"Three centuries of so called progressive thought turned on its head. We had been right the first time.

There is a force written at the most basic level of the universe that is dedicated to bringing forth life. The universe warps and bends itself to support life. Where humans settle and live for long enough water springs forth from the rocks and plants from the soil..."

Buddy Joe wanted to back away, but the yellow tentacle had turned its attention to the other bonds and was working to loosen them. Doctor Flynn didn't seem to have noticed.

"Life attracts life. We don't understand it...Humans wandered over the surface of the moon for decades without any sign of the effect, but when we established a colony, started to take a real interest in the satellite, then it started to take an interest in us. It's like some sort of feedback. You understand the term?"

Doctor Flynn looked at Buddy Joe, seemingly oblivious to what was going on behind him. None ofthe scientists seemed to care, either. The tentacle had freed two more. Now the metal clasps which held the rest of the alien hands were pulled free, pop pop pop. The hands were free. Those horrible, horrible hands, so big, just so big. Buddy Joe wanted to cry. He didn't want to put them on.

"Do you understand?"

Buddy Joe had to say yes, the Compliance made him. Doctor Flynn nodded, satisfied.

"Good. That's why, after the Collapse, we got to thinking about life. What if we made another form of life? Something completely alien to our experience. What if we built an alien suit for someone to wear?

Someone like you, Buddy Joe. What would they make of the universe? Maybe they would understand what was going on. Maybe a different perspective would explain why the universe had collapsed to a bubble 300 miles across. Has the Collapse anything to do with the Shift in our perceptions?"

"The hands are coming for me," said Buddy Joe.

"That's okay," said Doctor Flynn. "That's what they were supposed to do."

"I don't want to put them on. They look too big. I'll lose myself if I put them on. They're horrible.

Why did you make them so horrible?"

"We had to make them as alien as we could, Buddy Joe. We need the alien perspective. Before we had you in here we took other condemned and pumped them full of Junk and LSD and MTPH and we recorded their hallucinations. We recorded the screams of children, and the thought patterns of dogs twitching in their sleep and the terror of a very bright light in a very dark room. We took all that and painted it across the canvas that makes your body so that it could be as alien as possible."

The tentacles formed a thrashing, slashing cage around Buddy Joe. He stood with Doctor Flynn in a maelstrom of orange and yellow violence. Something turned itself up from the floor. Dark green circles with sharp red spines inside. The cuffs of his new hands.

Doctor Flynn seemed unconcerned. "And you know, even if our experiment succeeds, I wonder about what Wittgenstein said: 'Even if a lion could speak we wouldn't understand it.' I wonder if we will understand you, Buddy Joe?"

"Please don't make me put them on," he cried.

"Shouldn't have raped that girl, Buddy Joe."

"I know, I know."

He remembered the girl. He had cornered her in the lift. He remembered how she had shaken and wept.

He had been thinking about his grandfather, and things he had said. The girl had a look that reminded him of his grandfather. That same questioning, intelligent look. He thought she would understand. Buddy Joe had asked her how it must have felt to walk under the stars when they shone high above, walk on the beach and feel the sand beneath your feet and the cool ocean breeze. And when she asked him to stop he had ignored her and just carried on speaking, trying to get her to see.

Buddy Joe had raped her, pushed the hemispheres of her brain roughly apart and slipped the alien ideas into her head: left them to congeal inside her. Dirty, filthy and without her consent.

The hands reached for Buddy Joe, slipped around his human hands and melted them.

"I deserve the pain," he winced.

"Same time next..." Doctor Flynn began to speak, but the hands took over. They slashed across the room, cutting Doctor Flynn in half. His legs remained standing as his head and shoulders fell to the floor.

"Hey Buddy Joe, stop tha..."

The female scientist who called out had the top of her head sliced off in one easy motion. Blonde hair spun round and round like a Catherine wheel as it arced across the room. The yellow and orange tentacles were vibrating in sine waves, filling the room with their frantic, snapping energy. Flesh and bone snapped and tore, blood flew, and Buddy Joe was a human head on an alien body that stretched across the room and out into the night. He could feel his hands in the warmth of the room, in the cool of the night, on the metal of the deck, covered in blood, gripping the handrail at the edge of the drop to the dark ocean and pulling him clear of the room. Where were the hands taking him? A group of tentacles reached down to Doctor Flynn's head and shoulders and picked them up. He felt them thrusting themselves into the warmth of the body, feeling for the spinal cord, seeking out the arteries and veins and wriggling upthem.

And then Buddy Joe was out of the laboratory and his hands were pulling him up to the top of Deck Seven.

Why wasn't the Compliance working? thought Buddy Joe as he passed out.

He woke up spread out to the size of Deck Seven. His new hands were the size and shape of every strand of the metal mesh that made up the decking. His legs stretched down two of the Pillar Towers. His head was hanging, looking down over the gardens and houses of Deck Six.

Doctor Flynn appeared before him, looking like a glove puppet. Alien tentacles had been thrust into the nerves and joints of his broken body to make him work.

-Speak to him.

"Hey, Buddy Joe," said Doctor Flynn, his eyelids drooping, his eyes moving up and down and left to right, tracing out a slow sine wave.

"Hey, Doctor Flynn," said Buddy Joe. His head was trying to be sick, but he had nothing to be sick with.

-Where's my head?

"The body wants to know where the head is."

"It's not quite finished yet, Buddy Joe. I don't think it ever will be. The hands killed most of the team.

I'm not sure the expertise still exists to make a head. Even if it did, it would never get built without me to push through the requisitions."

Silence. The body was considering. Doctor Flynn twitched his nose. A single cherry of blood pumped from the side of a tentacle and fell toward the deck below.

-What do you know of the other alien?

Buddy Joe relayed the question.

"Nothing," said Doctor Flynn. "You were the only suit ever built. There can't be another alien. Hey.

You can't keep me alive like this forever. Another, what, ten P at most?"

"It can feel the other aliens," said Buddy Joe, listening to the voice. "It says there are more of them all the time, somewhere over the ocean. There are ten already. It wants the head so it can join them."

"Ten? But that can't be! Anyway, there is no over-theocean. Don't you see? The only thing that stopped the universe collapsing to nothing was the pressure of life within this bubble. The life force is so strong it caused the decking to grow, just to allow us to live. There is no over-the-ocean any more, there is just here."

"There is an over-the-ocean, now."

Then he had the answer. It was obvious. It just popped into his head. "I know what the answer is: I know where the aliens come from," he said. But it was too late. Doctor Flynn was already dead.

"But I want to tell you the answer, Doctor Flynn," he called. The tentacles were disengaging from inside Doctor Flynn's body, rubbing themselves together as a human would rub their hands to remove something unpleasant. They were letting him go, letting him fall to the deck far below. Buddy Joe watched Doctor Flynn tumble and fall, down and down until his body landed on the roof of someone's house.

The tentacles were writhing and thrashing again, spelling out their long orange and yellow scripts in the air around him. This is how they speak, thought Buddy Joe. This is how the aliens speak. I can hear it in my subconscious, read through my peripheral vision.

-Where do we come from?

"From the life force that fills the universe," said Buddy Joe. "If flowers can bloom on the moon just because humans live there, then surely you could have come into existence when the idea of you took root in Doctor Flynn's laboratory. New life walks the earth and a new environment opens up to support it. Opens up across the ocean."

-What a strange idea. This is how the universe works. It's not what we suspected, Buddy Joe.

"Not what anyone thought," said Buddy Joe, 30 miles long, 20 miles wide and two miles tall, his legs and arms stretching to fill the decks around him. He was growing all the time. "A universe that exists justto nurture life. New life bursting out all the time. And here we are trapped in this little bubble of the universe. I wonder when we'll get out?"

-Soon, Buddy Joe, soon. But not like this. Now we can see what is holding us back.

"What is it?"

-You.

The tentacles lashed around, seized hold of Buddy Joe's head and pulled it clean off. It wasn't needed any more. The alien was complete and reasoning without a brain. Doctor Flynn and his team had designed it to be that different.

Tentacles began to pull themselves free of the metal of Deck Seven as Buddy Joe's head tumbled down to join Doctor Flynn's body. The body stretched itself out thinner and thinner; ready to glide its way over the ocean toward its own race...

...and then it paused. Tainted a little by Buddy Joe and his humanity, tainted a little by its origins. It had been built by humans, and just a little of the sin that it was to be human was woven into the fabric of its body. It was not yet quite free of that human curiosity that the universe moved to protect itself from.

That need to explain how things worked. Curiosity. It was a most alien feeling. Without it, one could not wonder at its existence. It was a dizzying thought.

All around, the alien looked, tasted, felt the remains of the human world, the decking and the polluted seas, the last feeble stirrings of that doomed impulse that defined the inhabitants: the urge to try and understand the basic mechanism of their world. That human persistence in violating the cardinal rule, written at the quantum level and warned of in one of the humans' oldest texts.

Don't look at the system, or you will change it. The universe fights against being known.

Curiosity: forget it, the alien told itself, and it did so immediately.

Far below, there was a bump as Buddy Joe's head hit the deck.

EjEs

NANCY KRESS.

Nancy Kress [www.sff.net/people/nankress] lives in Rochester, New York. She is one of today's leading SF writers, known for her complex medical SF stories and for her biological and evolutionary extrapolations in such classics as Beggars in Spain (1993), Beggars and Choosers (1994), and Beggars Ride (1996), a trilogy of hard SF novels. She wrote Maximum Light (1998), Probability Moon (2000), Probability Sun (2001), and Probability Space (2002). Her stories are rich in texture and in psychological insight, and have been collected in Trinity and Other Stories (1985), The Aliens of Earth (1993) and Beaker's Dozen (1998). Her most recent SF novels are Crossfire (2003), Nothing Human (2003), and Crucible (2004).

"Ej-Es" was published in the original anthology Stars, edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick, a collection of stories taking off from one or another of Janis Ian's popular songs, a concept reminiscent of the old pulp fiction practice of asking writers to write stories based on already-purchased cover art. In this case it produced one of the best anthologies of the year.

"Ej-Es" is a dark story about the moral crisis of an aging woman doctor just landed on a rediscovered colony planet, and a disease that makes the survivors who have degenerated into starvation and lassitude happy. It works like a metaphysical poem, with the title creating an image in retrospect, and that makes it a bigger, better rationalist SF story.

Jesse, come home There's a hole in the bed where we slept Now it's growing cold Hey Jesse, your face in the place where we lay by the hearth, all apart It hangs on my heart....

Jesse, I'm lonely Come home -from "Jesse," by Janis Ian, 1972 "Why did you first enter the Corps?" Lolimel asked her as they sat at the back of the shuttle, just before landing. Mia looked at the young man helplessly, because how could you answer a question like that? Especially when it was asked by the idealistic and worshipful new recruits, too ignorant to know what a waste of time worship was, let alone simplistic questions.

"Many reasons," Mia said gravely, vaguely. He looked like so many medicians she had worked with, for so many decades on so many planets...intense, thick-haired, genemod beautiful, a little insane.

You had to be a little insane to leave Earth for the Corps, knowing that when (if) you ever returned, all you had known would have been dust for centuries.

He was more persistent than most. "What reasons?"

"The same as yours, Lolimel," she said, trying to keep her voice gentle. "Now be quiet, please, we're entering the atmosphere."

"Yes, but-"

" Be quiet." Entry was so much easier on him than on her; he had not got bones weakened from decades in space. They did weaken, no matter what exercise one took or what supplements or what gene therapy. Mia leaned back in her shuttle chair and closed her eyes. Ten minutes, maybe, of aerobraking and descent; surely she could stand ten minutes. Or not.

The heaviness began, abruptly increased. Worse on her eyeballs, as always; she didn't have good eye socket muscles, had never had them. Such an odd weakness. Well, not for long; this was her last flight. At the next station, she'd retire. She was already well over age, and her body felt it. Only her body? No, her mind, too. At the moment, for instance, she couldn't remember the name of the planet they were hurtling toward. She recalled its catalog number, but not whatever its colonists, who were not answering hails from ship, had called it.

" Why did you join the Corps? "

" Many reasons."

And so few of them fulfilled. But that was not a thing you told the young.

The colony sat at the edge of a river, under an evening sky of breathable air set with three brilliant, fast-moving moons. Beds of glorious flowers dotted the settlement, somewhere in size between a large town and a small city. The buildings of foamcast embedded with glittering native stone were graceful, well-proportioned rooms set around open atria. Minimal furniture, as graceful as the buildings; even the machines blended unobtrusively into the lovely landscape. The colonists had taste and restraint and a sense of beauty. They were all dead.

"A long time ago," said Kenin. Officially she was Expedition Head, although titles and chains of command tended to erode near the galactic edge, and Kenin led more by consensus and natural calm than by rank. More than once the team had been grateful for Kenin's calm. Lolimel looked shaken, although he was trying to hide it.

Kenin studied the skeleton before them. "Look at those bones-completely clean."

Lolimel managed, "It might have been picked clean quickly by predators, or carnivorous insects, or..." His voice trailed off.

"I already scanned it, Lolimel. No microscopic bone nicks. She decayed right there in bed, along with clothing and bedding."

The three of them looked at the bones lying on the indestructible mattress coils of some alloy Mia hadonce known the name of. Long clean bones, as neatly arranged as if for a first-year anatomy lesson. The bedroom door had been closed; the dehumidifying system had, astonishingly, not failed; the windows were intact. Nothing had disturbed the woman's long rot in the dry air until nothing remained, not even the bacteria that had fed on her, not even the smell of decay.

Kenin finished speaking to the other team. She turned to Mia and Lolimel, her beautiful brown eyes serene. "There are skeletons throughout the city, some in homes and some collapsed in what seem to be public spaces. Whatever the disease was, it struck fast. Jamal says their computer network is gone, but individual rec cubes might still work. Those things last forever."

Nothing lasts forever, Mia thought, but she started searching the cabinets for a cube. She said to Lolimel, to give him something to focus on, "How long ago was this colony founded, again?"

"Three hundred sixty E-years," Lolimel said. He joined the search.

Three hundred sixty years since a colony ship left an established world with its hopeful burden, arrived at this deadly Eden, established a city, flourished, and died. How much of Mia's lifetime, much of it spent traveling at just under c, did that represent? Once she had delighted in figuring out such equations, in wondering if she'd been born when a given worldful of colonists made planetfall. But by now there were too many expeditions, too many colonies, too many accelerations and decelerations, and she'd lost track.

Lolimel said abruptly, "Here's a rec cube."

"Play it," Kenin said, and when he just went on staring at it in the palm of his smooth hand, she took the cube from him and played it herself.

It was what she expected. A native plague of some kind, jumping DNA-based species (which included all species in the galaxy, thanks to panspermia). The plague had struck after the colonists thought they had vaccinated against all dangerous micros. Of course, they couldn't really have thought that; even three hundred sixty years ago doctors had been familiar with alien species-crossers. Some were mildly irritating, some dangerous, some epidemically fatal. Colonies had been lost before, and would be again.

"Complete medical data resides on green rec cubes," the recorder had said in the curiously accented International of three centuries ago. Clearly dying, he gazed out from the cube with calm, sad eyes. A brave man. "Any future visitors to Good Fortune should be warned."

Good Fortune. That was the planet's name.