Lian spoke up. "Sir. Let me go," she said awkwardly, "I can manage that much."

Redemption time for this marine. "Don't kill yourself," I told her.

With a grin she slid off the roof.

Briskly, I used my suit's comms system to set up a fresh link to the Spline. I requested another pickup-was told it was impossible-and asked for Kard.

Tilo requested a Virtual data desk. He fell on it as soon as it appeared. His relief couldn't have been greater, as if the mud didn't exist.

When they grasped the situation I had gotten us all into, Admiral Kard and Commissary Xera both sent down Virtual avatars. The two of them hovered over our wooden roof, clean of the mud, gleaming like gods among people made of clay.

Kard glared at me. "What a mess, Lieutenant."

"Yes, sir."

"You should have gotten Tilo over that damn bridge while you could. We're heavily constrained by the Xeelee operations. You realize we probably won't be able to get you out of here alive."

It struck me as somewhat ironic that in the middle of a galaxy-spanning military crisis I was to be killed by mud. But I had made my choice. "So I understand."

"But," Xera said, her thin face fringed by blocky pixels, "he has completed his primary mission, which is to deliver Tilo's data back to us."

Kard closed his Eyes, and his image flickered; I imagined Tilo's data and interpretations pouring into the processors that sustained this semiautonomous Virtual image, tightly locked into Kard's original sensorium. Kard said, "Lousy prioritization. Too much about this dark matter crud, Academician."

Xera said gently, "You were here on assignment from your masters in the Navy, with a specific purpose. But it's hard to close your eyes to the clamoring truth, isn't it, Academician?"

Tilo sighed, his face mud-covered.

"We must discuss this," Kard snapped. "All of us, right now. We have a decision to make, a recommendation to pass up the line-and we need to assess what Tilo has to tell us, in case we can't retrieve him."

I understood immediately what he meant. I felt a deep thrill. Even the locals stirred, apparently aware that something momentous was about to happen, even in the midst of their own misfortunes, stuck as we were on that battered wooden roof.

So it began.

At first Tilo wasn't helpful.

"It isn't clear that this is Xeelee action, deliberately directed against humans." Despite Kard's glare,he persisted, "I'm sorry, Admiral, but it isn't clear. Look at the context." He pulled up historical material-images, text that scrolled briefly in the murky air. "This is not a new story. There is evidence that human scientists were aware of dark-matter contamination of the stars before the beginning of the Third Expansion. It seems an engineered human being was sent into Sol itself.... An audacious project.

But this was largely lost in the Qax Extirpation, and after that-well, we had a galaxy to conquer. There was a later incident, a project run by the Silver Ghosts, but-"

Kard snapped, "What do the Xeelee care about dark matter?"

Tilo rubbed tired eyes with grubby fists. "However exotic they are, the Xeelee are baryonic life forms, like us. It isn't in their interests for the suns to die young, any more than for us." He shrugged.

"Perhaps they are trying to stop it. Perhaps that's why they have come here, to the halo. Nothing to do with us-"

Kard waved a Virtual hand at Mount Perfect's oozing wounds. "Then why all this, just as they show up? Coincidence?"

"Admiral-"

"This isn't a trial, Tilo," Kard said. "We don't need absolute proof. The imagery-human refugees, Xeelee night- fighters swooping overhead-will be all we need."

Xera said dryly, "Yes. All we need to sell a war to the Coalition, the governing councils, and the people of the Expansion. This is wonderful for you, isn't it, Admiral? It's what the Navy has been waiting for, along with its Academy cronies. An excuse to attack."

Kard's face was stony. "The cold arrogance of you cosseted intellectuals is sometimes insufferable.

It's true that the Navy is ready to fight, Commissary. That's our job. We have the plans in place."

"But does the existence of the plans require their fulfillment? And let's remember how hugely the Navy itself will benefit. As the lead agency, a war would clearly support the Navy's long-term political goals."

Kard glared. "We all have something to gain."

And they began to talk, rapidly, about how the different agencies of the Coalition would position themselves in the event of a war.

The military arms, like the Pilots and the Communicators, would naturally ally with the Navy, and would benefit from an increase in military spending. Academic arms like the great Libraries on Earth would be refocused; there was thought to be a danger that with their monopoly on information they were becoming too powerful. Even the Guardians-the Expansion's internal police force-would find a new role: the slowly rising tide of petty crime and illegal economic operations would surely reverse, and the Guardians could return to supporting the Commission in the policing of adherence to the Druz Doctrine-not to mention enforcing the draft.

A lot of this went over my head. I got the sense of the great agencies as shadowy independent empires, engaging in obscure and shifting alliances-like the current links between Navy and Academies, designed to counter the Commission's intellectual weight. And now each agency would consider the possibility of a war as an opportunity to gain political capital.

It was queasy listening. But there's a lot I didn't want to know about how the Coalition is run. Still don't, in fact.

"...And then there is the economic argument," Kard was saying. "It is as if the Third Expansion itself is a war, an endless war against whoever stands in our way. Our economy is on a permanent war-time footing. Let there be no mistake-we could not coexist with the Xeelee, for they would forever represent a ceiling to our ambitions, a ceiling under which we would ultimately wither. We need continued growth-and so a confrontation with the Xeelee is ultimately inevitable." He leaned forward. "And there is more. Xera, think how much the Commission itself stands to benefit.

"You Commissaries are responsible for maintaining the unity of mankind; the common principles, common purpose, the belief that has driven the Expansion so far. But isn't it obvious that you are failing?

Look at this place." He waved a Virtual hand through Doel's hair; the woman flinched, and the hand broke up into drifting pixels. "This woman is a mother, apparently some kind of matriarch to her extended family. It's as if Hama Druz never existed. "If the Druz Doctrine were to collapse, the Commission would have no purpose. Think of the good you do, for you know so much better than the mass of mankind how they should think, feel, live, and die.

Your project is humanitarian! And it has to continue. We need a purification. An ideological cleansing.

And that's what the bright fire of war will give us."

I could see that his arguments, aimed at the Commissary's vanity and self-interest, were leaving a mark.

Tilo was still trying to speak. He showed me more bits of evidence he had assembled on his data desk. "I think I know now why the volcanism started here. This planet has an unusually high dark matter concentration in its core. Under such densities the dark matter annihilates with ordinary matter and creates heat-"

I listened absently. "Which creates the geological upheaval."

He closed his eyes, thinking. "Here's a scenario. The Xeelee have been driving dark matter creatures out of the frozen star-and, fleeing, they have lodged here-and that's what set off the volcanism. It was all inadvertent. The Xeelee are trying to save stars, not harm humans...."

But nobody paid any attention to that. For, I realized, we had already reached a point where evidence didn't matter.

Kard turned to the people of the village, muddy, exhausted, huddled together on their rooftop. "What of you? You are the citizens of the Expansion. There are reformers who say you have had enough of expansion and conflict, that we should seek stability and peace. Well, you have heard what we have had to say, and you have seen our mighty ships in the sky. Will you live out your lives on this drifting rock, helpless before a river of mud-or will you transcend your birth and die for an epic cause? War makes everything new. War is the wildest poetry. Will you join me?"

Those ragged-ass, dirt-scratching, orthodoxy-busting farmers hesitated for a heartbeat. You couldn't have found a less likely bunch of soldiers for the Expansion.

But, would you believe, they started cheering the admiral: every one of them, even the kids. Lethe, it brought a tear to my eye.

Even Xera seemed coldly excited now.

Kard closed his Eyes; metal seams pushed his eyelids into ridges. "A handful of people in this desolate, remote place. And yet a new epoch is born. They are listening to us, you know-listening in the halls of history. And we will be remembered forever."

Tilo's expression was complex. He clapped his hands, and the data desk disappeared in a cloud of pixels, leaving his work unfinished.

We mere fleshy types had to stay on that rooftop through the night. We could do nothing but cling to each other, as the muddy tide rose slowly around us, and the kids cried from hunger.

When the sunsats returned to the sky, the valley was transformed. The channels had been gouged sharp and deep by the lahar, and the formerly agricultural plain had been smothered by lifeless gray mud, from which only occasional trees and buildings protruded.

But the lahar was flowing only sluggishly. Lian cautiously climbed to the edge of the roof and probed at the mud with her booted foot. "It's very thick."

Tilo said, "Probably the water has drained out of it."

Lian couldn't stand on the mud, but if she lay on it she didn't sink. She flapped her arms and kicked, and she skidded over the surface. Her face gray with the dirt, she laughed like a child. "Sir, look at me!

It's a lot easier than trying to swim...."

So it was, when I tried it myself.

And that was how we got the villagers across the flooded valley, one by one, to the larger township-not that much was left of that by now-where the big transport had waited to take us off. In the end we lost only one of the villagers, the young woman who had been overwhelmed by the surge. I tried to accept that I'd done my best to fulfill my contradictory mission objectives-and that, in the end, was the most important outcome for me.

As we lifted, Mount Perfect loosed another eruption. Tilo, cocooned in a med cloak, stood beside me in an observation blister, watching the planet's mindless fury. He said, "You know, you can't stop a lahar. It just goes the way it wants to go. Like this war, it seems."

"I guess."

"We understand so little. We see so little. But when you add us together we combine into huge historical forces that none of us can deflect, any more than you can dam or divert a mighty lahar...."

And so on. I made an excuse and left him there.

I went down to the sick bay, and watched Lian tending to the young from the village. She was patient, competent, calm. I had relieved her of her regular duties, as she was one of the few faces here that was familiar to the kids, who were pretty traumatized. I felt proud of that young marine. She had grown up a lot during our time on Shade.

And as I watched her simple humanity, I imagined a trillion such acts, linking past and future, history and destiny, a great tapestry of hard work and goodwill that united mankind into a mighty host that would some day rule a galaxy.

To tell the truth I was bored with Tilo and his niggling. War! It was magnificent. It was inevitable.

I didn't understand what had happened down on Shade, and I didn't care. What did it matter how the war had started, in truth or lies? We would soon forget about dark matter and the Xeelee's obscure, immense projects, just as we had before; we humans didn't think in such terms. All that mattered was that the war was here, at last.

The oddest thing was that none of it had anything to do with the Xeelee themselves. Any enemy would have served our purposes just as well.

I began to wonder what it would mean for me. I felt my heart beat faster, like a drumbeat.

We flew into a rising cloud of ash, and bits of rock clattered against our hull, frightening the children.

The Albertine Notes

RICK MOODY.

Rick Moody lives in New York City and is not essentially a genre writer but a distinguished contemporary writer of literary ambition. He is the author of Demonology, Purple America, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, and The Ice Storm and Garden State. He is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. He says, in a Powells.com interview, "Literature precedes genre. Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. It helps people know what section to browse, but I don't care about that stuff. I'm trying to stay close to language first and foremost and make sure that the paragraphs sing, that it sounds like music to me. What genre it falls under is only of interest later." He also used to write the Details comic strip ("which was really fun").

"The Albertine Notes" was published in McSweeney's Thrilling Tales, an original anthology of genre fiction edited by Michael Chabon, which was to our minds the most ambitious fiction anthology of the year, in a year with many strong contenders. This novella is a superior work of SF, in the exclusive and distinguished tradition of Philip K. Dick's "Faith of Our Fathers" and Gene Wolfe's "Seven American Nights," of stories that call into question the nature of reality in an SF setting involving drugs, politics, and present a character struggling to hold on to life and sanity. It is perhaps the best SF story of the year.

Albertine, solace of a city in ruins. Any memory you wanted, anytime you wanted it. All for the low, low price of-history itself.

The first time I got high all I did was make sure these notes came out all right. I mean, I wanted the girl at the magazine to offer me work again, and that was going to happen only if the story sparkled.There wasn't much work then because of the explosion. The girl at the magazine was saying, "Look, you don't have to like the assignment, just do the assignment. If you don't want it there are people lined up behind you." And she wasn't kidding. There really were people lined up. Out in reception. An AI receptionist, in a makeshift lobby, in a building on Staten Island, the least-affected precinct of the beleaguered City of New York. Writers spilling into the foyer, shouting at the robot receptionist. All eager to show off their clips.

The editor was called Tara. She had turquoise hair. She looked like a girl I knew when I was younger. Where was that girl now? Back in the go-go days you could yell a name at the TV and it would run a search on the identities associated with that name. For a price. Credit card records, toll plaza visits, loan statements, you set the parameters. My particular Web video receiver, in fact, had a little pop-up window in the corner of the image that said, Want to see what your wife is doing right now? Was I a likely customer for this kind of snooping based on past purchases? Anyway, recreational detection and character assassination, that was all before Albertine.

Street name for the buzz of a lifetime. Bitch goddess of the overwhelming past. Albertine. Rapids in the river of time. Skin pop a little bit, or take up the celebrated Albertine eyedropper, and any memory you've ever had is available to you all over again. That and more. Not a memory like you've experienced it before, not a little tremor in some presque vu register of your helter-skelter consciousness: Oh yeah, I remember when I ate peanut butter and jelly with Serena in Boston Commons and drank rum out of paper cups. No, the actual event itself, completely renewed, playing in front of you as though you were experiencing it for the first time. There's Serena in blue jeans with patches on the knee, the green Dartmouth sweatshirt that goes with her eyes, drinking the rum a little too fast and spitting up some of it, picking her teeth with her deep red nails, shade called "lycanthrope," and there's the taste of super-chunky peanut butter, in the sandwiches, stale pretzel rods. Here you are, the two of you, walking around that part of the Commons with all those willows. She lets slip your hand because your palms are moist. The smell of a city park at the moment when a September shower dampens the pavement, car exhaust, a mist hanging in the air at dusk, the sound of kids fighting over the rules of softball, a homeless dude, scamming you for a sip of your rum.

Get the idea?

It almost goes without saying that Albertine appeared in a certain socioeconomic sector not long after the blast. When you're used to living a comfortable middle-class life, when you're used to going to the organic farmers' market on the weekend, maybe a couple of dinners out at that new Indian place, you're bound to become very uncomfortable when fifty square blocks of your city suddenly looks like NASA photos of Mars. You're bound to look for some relief when you're camped in a school gymnasium pouring condensed milk over government-issued cornflakes. Under the circumstances, you're going to prize your memories, right? So you'll skin pop some Albertine, or you'll use the eyedropper, hold open your lid, and go searching back through the halcyon days. Afternoons in the stadium, those stadium lights on the turf, the first roar of the crowd. Or how about your first concert? Or your first kiss?

Only going to cost you twenty-five bucks.

I'm Kevin Lee. Chinese-American, third generation, which doesn't mean my dad worked in a delicatessen to get me into MIT. It means my father was an IT venture capitalist and my mother was a microbiologist. I grew up in Newton, Mass., but I also lived in northern California for a while. I came to New York City to go to Fordham, dropped out, and started writing about the sciences for one of the alternative weeklies. It was a start. But the offices of the newspaper, all of its owners, a large percentage of its shareholders, and nine-tenths of its reporting staff were incinerated. Not like I need to bring all of that up again. If you need to assume anything, assume that all silences from now on have grief in them.

One problem with Albertine was that the memories she screened were not all good, naturally.

Albertine didn't guarantee good memories. In fact, Albertine guaranteed at least a portion of pretty awful memories. One guy I interviewed, early on when I was chasing the story, he spoke about having only memories of jealousy. He got a bad batch, probably too many additives, and all he could see in his mind's eye were these moments of intense jealousy. He was even weeping when we spoke. On the comedown. I'd taken him out to an all-night diner. Where Atlantic Avenue meets up with Conduit. Knowthat part of the city? A beautiful part of the city, a neglected part. Ought to have been a chill in the early autumn night. Air force jets were landing at the airport in those days. The guy, we'll say his name is Bob, he was telling me about the morning he called a friend, Nina, to meet her for a business breakfast. In the middle of the call Nina told him that his wife, Maura, had become her lover. He remembered everything about this call, the exact wording of the revelation. Bob, Maura has been attracted to me as far back as your wedding. He remembered the excruciating pauses. He could overhear the rustling of bedclothes. All these things he could picture, just like they were happening, and even the things he imagined during the phone call, which took place seventeen years ago. What Nina had done to Maura in bed, what dildo they used. It was seventeen years later on Atlantic and Conduit, and Maura was vaporized, or that's what Bob said, "Jesus, Maura is dead and I never told her I regretted all of that, I never told her what was great about the years together, and I'll never have that chance now." He was inconsolable, but I kept asking questions. Because I'm a reporter. I put it together that he'd spent fifty bucks on two doses of Albertine. Six months after the thyroid removal, here he was. Bob was just hoping to have one sugary memory-of swimming in the pond in Danbury, the swimming hole with the rope swing. Remember that day? And all he could remember was that his wife had slept with his college friend, and that his brother took the girl he liked in high school. Like jealousy was the single color of his life. Like the atmosphere was three parts jealousy, one part oxygen.

That's what Albertine was whispering in his ear.

Large-scale drug dealing, it's sort of like beta-testing. There are unscrupulous people around.

Nobody knows how a chemical is going to behave until the guinea pigs have lined up. FDA thinks it knows, like when it rubber-stamps some compound that makes you grow back hair you lost during chemotherapy. But the feds know nothing. Try giving your drug to a hundred and fifty thousand disenfranchised members of the new middle-class poor in a recently devastated American city. Do it every day for almost a year. Allow people to mix in randomly their favorite inert substances.

There were lots of stories. Lots of different experiences. Lots of fibs, exaggerations, innuendoes, rumors. Example: not only did Albertine cause bad memories as frequently as good memories-this is the lore-but she also allowed you to remember the future. This is what Tara told me when she assigned me the 2500 words. "Find out if it's true. Find out if we can get to the future on it."

"What would you do with it?"

"None of your business," she said, and then like she was covering her tracks, "I'd see if I was ever going to get a promotion."

Well, here's one example. The story of Deanna, whose name I'm also changing for her own protection: "I was going to church after the blast, you know, because I was kind of feeling like God should be doing something about all the heartache. I mean, maybe that's simpleminded or something. I don't care. I was in church and it was a beautiful place. Any church still standing was a beautiful place, when you had those horrible clouds overhead all the time and everybody getting sick. Fact of the matter is, while I was there in church, during what should have been a really calm time, instead of thinking that the gospels were good news, I was having a vision. I don't know what else to call it. It was like in the movies, when the movie goes into some kind of flashback. Except in this vision, I saw myself driving home from church, and I saw a car pulling ahead of me out onto the road by the reservoir, and I had this feeling that the car pulling out toward the reservoir, which was a twenty-yearold model of one of those minivans, was some kind of bad omen, you know? So I went to my priest, and I told him what I thought, that this car had some bad intention, at least in my mind's eye, you know, I could see it, I could see that Jesus was telling me this, Better watch out at the reservoir. Some potion is going to be emptied into the reservoir. I have seen it, I have seen it. The guys doing it, they're emptying jugs in and they definitely have mustaches. They're probably from some desert country. The priest took me to the bishop, and I repeated everything I knew, about the Lord and what he had told me, and so I had an audience with the archbishop. The archbishop said, 'You have to tell me if Jesus really told you this. Did Jesus tell you personally? Is this a genuine message from the Christ?' In this office with a lot of dusty books on the dusty shelves. You could tell that they were all really hungry to be in the room with the word of the Christ, and who wouldn't feel that way? Everybody is desperate, right? But then one of them says, 'Rollup your sleeves, please.' "

Deanna was shown the door. Because of the needle tracks. Now she's working down by the Gowanus Expressway.

The archbishop did give the tip to the authorities, however, just to be on the safe side, and the authorities did stop a Ford Explorer on the way to the reservoir in Katonah. And Deanna's story was just one along these lines. Many Albertine users began reporting "memories" of things that were yet to happen. Outcomes of local elections, declines in various international stocks, the intensity of the upcoming hurricane season. The dealers, whether skeptical or believing on this point, saw big profits in the mythology. Because garbage heads and gamblers often live right next door to one another, know what I mean? One vice is like another. Soon there were those scraggly guys that you used to see at the track. These guys were all looking to cop from the man in Red Hook, or East New York, and they were sitting like autistics in a room with Sheetrock torn from the walls, no electricity, no running water, people pissing themselves, refusing food, and they were in search of the name of the greyhound that was going to take the next race. Maybe they could bet the trifecta? Teeth were falling out of the heads of these bettors, and their hair falling out, because they believed if they just hung on long enough, they would receive the vision.

Now that's marketing.

Logically speaking, there were some issues with a belief system like this. On Albertine, the visions of the past were mixed up with the alleged future, of course. And sometimes these were nightmarish visions.