Relief filled Master, and with a thrilled voice, he said, "I remember her now, yes. Yes. She asked about human dominance in the galaxy-"

"Not quite, no."

Suspicion flowered, and curiosity followed. "She didn't ask that about human dominance?"

"It was her second question, and strictly speaking, it wasn't hers." Ash smiled and nodded, explaining, "The woman sitting next to her asked it. Quee Lee simply repeated the question, since she had won your attention."

A brief pause ended with the wary question: "What then did the woman ask me?"

Ash stared at the remaining displays, and with a quiet firm voice said, "I've spoken with Quee Lee.

At length. She remembers asking you, 'What was the earliest sentient life to arise in the galaxy?' "

The simple question generated a sophisticated response. An ocean of learning was tapped, and from that enormity a single turquoise thread was pulled free, and offered. Five candidates were named in a rush. Then the historian rapidly and thoroughly described each species, their home worlds, and eventual fates.

"None survived into the modern age," he said sadly. "Except as rumor and unsubstantiated sightings, the earliest generation of intelligence has died away."

Ash nodded, and waited.

"How could I forget such a very small thing?"

"Because it is so small," Ash replied. "The honest, sad truth is that your age is showing. I'm an old man for my species, but that's nothing compared to you. The Vozzen journeyed out among the stars during my Permian. You have an enormous and dense and extraordinarily quick mind. But it is a mind.

No matter how vast and how adept, it suffers from what is called bounded rationality. You don't know everything, no matter how much you wish otherwise. You're living in an enriched environment, full of opportunities to learn. And as long as you wish to understand new wonders, you're going to have to allow, on occasion, little pieces of your past to fade away."

"But why did such a trivial matter bother me so?" asked Master.

And then in the next instant, he answered his own question. "Because it was trivial, and lost. Is that why? I'm not accustomed to forgetting. The sensation is novel...it preyed upon my equilibrium...and wore a wound in my mind...!"

"Exactly, exactly," lied Ash. "Exactly, and exactly."

After giving him fair warning, Ash left the historian. "The final probes still need to disengage themselves," he explained. Then with a careful tone, he asked, "Should I bring your assistant to you?

Would you like to see him now?"

"Please."

"Very well." Ash pretended to step outside, turning in the darkened hallway, centuries of practice telling him where to step. Then he was inside the secondary chamber, using a deceptively casual voice, mentioning to Shadow, "By the way, I think I know what you are."

"What I am?"

With a sudden fierceness, Ash asked, "Did you really believe you could fool me?" The alien said nothing, and by every physical means, he acted puzzled but unworried.

Ash knew better.

"Your body is mostly Aaback, but there's something else. If I hadn't suspected it, I wouldn't have found it. But what seems to be your brain is an elaborate camouflage for a quiet, nearly invisible neural network."

The alien reached with both hands, yanking one of the cables free from his forehead. Then a long tongue reached high, wiping the gray blood from the wound. A halfway choked voice asked, "What did you see inside me?"

"Dinners," Ash reported. "Dinners reaching back for billions of years."

Silence.

"Do you belong to one of the first five species?"

The alien kept yanking cables free, but he was powerless to void the drifters inside his double-mind.

"No," said Ash, "I don't think you're any of those five." With a sly smile, he reported, "I can tell.

You're even older than that, aren't you?"

The tongue retreated into the mouth. A clear, sorry voice reported, "I am not sure, no."

"And that's why," said Ash.

"Why?"

"The woman asked that question about the old species, and you picked that moment because of it."

He laughed, nodded. "What did you use? How did you cut a few minutes out of a Vozzen's perfect memory...?"

"With a small disruptive device-"

"I want to see it."

"No."

Ash kept laughing. "Oh, yes. You are going to show it to me!"

Silence.

"Master doesn't even suspect," Ash continued. "You were the one who wanted to visit me. You simply gave the Vozzen a good excuse. You heard about me somewhere, and you decided that you wanted me to peer inside his soul, and yours. You were hoping that I would piece together the clues and tell you what I was seeing in your mind-"

"What do you see?" Shadow blurted.

"Basically, two things." With a thought, he caused every link with Shadow to be severed, and with a professional poise, he explained, "Your soul might be ten or twelve years old. I don't know how that could be, but I can imagine: In the earliest days of the universe, when the stars were young and metal-poor, life found some other way to evolve. A completely separate route. Structured plasmas, maybe. Maybe. Whatever the route, your ancestors evolved and spread, and then died away as the universe grew cold and empty. Or they adapted, on occasion. They used organic bodies as hosts, maybe."

"I am the only survivor," Shadow muttered. "Whatever the reason, I cannot remember anyone else like me."

"You are genuinely ancient," Ash said, "and I think you're smarter than you pretend to be. But this ghost mind of yours isn't that sophisticated. Vozzens are smarter, and most humans, too. But when I was watching you thinking, looking at something simple-when I saw dinners reaching back for a billion years-well, that kind of vista begs for an explanation."

Ash took a deep breath, and then said, "Your memory has help. Quantum help. And this isn't on any scale that I've ever seen, or imagined possible. I can pull in the collective conscience of a few trillion Masters from the adjacent realities...but with you, I can't even pick a number that looks sane..."

The alien showed his pink teeth, saying nothing.

"Are you pleased?" Ash asked.

"Pleased by what?"

"You are probably the most common entity in Creation," saidAsh. "I have never seen such a signal as yours. This clear. This deep, and dramatic. You exist, in one form or another, in a fat, astonishing portionof all the possible realities."

Shadow said, "Yes."

"Yes what?"

"Yes," he said with the tiniest nod, "I am pleased."

Always, the sun held its position in the fictional sky. And always, the same wind blew with calm relentlessness. In such a world, it was easy to believe that there was no such monster as time, and the day would never end, and a man with old and exceptionally sad memories could convince himself, on occasion, that there would never be another night.

Ash was last to leave the shop.

"Again," the historian called out, "thank you for your considerable help."

"Thank you for your generous gift." Ash found another cup of tea waiting for him, and he sipped down a full mouthful, watching as Shadow untethered the floating pack. "Where next?"

"I have more lectures to give," Master replied.

"Good."

"And I will interview the newest passengers onboard the Ship."

"As research?"

"And as a pleasure, yes."

Shadow was placing a tiny object beside one of the bristlecone's roots. "If you don't give that disruptor to me," Ash had threatened, "I'll explain a few deep secrets to the Vozzen."

Of course, Shadow had relented.

Ash sipped his tea, and quietly said, "Master. What can you tell me about the future?"

"About what is to come-?" the alien began.

"I never met a historian who didn't have opinions on that subject," Ash professed. "My species, for instance. What will happen to us in the next ten or twenty million years?"

Master launched himself into an abbreviated but dense lecture, explaining to his tiny audience what was possible about predicting the future and what was unknowable, and how every bridge between the two was an illusion.

His audience wasn't listening.

In a whisper, Ash said to Shadow, "But why live this way? With him, in this kind of role?"

In an Aaback fashion, the creature grinned. Then Shadow peered over the edge of the canyon, and speaking to no one in particular, he explained, "He needs me so much. This is why."

"As a servant?"

"And as a friend, and a confidant." With a very human shrug, he asked Ash, "How could anyone survive even a single day, if they didn't feel as if they were, in some little great way, needed?"

A Night on the Barbary Coast

KAGE BAKER.

Kage Baker [www.kagebaker.com/index.html] grew up in Hollywood and Pismo Beach, California, where she still lives. She has worked as a graphic artist and mural painter, and (over a period of years for the Living History Centre) as a playwright, bit player, director, and teacher of Elizabethan English for the stage. Baker is best known for her series of SF novels and stories about "The Company," stories of time travellers, mortal and immortal workers from our future delving into periods of our past to rescue lost art and treasures on behalf of the wealthy and mysterious Company that controls their lives and the future-perhaps. Her Company novels include In the Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, andThe Life of the World to Come. She has also written a collection of Company stories, The Company Dossiers: Black Projects, White Knights. She published several fine novellas this year, and a stand-alone fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World.

"A Night on the Barbary Coast" appeared in Silver Gryphon. It is a Company story, a tale of Mendoza and Joseph in San Francisco in 1850. Its charms derive in large part from the sensuous and detailed portrayal of the setting.

I'd been walking for five days, looking for Mendoza. The year was 1850.

Actually, walking doesn't really describe traveling through that damned vertical wilderness in which she lived. I'd crawled uphill on hands and knees, which is no fun when you're dressed as a Franciscan friar, with sandals and beads and the whole nine yards of brown burlap robe. I'd slid downhill, which is no fun either, especially when the robe rides up in back. I'd waded across freezing cold creeks and followed thready little trails through ferns, across forest floors in permanent darkness under towering redwoods. I'm talking gloom. One day the poets will fall in love with Big Sur, and after them the hippies, but if vampires ever discover the place they'll go nuts over it.

Mendoza isn't a vampire, though she is an immortal being with a lot of problems, most of which she blames on me.

I'm an immortal being with a lot of problems, too. Like father, like daughter.

After most of a week, I finally came out on a patch of level ground about three thousand feet up. I was standing there looking down on clouds floating above the Pacific Ocean, and feeling kind of funny in the pit of my stomach as a result-and suddenly saw the Company-issue processing credenza to my left, nicely camouflaged. I'd found Mendoza's camp at last.

There was her bivvy tent, all right, and a table with a camp stove, and five pots with baby trees growing in them. Everything but the trees had a dusty, abandoned look.

Cripes, I thought to myself, how long since she's been here? I looked around uneasily, wondering if I ought to yoohoo or something, and that was when I noticed her signal coming from...Up? I craned back my head.

An oak tree rose from the mountain face behind me, huge and branching wide, and high up there among the boughs Mendoza leaned. She gazed out at the sea; but with such a look of ecstatic vacancy in her eyes, I guessed she was seeing something a lot farther away than that earthly horizon.

I cleared my throat.

The vacant look went away fast, and there was something inhuman in the sharp way her head swung around.

"Hi, honey," I said. She looked down and her eyes focussed on me. She has black eyes, like mine, only mine are jolly and twinkly and bright. Hers are like flint. Always been that way, even when she was a little girl.

"What the hell are you doing here, Joseph?" she said at last.

"I missed you too, baby," I said. "Want to come down? We need to talk."

Muttering, she descended through the branches.

"Nice trees," I remarked. "Got any coffee?"

"I can make some," she said. I kept my mouth shut as she poked around in her half-empty rations locker, and I still kept it shut when she hauled out her bone-dry water jug and stared at it in a bewildered kind of way before remembering where the nearest stream was, and I didn't even remark on the fact that she had goddamn moss in her hair, though what I really wanted to yell at the top of my lungs was: How can you live like this?

No, I played it smart. Pretty soon we were sitting at either end of a fallen log, sipping our respective mugs of coffee, just like family.

"Mm, good java," I lied.

"What do you want?" she said.