken during her breathless climb up the stairs, he was sitting right on it, back against the teak headboard, stark naked except for the silk bathrobe Monica had only recently given him for Christmas (strike two). From behind a hand-held holocorder, he was apparently directing Bette in some sort of "audition" (strike three). The holodisc, of course, left as little doubt about his guilt as the famous bin Laden tape from before the Aussie War. In a somewhat empty tribute to virtue, leggy Bette had never in fact had to get out of her leopard skin outfit, which was probably just as well, even though she'd closed the drapes and dimmed the lights. Monica confessed that the affair confirmed growing suspicions she'd had about her husband, who had been taking uncommon interest in a series of female trainers though he never seemed to exercise, and had started locking himself in the screening room.

From the street, the sequence was elegant in its economy-Monica running in the front door, Boots ejected from the rear, hopping past the pool and cabana, struggling to pull on his clothes. He nearly lost it all together when Kaplan punched the garage door's remote.

There were repercussions, of course. Bacci maintained that he had been hara.s.sed, entrapped, and defrauded. Before the day was out, we actually had to answer some questions posed to us by an investigator at the L.A. prosecutor's office.

Bacci himself was there, his eyes puffy, his silver boots scuffed, his anger palpable. He'd inflicted a long sc.r.a.pe on the side of the silver Lamborghini as he'd peeled out of the garage.

"Okay," the investigator, an anorexic attorney, began, "Who's Story Musgrave?"

"I am," the judge said.

"I am," Kaplan added, then he pointed to me.

I waved. "Did you say Story Musgrave?" I asked, adjusting my cap. "That's me."

She sighed. "Mr. Bacci maintains that earlier today, February 7th, you gentlemen, particularly Mr.

Kaplan and Judge Ortiz, colluded to defraud him. Now, Mr. Kaplan, I want you to tell me your precise whereabouts from the hours of...."

"Excuse me," he interrupted. "Let's cut to the chase. The medical record will show that I have suffered a ma.s.sive, debilitating stroke, and the legal record will show that specialists under Mr. Bacci's own supervision had me declared incompetent as an individual not six months ago. Any testimony I might give can't have standing in the State of California."

"Mmm," she mused, consulting her softscreen for a long moment. Then she turned to me. "Doctor, did you hear any conversation between Mr. Kaplan and Judge Ortiz that would suggest such a conspiracy?"

I fiddled with my cap. "Would you please put your question in writing?" I asked.

When she did so, I read the sentence, fiddled with my hat again, and replied. "I'm so sorry for the trouble, counselor. I was trained to be a good listener, but, you see, I've become stone deaf, and myhat's not entirely reliable. So I could hardly...."

"Judge Ortiz," she said, looking down at her softscreen again, sucking her upper lip. "Did you see anything today to call into question the legal standing of the woman known as Bette Waters as a legitimate entertainer seeking professional advice from Mr. Bacci?"

Ortiz twirled his red and white cane, and a bright red dot flew around the room. The dot finally got her attention. "Justice is blind," he said, setting his cane on the floor and rising. "Now can we go?"

That hour at the prosecutor's office, however, wasn't the strangest thing that happened toward the end of that day. Miguel, who said he'd never had a better time in his life, and who still is with us as our driver, ran us back to Casa Escobar to retrieve the gurneys.

They were there in the alcove, all right. But Tiger Montelban wasn't, and neither was the one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old lady.

The busboy was distraught. He'd checked every quarter hour, he told us. He'd been a bit late just after five because he'd had to help set up for dinner. When he'd finally looked in the alcove, they were gone-the tops of the gurneys empty landscapes of rumpled sheets and dented pillows punctuated by a trailing IV line. The restaurant staff had searched the neighborhood. People on the street spoke of an elderly couple in white who looked to be romantically involved, but it was just impossible. There was no report back at the nursing home, nothing from the nearby hospitals, nothing from the police or the morgue. To this day, we don't have a clue as to what happened to them, except for a series of charges that appeared on Montelban's credit chip at a resort in Cabo San Lucas. The chip had been embedded in his wrist.

These days we count on Arcadia for our medical care three days out of every seven, but otherwise we spend extended weekends at the house in Brentwood, sitting in leather furniture, watching sports in the den, taking in old movies with Barbara and Bette and Ramona in the screening room-that's really a treat, as Marv has remastered digital holos of all the great ones from the past hundred and fifty years, from Birth of a Nation to the ten Lucas Star Wars sequels. Monica's a regular angel, kind and considerate and a world-cla.s.s caterer, though we do our best to look after ourselves as much as we can.

Barbara and I have taken to light exercise in the pool and lounging beside the cabana. Every once in a while, lying on my back, relaxed and at peace-a third try with stem cells has reduced my tremor-I look up and think of them, Tiger Montelban and his angel. Occasionally I see them in the shapes of clouds rolling in the sky, soft and free as floating gauze or down, white as bright moonlight on a snow-covered mountain, drifting in the heavens together, arm in arm.

Afterlife

JACK WILLIAMSON.

Jack Williamson lives in Portales, New Mexico, near the Jack Williamson Library and SF collection at the University of New Mexico, which sponsors an annual Jack Williamson lecture on SF. The first age of SF genre heroes is not over as long as Jack Williamson is alive and writing.

Williamson's first SF story was published in the 1920s, and he has been a leading figure in the field in every decade since, all eight of them. He is a legendary pioneer of SF now in his nineties, who has never ceased learning his craft and producing fiction of high quality.

Published in F&SF , which had a particularly strong year in 2002, "Afterlife" is a good old-fashioned SF moral tale about believing in reason and science, and being rewarded by a better, longer life. Not an easy life, nor one with immediate rewards, but a deeper, richer one. This is one of the core messages of science fiction as a genre. There is also a level of satire in the subtext about con men who promise immediate salvation through science, a message just as relevant today as it has always been.

"We live on faith," my father used to say. "The afterlife is all we have." I wasn't sure of any afterlife. My questions troubled my father, who was pastor of our little church.

He made me kneel with him to pray and listen to long chapters from the Bible on the altar. That sacred book, he said, had come from the holy Mother Earth. It looked old enough, the brittle yellow pages breaking loose from the cracked leather binding, but if its miracles had ever really happened, that had been a hundred light-years away and long millennia ago.

"If there is a G.o.d," I told him, "and if he heard our prayers, we'd all be dead before we ever got his answer."

With an air of tragic sorrow, he warned me that such reckless words could put my immortal soul in danger.

"We ourselves are miracles," he told me, "happening every day. Our whole planet was the Lord's miraculous answer to the prayers of the first Earthmen to land here. They found it rich in everything, and spoiled it with their own greed and folly."

I heard the history of that from our one-legged schoolmaster. Our first dozen centuries had been a golden age. We settled both great continents, harvested the great forests, loaded fleets of s.p.a.ce freighters with precious hardwoods and rare metals. All that wealth was gone two thousand years ago.

Sadly, he showed us a few precious relics he kept in the dusty cupboard he called a museum. There was a little gla.s.s tube that he said had shone with the light of a hundred candles when there was power to make it burn, and a dusty telephone that once had talked around the world.

We were born poor, in a poor little village. On the Sabbaths, my father preached in the adobe-walled church. On weekdays, he got into his dusty work clothes and ground corn on a little grist mill turned by a high waterwheel. His pay was a share of the meal.

Wheat grew on the flat land down in the valley below us, but the soil in our hill country had eroded too badly for wheat. Through most of the week we ate cornmeal mush for breakfast and corn pones for bread. Sometimes my mother made white bread or even honey cakes, when church members from the valley gave us wheat flour.

On the Sabbaths she played a wheezy old organ to accompany the hymns. I used to love the music and the promise of a paradise where the just and good would live happily forever, but now I saw no reason to believe it. With no life here at home, I longed to get away into the wider universe, but I saw no chance of that.

It's seven light-years to the nearest settled star system. The trade ships quit coming long ago, because we had nothing left to trade. There's only the mail ship, once every Earth year. It arrives nearly empty and leaves with every sling filled with those lucky people who find money for the fare.

It lands at the old capitol, far across the continent. I'd never been there, nor seen any kind of starship till the year I turned twelve. That quiet Sabbath morning, the rest of the family was gone in the wagon with my father to a revival meeting in another village down the river. Expecting no miracle there or anywhere, I'd been happy to stay home and do the ch.o.r.es.

Awakened by a rooster crowing, I was walking out to the barn to milk our three cows. I heard something thundering across the sky. In a moment I found it, a flash of silver when it caught the sun. I dropped the milk bucket, staring while it wheeled low over the crumbled ruins of something that had stood on the hill west of us.

It turned and dived straight at me.

With no time to run, I stood frozen while it sank over the west pasture and the apple orchard. It struck the cornfield and plowed on through a cloud of dust and flying rocks till it stopped at the edge of my mother's kitchen. Its thunder ceased. It lay still, a smoking ma.s.s of broken metal.

I stood there watching, waiting for something more to happen. Nothing did. I caught my breath at last, and walked uneasily toward it. Nothing about it made any kind of sense until I looked into the long furrow it had dug and found a torn and bleeding human arm. A leg farther on, most of the skin torn off.

Another naked leg, still attached to the mangled body. Finally a hairless skull grinning from the bottom of the ditch.

Dazed by the sudden strangeness of it, I thought I ought to call my father or the constable or the schoolmaster, but they were all away at the revival. I was still there, wondering what to do, when I saw acarrion bird hovering over the body. I shouted and threw stones to keep it away till some of the neighbors came from up the river. We gathered up what we could, the smallest red sc.r.a.ps in my milk bucket, and carried them into the church.

The sheriff came on horseback, the doctor with him. They frowned over the body parts, laid out on a long table made of planks laid across the benches. The doctor fitted them closer together to see if anything was missing. The sheriff picked up pieces of broken metal, scowled at them uneasily, threw them back in the ditch.

They all left at last, for their dinners or whatever they had to do. I think they were afraid of too much they didn't understand. So was I, but I didn't like the flies buzzing around the body. I went home for a sheet to cover it. After a cold corn pone and a bowl of clabbered milk for lunch, I came back to look at the wreck again, and watch the empty sky. Nothing else came down.

Evening came. I milked the cows again, fed the pig, found a dozen eggs in the nests. I heard dogs barking and went back to the church to be certain the door was closed. Night fell as I was walking home. Our planet has no moon. In the sudden darkness, the stars were a blaze of diamonds.

I stopped to look up at them, wondering about the stranger. Where was his home? Why had he come here? What could have gone so terribly wrong when he tried to land? The answers were beyond me, but I stood there a long time, wishing I'd been born somewhere else, with a chance to see worlds more exciting than our own.

In the empty house, I lit a candle, ate another corn pone and a piece of fried chicken my mother had left for me, went to bed. Trying to forget the vulture circling over that skinned skull in the ditch, I lay listening to the tick of the old clock in the hall till I heard the rattle of my father's wagon.

My mother and my sister came in the house while he drove on to stable the team. News of the dead stranger stopped their chatter about the meeting. My father lit a candle lantern when he heard about it, and we all walked across the road to the church. My mother lifted the sheet to look at the body.

She screamed and my father dropped the lantern.

"Alive! It's alive!"

The candle had gone out. I shivered when I heard some small creature scurry away in the dark. My father's hands must have been shaking; it took him a long time to find a match to light the candle again.

The long naked body was a man's, black with dried blood and horribly scarred, but somehow whole again.

The bald skull had hair again, a short pale fuzz. The eyes were open, staring blindly up into the dark.

The body seemed stiff and hard, but I saw the blood-caked chest rise and slowly fall. My mother reached to touch it, and said she felt a heartbeat.

My father made me saddle my pony and go for the doctor. I had to hammer at the door a long time before he came out in his underwear to call me crazy for waking him in the middle of the night with such a c.o.c.k-and-bull story. If we had a live man there at the church, it had to be some drunk who had crept inside to sober up.

Still angry, he finally dressed and saddled a horse to come back with me. My mother had lit candles at the altar. My father was on his knees before it, praying. The doctor threw the sheet off the man, felt his wrist, and said he'd be d.a.m.ned.

"The hand of G.o.d!" my father whispered, backing away and dropping back to his knees. "A holy miracle! We prayed at the meeting for a sign to help us persuade the unbelievers. And the good Lord has answered!"

"Maybe." The doctor squinted at me. "Or is it some trick of Satan?"

My mother brought a basin of warm water and helped him wash off the clots of blood and mud. His eyes closed, the man seemed to be sleeping. He woke when day came, and sat up to stare blankly at the empty benches around him. His blond hair and beard had grown longer. The scars had disappeared.

My mother asked how he felt.

He blinked at her and shivered, wrapping the sheet around himself.

"Are you the Son of G.o.d?" My father knelt before him. "Have you come to save the world?"

He shook his head in a puzzled way. My mother asked if he was hungry. He nodded, and rose unsteadily when she asked if he could. She took his hand and led him out of the church and down the street to our house. He limped slowly beside her, peering around him as if everything was strange.

"Sir?" The doctor came up beside him. "Can you tell us who you are?"

He made a strange animal grunt and shook his head again.

At our house, my mother brought him a gla.s.s and a pitcher of apple juice. He gulped it thirstily and sat watching her fix breakfast. My father brought clothing for him, and a pair of shoes. He sat frowning at them and finally stood up to dress himself, slow and clumsy about it, and let me tie the shoes.

"Sir?" The doctor stood watching. "Where are you from?"

"Earth." He spoke at last, his voice deep and slow. "I am here from Mother Earth."

My mother set a plate for him. He studied the knife and fork as if they were new to him, but plied them ravenously when she brought a platter of ham and scrambled eggs. She had set plates for the doctor and my father, but they forgot to eat.

"You were dead." My father was hoa.r.s.e with awe. "How can you live again?"

"I was never dead." He reached to stab another slice of ham. "I am eternal."

"Eternal?" The doctor blinked and squinted at him. "Do you mean immortal?"

"I-" He paused as if he had to search for words. "I do not die."

"I saw you dead." The doctor swallowed hard and watched him slice the ham. "What brought you back?"

"The power." Smiling as though glad to find what to say, he wiped his lips with a slice of white bread.