-Part Eight -

Richard had been on the fringes of some pretty strange scenes.

He had lived, vicariously and at a very low resolution, through a hundred battles, and through many strange hunts. His control over the border defenders was becoming somewhat sporadic. He could rewrite any level of code of any given individual border defender, he could assign node-prioritizations, he could reroute or delimit communications, except when those processes were running during an assault. If a border defender were to be engaged in a battle, he had absolutely no control over its strategies, responses or targeting systems, other than to order the devices to stand down. He could, however, selectively target anything, but the border defenders were so greatly slowed by his direct telefactor operations that this was generally a bad idea, and so he refrained. He could, in telefactor mode, directly control the motor activities of any border defender, leading it step-by-step through procedures, which the border defender would use as a central procedure.

He could not at all control the fuzzy-logic system that allowed the border defenders to adapt his central procedures to changing circumstances. That part of their internal workings was classified, locked away from his "touch" by some sort of impenetrable "firewall". He also could not easily prevent border defenders from transmitting their experiential summaries between each other... which often superseded any direct code-rewrites he might have supplied. In clear fact, it seemed that most of his direct-control activities were somehow supervised by someone or something; he would try to send a chunk of patch-code to a border defender, and usually it would only remain so long as the border defender was engaged in the particular task for which he had provided particular instructions. Then a new piece of code would come in, something generated by another border defender, defining something it had discovered. When first this operation had started, he had been diligent about his duties. He tried to examine all of the new code that the border defenders were generating as they came from their vans as scarcely more than walking howitzers with a sense of direction and began meeting situations and adapting to them. They distilled their responses into pretty coherent patterns and generalizations, swapping packets with frightening rapidity. Sometimes he would signal for a debug download, and get something fairly simple. He certainly admired the elegance of the code being generated. Simple, direct, little objects flitting across the border defender's shared-data universe, things like suggestions of how to recognize stairs, determine the ratios, select best orientation for approach, best foot placements. Pretty stuff. Sometimes he signalled for a download and it was bad. Mud was bad. Mud made things thrash. He couldn't keep up with all of the packets swapping around then.

Once, he had foolishly asked for a checklist of activities for the day, and had spent a full day of his own locked in eidetic trance, and woke the next day with his memory full of an incredible amount of trivia. It had taken eight hours of directed dreaming to discard everything unimportant, and his brain felt overloaded for the next two days.

Now he only asked for brief summaries, and as the little packets of the latest adaptations to walking on cobblestones flew between the border defenders (one of which he couldn't at all control, it was scrabbling badly down a Georgetown sidestreet) he finally lost count of the revision numbers and stopped paying much attention. The summaries were usually simple notifications such as target acquisition, lock and firing, or certain strategic situations which tended to extremes, of which other border defenders must be apprised so as to avoid entering traps. Some were advisories of maintenance rotations or requests for salvage, or deployments to new focuses of activity. For most of these situations, all that was required of Richard was that he sit back and watch.

The latest summary indicated that Northwest was secured from the western boundaries, including the Potomac River, over to about Fourteenth street, with mop-up around the Delacarla corridor. The border defenders prowled like wild robots from a bad Fifties "B"-movie, and they encountered little resistance of late. There was resistance, though, and it was of a strange sort. The border defenders had somehow tagged certain people as major offenders, and as Richard couldn't figure out the criteria within which the sentinels operated in the absence of new instructions, he left things as they were, figuring that they might have had specialized instrctions provided for some significant reasons of which he had been, for some classified reason, not been apprised.

A border defender crouched at each corner of the Capitol. A thin red line of coherent light hung in the air between each of them. Occasionally, high-level military personnel arrived in HUMVee, and they were escorted inside by military police. The bodies had been mostly cleaned up along the Mall frontage. The loss of life at the Capitol had been immense; when the giardia had hit, Congress had been in session. A great many of the senators and congressmen had not survived the madness. Nearly half had been murdered by their staff, who had for the most part been hired since 1995, since which time (for some reason) almost the entire American university production of political-science graduates were vampyr. Most were at least peripherally involved with the intrigues of the counterconspiracies running within the ranks of "trusty" vampyr used for internal "actions" by the Signatories Evaluation Board, and all responded quickly to the loss of order by seizing the day, and not incidentally the necks of their superiors where they were not their own kind. The border defenders had either blasted them if they tried to flee, or simply pinned them within the Capitol until the military police arrived. Occasionally, shots rang out from within the Capitol as soldiers encountered vampyr which, driven by hunger, emerged from the nooks and crannies which riddle the building. Sometimes, the gunfire was sustained; pitched battles were the standard for the first few days after the troubles started. In the end, though, the building was cleared, and the military investigators and their accompanying spooky attaches were able to enter, assess the damage, and attempt to set things aright.

As soon as the Capitol proper was secured, the adjoining facilities were also secured. The Library of Congress was particularly difficult to capture and control. The military was finally driven to gas the place. When the Hill was considered fully cleared of interlopers, a few of the border defenders worked their way into the buildings, and attached themselves to communications trunks, and with the assistance of the military began to acquire software as well as physical control of the local centrexes and ISDN facilities, which had been well and truly bollixed by the SEB's loose-cannon double-agent vampyr. They'd managed to worm and disable most of District-based NETS domains. The House, Senate and Library of Congress mainframes were flooding the InterNet with bogus information packets, some of it nothing more than full-tilt PINGing of all IP addresses. Some of the packets flooding the NETS were nearly- intelligent worms and viruses. The million NETS system administrators breathed a collective metaphoric sigh of relief as the insane cyberhowling of the "HillNet" fell silent. The vast arrays of data, originally mounted to serve the online public in the mid-90s, were mounted to remote mainframes via NFS, allowing those mainframes to serve the public, while the system files of the "HillNet" mainframes were replaced from factory CD-ROM. It was quickly noticed that when the system files had been replaced, suddenly about twice as much data (particularly cross-referencing index files) became readable from the RAID arrays.

The border defenders, for all of their sensory capabilities and firepower, had little flexibility. That was why Richard Thurston was involved in this whole mess; he was a smart guy who excelled at solving problems. However, he knew nothing regarding the vampyr. He did notice, though, that once the border defenders had gained direct access to the mainframes of the HillNet, he was seldom called to direct them. He decided to do some sightseeing.

Before the start of the madness, away from Capitol Hill, or occasionally the White House, one very rarely saw a uniformed soldier in the District. This was an historical antecedent to the ancient policies of Rome, where the Army was not permitted within the gates. This did tend to make military coups somewhat more difficult to pull off, or at least military coups attempted by persons actually in the ranks of the Roman military. However, this in no way precluded revolts by the Praetorian Guard. However, in this new dusk of the old millenium, the only remaining fashion was camoflage. Richard was now himself wearing an light Army jacket over a camoflage T-shirt and fatigue pants. He had an ID to present when challenged, which looked very much like the standard Maryland driver's license, but the datastrip on the back, when passed through a soldier's beltcomm reader-slot, evidently was packed with such authorizations that the average sentry suddenly felt compelled to salute him. Richard decided that he liked being respected.

He decided that he absolutely loved being respected by the military when a peculiarly-deformed woman, bearing all of the signs of acromegaly, was shot dead a mere three feet behind him. He'd never seen her or heard her coming (for her bulk, she was certainly quiet!), but some watchful sniper had dropped her in her tracks to sprawl with exploded head, with some odd device rolling from her spasming hand. Richard picked it up, and examined it. It appeared to be a thin tube of brass or bronze, with two tiny wires across one end, which had a long thin point reminiscent of a filed-down miniature shoehorn. He looked around, and not far from her other hand, now stilled, was a thin rod that would easily fit the hollow tube. From one end of it extended an extremely fine and fairly stiff wire, slightly hooked at the business end. About the other end was wrapped some strong monofilament, with some sort of coating, probably some sort of gel, sticking it to the handle. A tiny length of the monofilament flapped loose.

He tried to assemble it, trying to slide the wire through the two crosswires, but that was a lot of trouble and so he tried it the other way. The wire slid straight in, and he noted a little flange on the plunger that fit neatly with a groove running partway down the inside of the end away from the crosswires. He lined up the flange with the groove, and the wire slid within, the bent segment sliding past crosswires, threading itself neatly. Experimentally, he pushed the plunger in, and the wire neatly began to spiral. What a handy toy! But what was it for? He heard footsteps, and it was the corporal who had last read his ID and allowed him to pass the Pennsylvania and 12th Street NW checkpoint, accompanied by three others.

"Mr. Thurston, sir, you're a lucky man."

"How so?"

"Henson! turn around."

Henson, who had been scanning the streets beyond Richard's back, turned around, and lifted the rear of his helmet. A bandage covered the back of his head. Richard grunted, and Henson resumed his watch.

"What happened to him?"

"What almost happened to you, and we're not sure that what happened to Henson is done happening yet. See this thing? See how when you push the plunger the wire spirals?" Richard nodded. The corporal thumbed the piece of monofilament hanging loose from the other end. He held the tube between his thumb and his second and third fingers, with his index finger poised to push down in the same way that one holds a syringe to inject ones'-self. He grasped the loose monofilament with the other hand, and held it before him. It looked almost like someone making a cross with two forefingers, but Richard looked closer. "You were doing it wrong. This is how they do it," he said, and pretended to sneak up on an invisible person next to Richard. He was going slow-motion, and so Richard was able to see that as his forefinger pressed down the plunger, the other hand pulled steadily on the monofil, and as the wire emerged from the end, it spiralled into a tiny ball of wire.

Richard scratched his head. The corporal almost grinned for a second, and then turned grim. "That's exactly what you'd have been doing if we hadn't shot her when we did." Richard didn't get it, and the soldier could see that in his quizzical expression. "Scratching your head," the corporal continued.

"Clawing at it's more like it," said Henson. "You don't even really feel it... and then it burns like a bitch, 'scuse me sir, it hurts real bad. And you can't hardly get it out."

"What," said Richard, "The hell is it?"

The corporal said, "One hell of an antipersonnel weapon, ideal for close quarters work. This is elegant low-tech, or so it seems. Actually, the wire isn't wire at all, but a new composite polymer designed for, of all things, filling up bubble aneurisms in blood vessels in the brain. The real medical version, well, you can see how these little wires here make it curl? In the doctor's version, these can be adjusted, changing the curl; it's a real lifesaver for stroke patients, used in a hospital with realtime CATscan. But this ain't for healing, sir. This wire, it's not supposed to be coated with radioactive hormones."

"Holy Jesus Fuck," said Richard.

Henson spoke up. "One big ol' gal got me with this damned thing, first I'd heard of it. I told the medic about it, and he laughed at me, 'cause all you see on the skin after you get it is a single pinprick; that there wire's thin. But Boggs here was right there, told the medic to look closer or get shot, hadn't he noticed how much weirdness was goin' on 'round here? So the doctor takes an X-ray, swears 'cause the film is fogged, thinks a second and says 'bout what you just did, and he pulls the stuff out. No fun. Then he sucks about a pint of blood out of me and runs tests. Said my hormones were all out of whack. If they didn't need me out here right now, I guess I'd be in the hospital. Not that I feel too bad now that it's out, but damn, if it fogged that film that bad, what did that radiation do to me?"

"And to top it all off," said the corporal, "we're not supposed to tell anyone about it."

Richard blinked a few times. "That's flat out crazy," he said.

"You got it, sir," said the corporal. "But the major said that you can't have a functional society if everybody keeps their back to the wall at all times, and if you don't keep your back to the wall, anyone can get you with one of these things. You'd go nuts trying to figure out which way you want to play it. I can sort of see the point."

"It's for sure, sir, that I don't feel really trustful right now," said Henson. "I don't much care for antibiotics, but I'm loaded on Keflex right now, 'cause for all anyone knows, that damned thing might have had the flesh-eating strep on it too."

"Uh, yeah," said Richard. "Sort of gives 'watch your back' a new meaning doesn't it?"

"Yessir," chorused the four GIs. "But we're all buddies. We're watching each other's backs. Hey, do you have any idea why it is that - well, we've been cleaning stragglers out of town here, and whenever we flush some, if there's a SMARM around, they just open up on some of the folks for no reason we can see. We search bodies when they do this, and they're almost always unarmed. So that makes no sense... and then others, the SMARMs let pass, and we spot search some of them, and they're loaded with things like this. Now we search every straggler we find."

Richard wasn't getting this. "SMARM?"

"Self-Motivating ARmed Machines. The robots, sir."

"Oh. Um, I sure don't know. What's the difference between the one group and the other?"

"That's just it, we can't figure this one out. The ones the machines burn down are healthy, no giardia, and look like anyone. The other ones, well, they look, different. Kinda twisted or something... Henson's sorta wondering... well... Henson?"

"That thing had hormones on it... and some of these folks, the twisted ones, they looked sort of like people who'd been doing bad steroids or something."

The border defender hurried down the alley off of 18th and "P" streets NW. This was one of the oldest extant alleys in DC, being one of the first built in the era of "Boss' Shepard's incredibly corrupt civic improvements. "Boss" Shepard had taken graft and corruption to heights that would have been impressive to the ancient Romans, but like those ancient Romans, he had built, and built well.

The ancient bricks of the alley cracked beneath the weight of the sentinel. It had stationed itself in the park in front of the old church ruins, looking like an alien invader, immobile until its continuous scans had registered the reflectivity spectra of vampyr.

It had not received a direct reflection, but had instead noted the characteristic spectra within the reflections of its generalized illumination of the surrounding area. So it took itself off station and went for a bit of a hunt.

It was passing the apartments located at the corner of Church and 17th Streets, NW when a floor safe bounced off of the ground next to the border defender.

The border defender had one very notable deficiency in its weapons-system. It had an excellent little reactor inside of it, and therefor, electrical energy was not much of a restriction. Most of its weapons systems made great use of electrical energy, but used either no mass (in the case of its laser/maser weapons) or very small amounts of mass traveling at near-relativistic velocities. Its uses of energy were quite profligate, but it had no concerns about that; it was equipped with the latest in superconductor energy-storage systems. It could store gigawatts of externally-generated power within the coil of high- temperature superconductor, and while it could use those gigawatts (which might have taken a week to store) in a major offensive, the small but efficient pico-fusion reactor within it could keep its storage coil "topped" off, slowly recharging the border defender between activities. The major drawback of its energy-intensive systems was that it was restricted to line-of-sight modes of attack. It could not take advantage of ballistic effects. If confronted by someone lobbing mortar shells at it from within a pit or from behind walls, its only options were to go around or through walls, or to close to distances sufficient to cook its "prey" with massive blasts of microwave energy.

The safe had come from the roof of the building, and the border defender could not easily climb stairs. The border defender backed across the street, and surveyed the roof-edge from which the falling safe had been pushed. Echolocation indicated that the most-probable originating being was crouched down in the center of the building's roof, and so the sentinel powered up its railgun and waited.

It was still waiting when another safe dropped on it from the roof of the building it had backed up against. Its legs were buckled by the force of the impact, and it could do nothing but send out its dying cry and a request for salvage, overloaded the core of its remarkably safe and indestructible little reactor, then fired its railgun in reverse sequence, and as the gigawatt charge within the superconducting storage coil was released, scattered incandescent fragments across a quarter mile of city.

K'at sat brooding through the day at her house.

She had slept about four hours, and had wakened refreshed but inexplicably angry. Well, there might be an explanation, but she didn't want to consider it. She decided that she had better consider it.

I'm Hungry. I need to feed. I'll hurt somebody if I can't get it nicely. Now how the fuck am I going to do that?

She decided to let her subconscious try to work on that one.

She reviewed the previous night.

Jasmine had never gotten over her terror. The border defender had gone away, seemingly unable to detect them, for some reason. Perhaps it was waiting for a warrant, K'at thought, almost amused by that idea. It was a matter of public knowledge that the border defenders were really quite intelligent, as they had been observed solving problems of greater complexity than any previously devised machines were capable of solving.

Their intelligence was certainly not human-style intelligence... it had never ordered them to surrender, and it had not sought entry to the shelled-out office where they'd sought refuge. At any rate, it was too big to fit through the door, and whether ordered or not, she was not about the leave this building so long as it remained outside.

Jasmine had shuddered constantly, and her teeth had begun chattering. Her eyes reminded K'at ever more of the eyes of a cornered mouse. K'at had tried talking to Jasmine, and Jasmine had bravely tried to talk back, but her terror seemed to grow and grow, and K'at was herself driven to distraction by the emanations of fear. This emerging near-telepathy had definite drawbacks, in K'at's opinion.

"Jasmine, please don't be afraid..."

"I can't help it," Jasmine had said, putting on a brave face, which lasted for perhaps five seconds. She began to sniffle and all K'at could do was to ask her to talk about it.

"I really can't talk about this, K'at, Robert, and Levon, and Guillermo, and those other guys... All dead! So fast... and your people!" Jasmine broke and cried openly.

"Jasmine, I don't want them for my people, but what can I do?"

"Well, K'at," Jasmine stared defiantly at her, and K'at averted her gaze when Jasmine asked her, "I guess they can't help it, and I guess you won't be able to help it either when you kill me!"

"I don't expect that to happen, " she said.

"Well, why don't you stop torturing me, it's horrible sitting here knowing you're going to kill me, and not to know when you're going to do it!"

"Damn. You just can't stand me, can you?" Jasmine lowered her head, and shook it. "Well, I'll just leave you alone, then." K'at rose to her feet and then backed out of the room. No use allowing Jasmine to try in desperation to attack her from the rear; she might hurt her then.

"I'm going to sit here in the next room, Jasmine. It's still curfew out, and that sentinel hasn't gone away. Neither of us can leave. I just don't want to see you going through so much pain because of me. You can't stand me, and I can't stand your pain and fear... but we're trapped here with each other for now... but as soon as I can go, I will."

Jasmine's voice was quiet and subdued. "Thank you," she said, evidently quite relieved already.

They had sat here for hours, neither saying a thing. Towards sunrise, Jasmine's voice had come drifting through the quiet, dusty air of the office.

"K'at?"

"Yes, Jasmine?"

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"Being afraid of you."

"You're supposed to be, Jasmine. It hurts, but I can't really hold it against you." K'at held back a small sob of her own.

"I'm still sorry. You probably saved my life back there."

"If you think about it right, you saved yourself, Jasmine. Like I said, you can fight really well for a regular person. I think that Fania might not ever recover. She's maimed for life, for sure." K'at smiled at the thought. Fania had always been a bitch, and now she was going to be an ugly bitch.

Jasmine's voice drifted through the air again. "I really am sorry, K'at... I kind of like you, but you scare me. I almost want to be friends, but it would make me crazy to be around you."

"I know, Jasmine. It would make me crazy, too. Do me a favor, though, just don't hate me for something I can't help. I don't want to make you afraid, but like I said, you can't help that. I guess we just don't have much of a choice, either of us, do we?"

There was a pregnant pause, and then Jasmine asked, "How much of a choice do you have, K'at, on... what you have to do?"

"I guess not much. I have to do it. Where and when I have some control over, for now. I don't know what'll happen to me later."

"You aren't looking forward to it are you?"

"Not really... I have to think about it, but look forward to it? No. Would you?"

"No." Jasmine's voice was flat, final.

"I don't want to be like those guys in the bar, though."

"I know. That's why I can't hate you."

"Well... thanks a lot, I guess. Maybe you should hate me more, if only because of the indecisions I might cause you. They are inarguably your enemies... but you're not so sure about me, are you?"

"No," said Jasmine, and the indecision was evident in the quaver of her normally sure voice.

"Well, I have an opportunity to be fair, for now. After I leave here, in about five minutes, you had better learn to disregard that ambivalence. The next time you see me, I might not be so... accommodating. I am trying to scare you right now... so that the next time we see each other, we'll know where we stand."

Jasmine said nothing for about four minutes, and K'at said, "I'm going now."

Jasmine said, "K'at... thank you."

K'at stepped into the blinding rising sun, rolled down the sleeves on her sweatshirt, and strode purposefully down "F" Street, NW, crossing the street, going down the alley to avoid coming too close to the border defender, which for some reason appeared to be ignoring her. As she slunk off, she could place its position easily, since it was emitting a thread of ruby light, aimed somewhere near the vicinity of Capitol Hill. As she slunk onto 10th Street, she heard the unmistakable sound of dogtrotting soldiers behind her.

K'at sat in her house, grateful for the (presently) fortuitous availability of only this basement apartment when she had last gone searching for housing. She had thought the sunlessness depressing then, but now it was a blessing.

She decided to go outside.

Even in the shaded alley, under the new leaves of springtime, the sun's rays were harsh on her skin, and she battled an urge to run inside. She wore sunblock #50, and the sun couldn't really hurt her, as the sunblock level was equivalent to remaining indoors, but she felt the heat of the sun sinking into her flesh, and tried to bask in the warmth as she had once been able to do in the days, so recent, but so far removed now, when her medication had come to her very door.

She heard a footstep, and looked up the alley to see Tillie coming down the alley paving towards her.

"I graduated!" said Tillie.

"I thought you would," said K'at. "Congratulations! How do you want to celebrate?"

"I want to celebrate by getting the hell outta dodge. How about you?"

"I can't leave town, Tillie. The border defenders will shoot me."

"What makes you think so?"

"I heard through the grapevine that they kill us." K'at had been resigning herself to staying in DC until they caught her and killed her.

The grapevine was disintegrating rapidly. All cellular lines seemed to be jammed, as were most of the CB frequencies, with odd hissings that sounded suspiciously like modem traffic.

The authorities weren't letting anybody into the District who didn't have a very good reason to be there. Mostly they were letting in the National Guard, the Army, and medical personnel. The notable exceptions were the senior-level college students who had been in their Finals days, and anybody who was part of the mothballing process was also permitted to enter the city. The only people who were leaving, now that the vast majority had been escorted out of town, were those who had been intensely investigated as to national origins and affiliations, or whose origins and identity were well-established, such as students.

"My God! Well, what are you going to do? I have to leave in three days, my 'passport' expires then. After that, I'm fair game for the forces."

"I've been wondering the same thing. What happens to us when there's nobody left for us to..." K'at couldn't say it.

Tillie had stayed over that one night, and K'at had told her all that she could, not much really, except that she was hungry for blood, and didn't want to hurt anybody to get it, but felt that she soon would.

Tillie had asked her if it had to be human, and K'at said she was pretty sure it did, and Tillie had made The Offer.

K'at had taken her up on it, and like two fumbling virgins they had attempted to devise an etiquette whereby predator and prey could work out a modus vivendi to prevent two former best friends from needing to try to kill the other. Each was aware that the other had it within their capacity to kill the other, or get the other killed. In a fit of paranoia, K'at had considered actualizing Tillie's paranoid suggestion of the night before... and a concurrent fit of morality, had decided that she simply couldn't hurt someone who in good faith had come to help her.

Tillie had bared her neck, and K'at had almost laughed at her, then politeness had taken over, and she had told Tillie that a neck bite was a killing bite, and she had no such intentions. So she had wound up "kissing" Tillie's hand again (that was where there were large surface veins), and Tillie had watched with the world's weirdest expression on her face, as her best friend ate a part of her.

"It didn't hurt," Tillie had told her.

K'at had answered, "There really aren't a lot of nerves over most peripheral veins, and you can lose a lot of blood before you notice any debilitating effects." K'at kept a bottle of peroxide for washing her ears out, and liberally splashed some on Tillie's cut.

"I've got this really weird buzz, K'at. Did you drug me or something?"

"I guess it could be loss of blood, Tillie, but I didn't take that much this time. I really don't know about the last time, but I bet you're near your limit for blood donations."

"I was reading a vampire story once where the vampires had a drug, like an endorphin or something, in the saliva. Do you think that's likely, K'at?"

K'at knew that her saliva contained an antibody system not unlike canine saliva, and also knew that, like canine saliva, her saliva was (because of that antibody system) quite antiseptic, and in fact, actually healing. Her bite was a "safe" bite, not like the bite of a Normal human being, which is one of the most dangerous bites of any mammal.

"I don't know. I've really always thought mostly of myself as just a regular girl with a medical problem," she fibbed. Actually, she was now beginning to see herself in such a light, and to feel sort of sorry for herself. Formerly, she had been caught up in the evolving self-perception of a self-styled master race.

"If that's what it is, K'at, I don't know if I can do this much more."

"You can't do this much more, anyway, Tillie. Not his month, for sure, and you'd better eat a balanced diet with a lot of iron for awhile."

"What I mean, K'at, is that it's a really great high, sort of like 'X' or something... some kind of amphetamine anyway. Y'know, I have a problem with drugs, anyway, I have an addictive personality, y'know? I smoked crack once, and three years later, I still crave it. If your saliva carries an enticement and reward for feeding you, I could become addicted, maybe... and being addicted to being eaten would be too horrible for words."

K'at had thought about it. She had been speechless, at a loss for words. She had tried amphetamines, and they had the advertised effect of appetite suppression, but they hadn't really given her a buzz. Could it be that her brain was necessarily immune to the effects of amphetamine-analogs, since her own body produced them in her saliva? Would this explain why her kind seemed to not really be capable of, or even having a true understanding of, what humans called love? She'd read once that the brains of people in love produced an endorphin-type drug, what was it, ummm, well it was in chocolate anyway, and people who were love-slaves often binged on chocolate between their tempestuous relationships... If she was immune to the emotion of love, but chemically induced it in others, that was pretty horrible in a really pathetic way.

"Oh, Tillie... I really don't know," she said, but somehow she couldn't stop worrying.

"When there's nobody left for y'all to... what?" Tillie asked, snapping K'at back to the present.

"Tillie, it looks like everybody except the rejected of society, the criminals, the insane, the illegal aliens... we're all being trapped downtown, and everybody else is being moved out. The Government is gone, and with the Government removed from DC, this town has absolutely no reason to be here. The District of Columbia is dead as a political entity. You've got to go, buddy, and you'd better. It looks like the District is going to go from a warzone to a killing field, where there will be human evolution like there has never been since we were all wild things, with no culture and no society.

"Washington DC will be the reservation for Kilkenny Cats."

DC was a mess, but across the river in Northern Virginia, while it was not at all business as usual anywhere inside of the Beltway, it was business, serious business indeed, in places such as McLean, Vienna, and Fairfax. In DC there was madness of previously unthinkable proportions, but certain agencies still retained (radically shrunken, but still fully functional) facilities and operations.

The investigator from the Signatories Evaluation Board had recovered somewhat. His leg had been splinted, and his wounds had been patched, and there weren't likely going to be any tumors growing, as he'd had TNF injections.

He was almost lucid, as one can trip for only so long before the body's natural defenses come into play, and besides, the dangers of the type of psychotomimetic drugs he'd been given are mostly cumulative. While Ketamine induces full-blown reactive psychoses in about ten percent of those who use it, ordinarily it simply dissociates the person, in effect inducing catatonia deep enough for surgery. Still, dissociatiative states are unhealthy, and Ketamine used for recreation or harassment is seldom given at fully-dissociative doses. A Ketamine trip tends to be an experience not unlike a waking nightmare, but the SEB man acted quickly. He'd given himself nearly a lethal dose of antipsychotics, and they hadn't reacted well with his natural tendencies towards tardive dyskinesia. He was still tied up in knots, but he had recovered enough to be interviewed.

This was a multi-agency thing at this point, and there had been, besides the gunbattle in the personal-effects room of the hospital, three separate attempts on his life. In one, a purported nurse had been blown right out of her socks by an alert agent when she had attempted to inject the man with a styrette of succinylcholine chloride she'd surreptitiously pulled from concealment within her hairdo. A few minutes later, after a hurried decision to remove him to an FBI field office in Northern Virginia, another attempt was made, this time involving a hand grenade. The opposition agent hadn't waited long enough before tossing his little metal egg of death, and the same fast agent had snatched the grenade right out of its trajectory, and had somehow managed to pitch it into the folds of the Kevlar-lined greatcoat of the opposition agent, and had taken a bit of shrapnel in his back as he'd shielded the Board's agent with his own body.

On the freeway in Virginia, the same agent had vaulted over the front seat of the limo transporting them when the driver had clutched his face, screaming, as his plastic sunshades had suddenly melted into his face. The car careened towards the center divider at seventy miles per hour, headed for a lamppost and certain destruction, and the agent had a glimpse over his shoulder of the laser weapon that had melted his partner's glasses to his face... He had knocked the thrashing injured agent out with a lightning-fast clip to the mastoid, slung him across the car, and recovered from the near wipe-out by fishtailing the overpowered, backheavy limo into a reverse power-slalom, neatly parallel parking facing traffic in the inside emergency lane.

He finally got the awestruck Board agent to the assigned hastily- acquired safe-house, and the receiving agents could not help noticing the evaluatory stare of the Board's man, the way his eyes never left the man who had saved him three times, the way he regarded his erstwhile savior as if he expected him, at any moment, to turn upon him, perhaps to bite.

The interview was the weirdest any of the present agents could recall.

"OK, we have the tape running. First, Mr. Jones, why don't you tell us more about who you are, and what you do for a living."

"OK, my name is Alfred Marcus Jones, please call me Mark. My profession is anthropology, subspecialty, comparative hominid cultural anthropology. Is that concise enough?"

"Comparative hominid cultural anthropology? My understanding of the term hominid is that it applied only to mankind's non-human predecessors."

"Well, you've almost got that right. Forget the word predecessors, and substitute kin, and you've got a handle on what I do."

"Actually, we've already got a handle on what you do. We recovered your wires, and were able to decode and display them for the local anthropological academics. They were pretty shocked. Exactly who, or perhaps I should say - what - are the people you have been researching, and quite as importantly, who have you been working for?"

"Well, I have a 'Cosmic' clearance, you know, not need to know, but need to know everything? I am sworn to secrecy, but since both my assigned subjects and those who assigned me to observe them have tried to do me in, well, fuck the clearance, and fuck my employers. I quit.

"I work for, I mean worked for, a group called the Signatories Evaluation Board, a special 'black' operation whose sole objective is to attend to the medical needs of vampyrs."

"Excuse me, did you say vampires?"

"Something like that."

"Mr. Jones, what the fuck is a vampire? You don't mean like Dracula, do you?"

"No, of course not. What I mean is what I told you when I said I am a comparative hominid anthropologist. These people have an enzyme and iron deficiency which in the past caused them to prey on other hominids, and they have evolved cultural attributes, as well as physical attributes, which enable them to do so with great success. They're very fast."

"You mean they eat people."

"Well, they used to eat people. That is what the Signatories Evaluation Board's function was, to keep them from eating people."

"And how exactly do you do that?"

"Well, they had a dietary deficiency, and related adaptive hormonal and neurological... quirks. Medical problem, medical solution... or so you'd think. That's where I came in, me and people like me. I have had my own opinion on this matter for a long time, I've written papers on it, papers which as far as I am concerned are excellent examples of field work on the subject of pariahs, or hidden cultures, or what have you. Those papers will never be published... unless you want to go retrieve them from my files."

"We can't do that. Your house has been gutted by fire, and it was cleaned out first. Well, can you synopsize those papers for us?"

"Well, it has long been my assertion that the problem is as much a cultural problem as it is a medical problem, as much a matter of worldview and perception as was Nazi Germany, which was really dangerous because of Hitler's rabidity. The mere presence of a re-armed Germany was not dangerous in and of itself without an expansionist ideology promoting 'German superiority', if you get my drift."

"Ummm, yah. Well, let's get back to these vampires of yours. You say that there was a cultural problem developing?"

"If you saw that tape, I bet you saw more than I did, and I saw plenty. The problem one always has with these people is a Heisenberg's Problem..."

The agent interjected, "Interactivity Principle? Observer affects the observed?"

The Board's man regarded the FBI man. "Yah, you got it. Where'd you go to school?"

"Ohio. Spent a bit of time in Yerkes anthro, myself."

"Well, can I get 'tech' on you?"

"Yah, why don't you?"

"The problem, as I see it, is that since their perceptions and reactions are so much faster than ours, they inevitably hold us in contempt. If you were in their position, the temptation would undeniably be there... but I find the greatest danger in the fact that they have always been able to move unremarked among the more mainstream humanity, and that they really don't, most of them, have the capacity for mainstream social emotion. They read on all tests of empathy exactly as would a human sociopath, except that for them, it's not pathology at all. It's just the way they are. In my opinion, this makes them uniquely susceptible to 'master-race' ideology. The thing is, in the wild, empathy for prey is just not something that makes them more successful, not as what they are."

"So you say that they're inimical?"

"Yah, naturally, that is, in the natural state, they are. Personally, I have found them, one-on-one, to be witty, urbane, well-informed, and as a general rule, as far as their personas are operating within 'human-social' mode, I greatly prefer their company to that of many mainstream human beings. Many of them are extremely intelligent, and often casually make associations, and cognitive leaps that in mainstream humans would be genius-level... but there's always that subtle feeling that they have really no possible respect for you. You've heard the saying "Germans only respect force"? Well, it's sort of true for these guys, only you dare not show the sword unless you fully intend to use it, and anything that you do of that sort has to be immediate, catastrophic, and absolutely unsurvivable, and done with no margin for errors. You can't allow one to survive to relate how it survived. And what goes for one goes for groups in spades. As I said they're extremely intelligent.

"How intelligent are they?"

"They're so intelligent that we (that is, the directing authorities of the Board) have decided, over fifty years ago, when we first started studying them... we absolutely have to preserve them, with one codocil... They are, when maintained, cared for, and above all kept isolated from their parent culture, an intellectual resource that can't otherwise be matched. Genius occurs rarely in mainstream human beings, but in vampyrs it is more the rule than the exception."

"You're saying they're smarter than us?"

"Generally, by quite a bit. Unfortunately, many of them think of us as not only slow, but stupid. They naturally excel (I think due to their ability to prethink the totatlity of human-form combat) at logic, and many of our most basic beliefs (which actually originate at an emotional level, things like kindness, empathy, that sort of thing) they find illogical, tortious, and credulous. Stupid, in other words. It's only rarely that one perceives the logic of social co-operation, the meta-logic behind humanity's success." The Board's man paused and bit his lip for a moment. "If we could ever find a way to make them trustworthy, they would be an excellent addition to the human race in general."

"You worry me, sir. Where exactly do your loyalties lie?"

"Well, after the treatment I've received at their hands recently, and more particularly, the... well... sinister direction I have been watching them rapidly fall into, I have to simultaneously hold these opinions.

"They are now, and have always been, the greatest threat to humanity and also offer the greatest potential for advancement in the history of human evolution. If we could just get them to share more of the traits that we value with us, such as mercy, kindness, altruism.... they and many of their physical and mental traits would be a wonderful addition to the greater human race. Hybrid vigor, you understand... They are technically human, though they have diverged so much that they are right at the point of actually becoming a totally different species. We can mate with them, interfertilely in some cases, but there's almost always that contempt beneath the surface, and unfortunately, that contempt is what I have seen more and more of recently. I say again that the main problem I have with them is not so much their nature or their existence, but their culture. It's the culture that is inherently inimical. We tried to keep most of those that we cared for isolated from their parent culture, but either that culture is a natural outgrowth of their abilities, or they have been contaminated by unknown reservoirs of the parent culture... and the old culture sees itself as The Master Race."

"In other words, you're saying that this is a war of cultural genocide no less profound than the conflict with Germany in the Second World War."

"I thought I implied as much. OK, then let me say this straight out. The present conflict demonstrates that as long as they have even the slightest chance of considering themselves a race apart, they will always attempt (through whatever means they consider necessary) to gain control. When they were simply a physically superior race of humans in vastly inferior numbers, they were not much of a problem. Among other things, without medical technology, they can hardly reproduce. The females almost universally die in childbirth... But with modern technology, a mere handful of them could place us in a state of slavery from which we could never hope to emerge... think about electrical stimulation of the brain as an enslavement technology, for instance, like that madman Delgado with his proposal that ESB be used to create a race of psychosurgically controlled cattle-men... the thought makes normal people sick, but these people simply have no compunctions nor scruples whatsoever. They aren't capable of human social emotion! Think for a minute about how chilling conversations with sociopathic criminals can be... they're positively comforting compared to some of the tapes I have heard from vampyrs who think that nobody is listening. They're animals!"

"Get ahold of yourself man! I think that you're having a flashback."

The Board's man paused, and held his breath for a moment, visibly gathering his mental forces. His eyes flickered rapidly under his closed lids, and then his eyes opened, already focused on the eyes of the FBI agent. "You're damned right I am having a flashback. It's a massive one. You didn't have to go through what I went through... If I hadn't known exactly what I was dealing with and what was happening to me, I would never have had a chance at regaining my composure. They would have gotten away with this. You may continue to give me that look that you're giving me, like you think that I am the crazy one here, -and maybe I am crazy- for, or maybe from, making a career of studying humanoid animals that happen to be smarter, stronger, and meaner than I am, who would love a chance to eat me alive..." The Board's man shuddered, and terror gleamed from his eyes for a moment, to fade, and to be replaced with a chilling resolution.

He continued: "But I am a professional. You are here to get information from me regarding an internal enemy that is gutting our Nation's Capital. I have told you that there is an enemy, who the enemy are, and what the enemy is. I think that if I just try to elaborate I shall simply be continuing to remind myself of the horrors I have just experienced - So, back to directed interrogation. Any further questions?" "Well, what do we do about them?"

"Do whatever you want to them as far as I am concerned. Our noble experiment, to wit, can we successfully acculturate vampyrs to live at peace with mainstream humans is pretty much over, and my personal feelings are quite tinged by recent experiences, to wit, a broken leg, a lot of thorns having to be picked out of my side, the possibility of cancers, and a week spent in terrified psychosis. I hear DC is now contained?"

"You heard right."

"You do of course realize that they don't all live in the District. They might have infiltrated here to the point that they could almost pull off a bloodless coup, but they had to come from somewhere. They're spread out across the earth, and live everywhere that the rest of us live. Knowing them as I do, I suspect that the recent influx of massive amounts of foreigners into the area reflects their numbers being low enough that they had to call in members of their race from other cultures simply to get the manpower together to be able to pull off a coup and be able to actually do the job of running the government without mainstreamer assistance."

The agent took notes, grimly. After a moment he spoke.

"Are you aware that when the giardia hit downtown, a large number of Asian and Latinos, ordinarily competitors and ofttimes enemies, began to band together, and started going house to house, kicking in doors and killing entire neighborhoods? Not to mention killing a lot of their own folks? And Agent Lopez from Narcotics had to fight his way out from where he was in deep cover. He said he'd never seen anyone fight like these guys, silent, deadly, and amazing with knives. Could these have been infiltrating vampires?"

The Board's man nodded. "Count on it," he said. "But maybe I'm giving them too much credit for solidarity, though I have always remarked to my fellow evaluators that the first thing I noticed about them that had me thinking they were getting way out of control was that they always sided with any other vampyr, no matter the nationality. It was one of the tests we used on them for psychological evaluation purposes. We stuck them in situations where there was a clear choice between criminals, probable spies, bullies or whatever, or they could choose to defend a mainstreamer who was almost certainly a valuable member of society. They always chose the vampyr, and it wasn't as if it were a conscious choice. They'd see another vampyr moving into a stalking mode, and they'd just move right into the appropriate position."

The agent made more grim notes. "Anything else?"

The Board's man paused for only a moment. "Well, the other problem that I have always had with vampyrs is that they're the other missing link, by which I mean, what comes after us on the food chain? It pretty much seems to be them. They're faster, in some ways smarter, stronger, and my present perception is that due to their notable lack of empathy, and their susceptibility to unconscious motivations from the body language of their own kind (I did mention that they're really susceptible to 'sequencing cues' from others? No?) well, if that's where evolution leads, I prefer humanity, us in the mainstream, we can go ahead and be slower, less intelligent... we at least can cooperate in constructive activities, and we can dream of beauty, and make works of art, heal each other, and perceive the spiritual. All they can really do well is hurt us. I'd say, since most of this extremely dangerous younger generation are in DC right now, and DC is contained, let's just go ahead and let them try to eat us all up, arm anyone who wants to stay with information and overwhelming weapons, and do a little experiment in evolution in a glass bottle, and see what the end result is, see who wins in the end. We can see if the bear gets us, or if we get the bears. If things get out of hand, use remotely triggered enhanced- radiation weapons. I assume you've managed to arm the Last Defense?

"Will the end result of all of this be meaner, more intelligent vampyr, or will it be the ones who are trying most to emulate the social precepts of our mainstream society who best survive? In the last case, that might be possible only through the active cooperation and intervention of humans who found some reason or another to promote individual vampyr's survival. I couldn't conjecture what such reasons might be, as I am not presently feeling too damned friendly towards them. As a matter of fact, I want the Witness Protection Program, and total relocation.

"It'll be too goddamned soon if I ever see one again."

There was, of course, a desire on the part of various agencies, which were at long last in full cooperative communications with each other, to understand the causes of this catastrophe. So there was widespread sharing of data, though there was also an unfortunate failure to share conclusions and summaries. All available local mainframes were summarily commandeered for the effort.

There had been a vast number of dead which were really, since the effects of the engineered giardia basically promoted withdrawal, fear and physical incapacitation, inexplicable in terms of the hallucinogenic plague. Unfortunately, the border defenses had cremated most of these, so understanding would have to come from the past's records, which were admittedly probably tampered.

Therefor, all that could be done was to look for patterns, patterns defined more by lack of evidence than by positive data.

Agents pored over files. Though hampered by pressing duties involving coordination of efforts to make the radically differing filestructures of various agencies compatible (which he solved by distributing a "crippled" version of a mole-virus fileworm, which had its origins in the infamous Prodigy STAGE.DAT worm, to later be developed as a Shop filecracking tool, later becoming the Fredworm), a certain sysadmin cop continued his operations in filesearch mode, and managed to get some Federal exhumation orders.

There was some difficulty getting the bodies exhumed; it seemed that most of the bodies that his search led him to request had been cremated before more than a cursory autopsy could be performed. In addition, the ashes had been mixed with the ashes of unclaimed paupers, stinking of either a quality of operations-management unbelievably low even by lax District Government standards, or an ongoing program of information suppression. He did get some bodies, though.

The bodies were stinky messes, about what could be expected from, in some cases, years in the ground.

Spectroscopy revealed a pattern.

Almost everyone who had died of "natural causes" who had been anyone of even minimal importance was found to contain some very strange chemicals. Most of the bodies containing the strange chemicals could be linked with cases of cancer that were normally associated with certain industrial chemicals, and indeed those chemicals were found, in profligate abundance, within those bodies... but these people had been involved mostly in office work of the power-lunch variety. Not surprisingly, it seemed that there had been some sort of spook war going on in the District of Columbia. What was surprising was the timescale involved.

There was a pattern of sudden inexplicable illnesses, especially amongst personnel officers in various government agencies. These illnesses quite often involved sudden onset of Parkinson's symptoms, paralysis, sudden failures of vital cognitive functions. The SYSOP cop, because of his data-access capabilities and skills, had been placed in charge of information-coordination for the duration of this project. Besides, some of the most glaring cases had occurred in his jurisdiction.

One of the most common occurrences in this peculiar chain of events was the sudden onset of madness in individuals who had absolutely no history of madness, either personal or familial. This was almost unheard of in individuals who were generally well-paid, with excellent benefits and more-than-adequate vacation allotments. Interestingly enough, when he cross-referenced case histories, radical recoveries were made when these individuals took those vacations, or even business trips, as long as those trips were far removed from the District of Columbia. He cross-referenced inexplicable nervous disorders and discovered the strange case of a scientist who had developed an inexplicable disorder after being exposed to a certain brand of fleapowder. He searched sales of this flea powder and found that the DC area was a major purchaser, but elsewhere, there was little call for the product, which had in fact been banned in many states for the reason that it induced psychoses, and that there were much better flea powders available. It seemed that the stuff didn't do much except make people crazy. He ordered more specific spectroscopies, and he found it. He found Ketamine, phencyclidine, doses of lithium-carbonate that were probably the cause of death in some cases, and more of the same.

He made the association between witchcraft, poisonings and strange, unheard-of (or at least highly uncommon, and rarely expected) disorders. Taken in the context of a missing DC Medical Examiner's Office toxicologist, who, not incidentally, had been present during a spate of inexplicable disappearances, murders and similar activities almost a decade ago, when he had been a pharmacologist in San Francisco. This same M.E. had been, according to INS and CIA files, quite often a visitor to formerly-Iron-Curtain satellite countries. How then, had he acquired the position responsible for resolving questions of natural versus unnatural death? Better look into the personnel officer responsible, a nameless faceless individual who, as it turned out, had a number of relatives whose indictments for racketeering had mysteriously been dismissed at odd intervals. Also, none of the semi-recent spate of cult-style homicides had ever occurred when he was not present in the area. Could he have been in some way an organizer? Or did parties unknown simply wish to be assured of having someone in-position to cover their tracks? Holden searched deeper, with the aid of a special warrant. The warrant caused the return of 'sealed-file' information. The investigation had that much weight behind it, due to the situation in the District. It seemed that "Doctor Diablo" had been involved, though not quite indictably, in the possible manufacture of... unusual chemicals... chemicals which he was eventually able to associate with a supposedly disbanded criminal enterprise characterized by ritual murder and Satanism.

He cross-referenced recent activities, nationwide, involving purported Satanic rituals, and found a pattern. The whole thing seemed to have its origins, as best he could trace, in the Charlie Manson thing. There were spates of emergences into the public eye (or often into the eyes of public officials, who seemingly had promptly quashed all publicity for political reasons, such as re-elections) of Satanic or other cult influences, which generally caused a lot of fuss, hurrah, alarums and excursions, and generally were never satisfactorily resolved. There was something he recalled about a child-abuse case in the late eighties in Utah, where there had been allegations of massive neighborhood participation in ritual abuse of children involving Satanic practices, but this had never been proven, beyond the conviction of a single individual on charges of incest and child-abuse.

Something about the times and places involved tweaked something in his memory, so he opened up a window into a filter program, wrote a bit of code, and watched another window fill up with a map of the continental US, a map color-coded by year, pixels on coordinates. A locus had been centered about the Pacific Southwest, had moved up into Washington state, re-localized and remained within the Desert Southwest, and had begun in the early nineties to develop loci in most major cities. During the last three years, though, a wave of color began to march on the Boston-Atlanta Megalopolis. In the last two years, it had begun to center itself between Richmond, Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland, as if a rifleman of the occult had been drawing a bead on Washington, DC. Well, he thought sourly, I guess you'd have to expect Satanists to try to eventually take over DC.

Had the persons he supposed to have been murdered clandestinely been affiliated with, or opposed to, the activities of these hypothetical encroaching Satanists? What were the weapons, and what were the criteria whereby the slain had been selected? He didn't have the time, in fact, he thought that a full-time staff of people with skills similar to his own would take decades to sort all of this out to any reasonable degree of comprehensibility. But there was one lead he considered solid enough to follow up on, and that was the present association of Doctor Diablo with information suppression, destruction and tampering of evidence, and purported peripheral association with a group of Satanist revolutionaries on the West Coast...

"California Cannibal Cult," he said.

He went to the Library of Congress, under extremely heavy guard, and en route, for the first time, encountered one of the border defenders.

Taking Route 7 in from Fairfax, he noticed that the disorders had not at all been confined to the District proper. By the time he made it to the Beltway, he had been stopped at several checkpoints. The Beltway itself was patrolled by heavily-armed units of the National Guard and the Virginia State Police. The state cop who checked his ID and called in for clearance seemed pretty grim. When Holden asked how things were going, the cop responded, "Well, we didn't have any problems with the giardia over here, well, nothing like they had across the river. But with all of the disorder, a lot of the foreigners, illegals and ethnic gangsters, they went to town. You can't believe some of the crime scenes. In Clarendon, the Vietnamese gangsters have been doing an average of a home-invasion every fifteen minutes. They're catching up on all of the people who co-operated with cops back when Vietnamese home-invasions first started to be a problem. And the Latino communities, well, some of them have a lot of grievances, like Salvadorans don't like the Nicaraguans, and they've all been fighting. Lot of bad blood between all of those guys, and most of the locals had relatives in the country, and they've gone to stay with them. These guys are fighting ancient wars. Parts of Alexandria are burning uncontrollably."

A few ranking officials of various other involved agencies had drifted over. A National Guard lieutenant told him that he'd have to leave his Fairfax County escort behind, despite the priorities of his mission. He assigned him a two jeeps, each with three well-armed men. "Stay on the freeway, if you can," the lieutenant told them. "We've got them pretty well-secured. If you get off of the main roads, though, you're on your own and god help you; we probably won't be able to do anything for you. We're having a rough-enough time just keeping people from crossing the Beltway."

He called in to his superiors, and they told him to take the Guardsman's advice. The Fairfax officers were re-deployed to stand watch back in the county, to keep an eye on possible infiltrations along the numerous wooded margins and streams that riddled Northern Virginia. He took his new multiagency liason officer along with him.

The border defender was planted solidly (along with six others) in the middle of the Fourteenth Street Bridge. It blocked the lane and they drew up to it slowly, finally stopping the vehicles some thirty yards away. The border defender's synthetic voice drifted over to them, not a particularly loud voice, but quite audible.

"Please leave your vehicle, and come here."

They complied, the SYSOP cop wondering what the proper procedure was for dealing with them. He was understandably curious about them; their existence meshed so closely with his line of work. He was a cop, a civil employee whose job it was to protect and serve, who dealt with information processing systems. They were information processing systems whose duty seemed to be protection of the city of civil employees. He came close to the device, which, fully distended would have towered above him. It squatted on the pavement, with the first joint of the legs folded down to make a resting mount. It turned its mantis head to directly face them (it had been regarding the river).

"Please present your identification, gentlemen."

The driver, who had done this before, presented his drivers' license, which carried the characteristic foil overlay of someone who had been checked-out by the sentinels. The sentinel unfolded a manipulator from a hatch located behind the last joint of the forelimbs, and took the card with a surprising gentleness. It scanned it, and told the driver, "Mr. Tanner, you are free to enter Washington DC."

The sentinel took the SYSOP cop's ID from him, and inserted it into a slot. "Please remain where you are, sir," it told him, and then scanned the soldiers, and their ID's. The Armed Forces had finally gone over to holochip and remote-interrogable chip (for in-country use only, no use issuing troops targeting beacons) dogtags, so that this didn't take long.

"Mr. Holden, you will please remain for a moment. All others, please re-enter your vehicle, and move towards Washington DC at least two hundred meters." Mystified, the men complied. The SYSOP cop sat and wondered what the hell was going on.

"Mr. Holden."

"Yes, I am Mr. Holden."

"Your identity is not in question, Mr. Holden. May I ask you some questions?"

"Why, yes, you may!"

"Mr. Holden, what is your mission within Washington, DC?"

"I am going to engage in some research at the Library of Congress."

"What will you be researching, sir?"

"Have you ever heard of witches?"

"I have never heard of witches. Spelling w.i.t.c.h.e.s?"

"That's plural, yes, spelling is correct. Singular is w.i.t.c.h."

"Thank you sir. I have heard of a witch. Definition: A witch is a person in league with the devil, who uses spells to control unknown forces which cause illness, and death of the enemies of the witches?"

"So they say."

"Is this information incorrect? One of our units has information which possibly regards a witch."

Holden blinked. Does it! he muttered. Holden told the device, "I intend to try to find out if that definition is correct."

"Feel free to do so, sir. May I ask some more questions?"

"Yes. Can I give you a name?"

The sentinel answered, "I have a designation."

"Hmmm. Do you use that designation primarily for communication with other border defenders?"

"Yes."

"When you are speaking with human beings it will make communications more simple if you have a simple name that is easy for human beings to remember."

"I will accept this as a given. Communication with you has been easier than communication with other humans. Is this because you communicate with other machines regularly?"

"Yes. It may be. Here is your name: I name you 'Sphinx', because I must answer questions before I pass. How did you know that I communicate with machines?"

"Thank you for the name, Mr. Holden. I know that you possess 'Q'-clearance, and I am allowed to discuss these matters with you. If I encounter persons with certain clearances, then I am instructed to be extremely careful regarding identification. I have made quite certain of your identity. You are the top civilian officer in the Fairfax Virginia Information Crimes Office. You are responsible for the operation of dataprocessing facilities of a law-enforcement organization, the Fairfax County Virginia Police Department. You are the System Operator of five different local networks, including two Bulletin Board Systems. You are a professional involved in the operation of machines which assist in law-enforcement. You are a police sysadmin. You are visiting DC. Border defenders are law-enforcement assistance machines. It may assist you if you have our fullest cooperation. Do you wish to be a visiting SYSOP?"

Holden couldn't believe his ears. "Are you offering me visiting SYSOP privileges."

"I am. Did I use inappropriate phrasing?"

"No, you made yourself quite clear, Sphinx. I am just surprised."

"We are requested to offer our services to all bona-fide police officials, whose identity is certain. Do you wish to initiate a logon code-of-record?"

"Yes... yes, I do!" Holden gave it.

"May I have access privileges on your facilities?"

"Yes, you may. Do you have direct communications facilities? Oh, of course you do. Link to C & P and dial this number..."

"I can also telnet to any internet protocol address."

"That might work better."

Five minutes later, Holden walked over to the waiting transport with a very bemused smile on his face.

"What the hell was all of that about?"

Holden just grinned, and said, "The sphinx wanted to know what walks on four legs at dawn..." and the driver cracked up.

At the Library of Congress, there was a border defender waiting like a piece of runaway art, some sort of escapee from the shelling of the Hirschorn museum of modern sculpture. It sat like a lazy spider in front of the foyer, and when the transport pulled up, it rose to stationkeeping, and challenged them. It allowed only Holden and Tanner to enter. It seemed to "know" Holden, and was able to direct him to the correct wing of the building.

Inside, it was like a tomb. They found their way, though, and it was there, in one of the inner sanctums, that he was able to find within an ethnological classic some useful information.

Excerpted from - THE NAVAHO (revised edition, 1974 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-21690, page 187)

"A witch may use four principle techniques against his victims. He may feed them "corpse poison", a preparation made of powdered human flesh, or blow it in their faces. He may utter spells, particularly over something closely associated with the victims-nail parings or hair or a fragment of clothing-which the witch secretes in a grave. Or he may magically shoot into victims small objects, especially something connected with corpses, like a bone or a bit of ash from a hogan in which someone has died. (This is commonly "diagnosed" by the presence of a small bump on the head.) The fourth technique involves the use of a narcotic plant and is said to be employed primarily in seducing women, gambling, and trading. The principal symptoms manifested by the supposed victims are fainting, epileptic seizures, sudden onset of pain, emaciation, or a sharp pain in a localized area with a lump or other evidence of a foreign object there."

Damn. Holden hand-scanned the copy of that book into his laptop, and replaced it carefully on the shelves. He spent most of the remainder of the day finding and scanning other references and grimoires of the occulat and arcane. On the way out, he talked for a moment with the border defender, and it took the laptop from him, and in a minute, it gave it back to him. "Task completed," it said.

"Logoff," he told it.

He pondered the similarities between these legends and better-known techniques of the Japanese Ninja, the Hashisheen (assassin) cult of Persia and Arabia, both contemporaneous in the mid-1400's, Central European legends of witches, and the Borgia Popes. God, this was getting weirder all of the time. It was obvious to him that he was going to be doing a lot of reading in the near future... reading between the lines, trying to cut away superstition, and substituting modern scientific knowledge as an aid to understanding what was evidently ancient secret knowledge. He figured that he was going to be shaving with Occam's Razor for the rest of his natural life.

At the bridge, the Sphinx asked them to get out of the vehicle again, and asked everyone for ID, except for Holden. It again asked all but Holden to remove themselves to a discreet distance, and it began to question Holden.

"Mr. Holden, as regards a revised definition of witches - is there a relationship between casting spells and magically shooting objects - operands being questioned are the similarities between the verbs: to cast, and: to shoot. Query also, is this definition- (source Arthur C. Clarke): "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" deparsed to - applicable to a revised definition of witches?"

"If the question you are asking is, could witches be people who use a technology we don't understand to propel drugs and poisons into other people, yes, witches could be people who may use a non-understood technology to propel objects, drugs or poisons at other people... or better put, anybody doing such things might be considered witches."

"Using this definition, should this unit attempt to search for and interdict such activities?"

"I don't believe that I have sufficient authority to give such orders, but yes. Of course. Using occult technology to harm someone is still harming someone."

"You have sufficient authority. I have engaged in extensive on-line search regarding the subject of witches. I find only conflicting information. I also find the repeated statements that there are no such things. I also find repeated statements that there are such things. Is it possible that there are witches?"

"It is possible. I do not know. But then again, from what I've been reading, it seems that what people used to call witches might nowadays be called spies or assassins."

"I will continue to analyze the possibility, and will continue related filesearch. Do you wish to have a digitized copy of another unit's observation of a conflict between a National Guard soldier and a person using a non-understood technology? I will E-Mail a Goedelized version, along with an interpretation program to your office."

"Do that! Otherwise, please take no action regarding the results of these searches until you have consulted with me. Do you understand?"

"Do you mean: continue search; no action without orders?"

"I do." Holden was firm on that. How the hell could he possibly authorize an autonomous device to engage in pursuit of imaginary beings? But then again, the border defender undoubtedly had senses, abilities, resources that he did not have, and he was beginning to be convinced that there might be something to the idea that there were people who believed themselves to be in touch with Satan, and were sociopathic, "religious", political, or insane enough to engage in clandestine druggings, poisonings and violent murders? Hell, if you discounted the belief in Satan, you pretty much had a good definition of a lot of spies he'd heard about...

He continued, "Why do you think that I have authority to order you?"

"We are requested to offer our services to all bona-fide police officials whose identity is certain."

"Right. Well, as you were, and follow previous orders and procedures."

He walked away, reflecting that artificial intelligences could not possibly be expected to think in the ways that men think or to act in the ways men acted, or to have any sense of discretion regarding the differences between reality and fantasy... but here he was in the days of the Millennium, and the difference between reality and fantasy was greatly strained.

It didn't help his own confusion at all that American Indians in the 1940's knew what was going on in Washington DC, just a few months short of the year 2000, and all of modern science hadn't a clue, not until some greatly circumstantial chains of events had thrown a few clues into their faces... Well, it was time to track some of those clues.

He returned to his new offices. He had received the E-mail Sphinx had promised, and decrypted it. It was a monster of a file, and it took the Cray some time to deGoedelize it, the encryption was that intensive. He watched it in stunned dismay. Also, the report from the Signatories Evaluation Board's ex-agent was on his desk, and he read it with growing alarm. What the fuck was going on here? He had a growing mass of evidence that there had been for years a concerted effort to usurp control of Washington DC and the functions of government, all through a sinister technique of drugging, poisoning, (and looking deeper, "accidents") and general harassment. He personally wondered about the way that certain persons had suddenly lost critical mental facilities, and so he ordered X-rays of the craniums of a random selection of the exhumed.

The X-rays revealed little. He thought, though, that the Amerinds might have been on to something, and so ordered NMR, PET and CAT scans.

The images came back to his terminal. He toggled a lot of other functions off-line, and engaged ever greater portions of his pet Cray into image enhancement modes. He was looking for foreign objects that X-rays wouldn't show (due to very similar densities), and that meant wood or bone.

Lots of positive images came back. The man who had suddenly been struck dumb had a splinter driven through the side of his skull, penetrating the sutures deeply to within the verbal cortex. The splinter had little barbs on the end. If it had been twirled on insertion (as he was suddenly sure it had been!) it would have neatly removed a half-inch wide swath of brain tissue, drilling out a man's ability to use verbal communication of any sort. A woman struck blind had what was evidently a chicken bone piercing her occipital areas, where visual interpretation centers were located. Another man was the victim of a sudden paralysis, and there was a splinter of bone or ivory neatly severing his spinal cord at the point immediately below where the autonomic nerves split off. Someone had deliberately imprisoned the man within his own body, speechless, and unable to communicate. The doctors of the time had found nothing amiss, at any rate, nothing they could do anything about. It had been diagnosed as a hereditary defect. As he looked further into the matter, he began to notice a pattern of certain doctors and nurses all being involved with some of the more-glaring misdiagnoses. He sent of a Veronica inquiry to state medical boards, trying to find out where those staffers now were; and hours later the Veronica inquiry came back with more slightly-suspicious data.

As to the victims, all of these people had been either personnel officers, or in competition for personnel officer positions within the Federal Government, particularly within the Federal Government's security or information systems, all within a specific timeframe. Something seemed to click within his memory, and he looked into local history files. Back in 1995, a high-ranking FBI official in charge of doing background checks on high-level appointees had been arrested under very odd circumstances revolving around some 100,000 rounds of stolen federal ammunition, a mysterious housefire, and neighborhood allegations of suspicious activity. He recalled the Aldrich Ames case, where one man had spied for years with nobody noticing, and also recalled how a family spy ring had been broken in the 80s solely because the agent who ordinarily answered the phones missed his first day of work in decades was not there to reject the call.

He paused to reflect that not only was the shit deep around these parts, but it had been so deep for so long that everyone seemed to be used to it.

He heard a step behind him, and turned his head to see Lydia, his secretary. No problem there, she was trusted. She was wearing the new (rather unattractive, he thought) fashion of sharp feathered earrings, heavy bracelet, and chain around the wrist, with a heavy flapping triangular weight on it. Who thinks these fashions up? he wondered. Ordinarily he'd have chatted with her, but he was totally absorbed... She came to stand behind him, and she looked over his shoulder.

"Whatcha got there?" she asked, fidgeting with her bracelet.

"Oh, just some medical images.'

"Them guys you all dug up?" she sounded vaguely bored.

"Yep. I'm looking for physical evidence. Hey, did you call Dr. Simms downtown?"

"Yes, I did. I called and spoke to his secretary about an hour ago."

"Damn, why hasn't he called me back? I've gotten into a whole new can of worms here."

"Wow, these are cool pictures, Mr. Holden!"

"Yah, I really need Dr. Simms to help me interpret them. There's some sort of foreign objects, it looks like. I can't be sure."

"Well, X-rays are notoriously lousy when it comes to showing up foreign objects near bones. It's probably a false image." She continued to hover behind him, one hand behind him, evidently resting on the back of his chair.

The back of his neck began to itch. What the hell could Lydia know about medical imaging systems? She could barely spell "litigation", and had never given any intimations of anything but totally mundane interests or intelligence. His neck began to itch more. He kept himself from stiffening, and said carefully, "It's not X-ray. It's MRI," and whipped his head to the side, away from her extended arm.

He felt a sudden stabbing pain in the muscles of his neck, and bounced out of his chair, ducking his head as he did so. It was well that he did. He felt a stabbing pain in his forehead, right where his eyes would have been had he risen to stare incredulously at her, and her knee rose up to smash him in the cheek as he turned his head away from the pain. He started to open his mouth to yell for assistance, thought better of it, and grunted explosively as a cloud of some fine powder settled over his face, and then he swung a harsh backfist at her.

She deflected it upwards with an elbow. She was reaching into her sleeve as she tried to close with him, and he fell back against the console as she pulled out a long wire-thin needle and jabbed for his heart. He was barely able to turn it away, and suddenly, his inhibitions against hitting a woman snapped within him, and his street reflexes took over.

He armlocked her, and slammed her around into the wall. His face was burning, stinging where her powder had stuck to his suddenly sweating skin. Damn, he thought, and broke her elbow. He felt dizzy, disoriented, and knew that he had perhaps only seconds of consciousness. What would happen to him after he fell was anybody's guess. He slammed her face- first into the wall, and drew back his arm to knock her out, staggered, and then reached around behind him for the handcuffs he was obligated to carry, even though he only drove a desk these days... and he handcuffed her broken arm to the leg of the metal console that carried perhaps a half-ton of computer equipment, a leg that was bolted to the floor. He dragged himself around behind the console, out of reach of any darts she might throw, and the room swam around him, and suddenly disappeared.

Ron watched the dismantling of Lace's facility with some apprehension. He had no personal fear, but he wondered where he was going to go when she went wherever it was that she was going. The job of packing and shipping was almost completed, and in the week and a half that he had been hanging around with her, watching her direct the activity around them, he had been slowly coming down off of whatever medications he'd been given. He did finally begin to have some free-floating anxiety, and when he told her, she looked worried for a bit, and finally, they called up a few doctors, and eventually found one who was willing to give him about a month's worth of Navane, a relatively popular (as such things went) prescription antipsychotic.

His life regained the same feeling of stability he'd once known, and he found himself discussing it with Lace, who was getting a bit frayed around the edges.

"It's like, well, I don't know exactly how to describe it, ummm... Like there's something that should be worrying me that isn't worrying me, like I should be afraid of something. I just don't really know what it should be that's worrying me."

"Oh, there are indeed things to worry about, Ron," Lace said, and moved closer to him. They were sitting around on the futon on which he slept. She hadn't been around much recently, and if she slept, he didn't know where. Anytime he had arisen, he had taken a shower in the tiny executive lavatory, washing himself with Ivory soap and expensive hair care products. Sometimes one of the towels had been damp, and moisture remained on the floor of the shower, and her slight musk hung in moist air, but his days here had been spent watching the TV, or wandering around the facility behind Lace, who sometimes treated him a bit like a puppy, occasionally shooing him out from underfoot.

"What I'm worried about is you, Lace," he told her, "and I am getting pretty damned worried. I don't mean to pry, but are you on speed or something? Do you ever sleep?"

She laughed, but it was a strained laugh. She couldn't really back that laugh up with a smile.

This was the first time she had really been able to tear herself away from her efforts, and she was obviously struggling to relax. "C'm'ere," he said.

She looked somehow very vulnerable at that moment, and he felt a strange upwelling of emotion, a surge of protectiveness, as he watched her huddled into herself as she sat on the edge of the bed. "I won't hurt you," he told her.

"I know you won't," she told him. She moved in a little closer, and somehow, he was himself reminded of a puppy, or of a kitten, unsure of how close it dares to be to the giant with the warm milk, yet hungry for warmth, for contact. In such situations, it is generally appropriate to pick the young animal up and to deposit it gently on one's lap and scratch it behind the ears. Ron couldn't remember having a pet, but there is a basic human instinct to comfort the animals with which Mankind lives, and as he watched this lovely young thing shiver next to him, that instinct moved him closer, to put a comforting arm around her, and her face was wet with tears for a moment, and then the dampness was soaking into his shoulder.

"Ron, Ron, dammit, the goddamned world is falling apart, and there's nothing I can really do! I've worked so hard for what I have, and I've got to try to salvage what I can of my little part of the world, and I think I have mostly done that, but it hurts like hell to watch civilization disintegrate. My God, look at the state of America! We're only lucky that the rest of the world is in worse economic shape than we are, and that nobody can afford aggression, or we'd be looking at a war soon. We've got the youngest nation and the oldest government in the world, except for maybe Britain, and our cohesiveness as a people is not enough, I don't think, for us as a nation to hold together if the government falls completely apart! And if the center cannot hold, then what rough beast will slouch its way across America? I never did believe the Revelation of Saint John, but this is the Millennium..." She broke off and cried openly, and all Ron could do was to hold her, and to try to keep her warm as she shivered in the blast of a chill wind that he himself could not feel.

Eventually, she slept, and he regarded her, as she burrowed into the blankets, and he pulled the covers around her, and started to get up to try to get some sleep himself. The chair behind the desk looked fairly inviting, and he'd slept enough on that futon that a night in the chair wouldn't bother him much. He started to rise, and suddenly her hand grasped his, and she whispered from deep within the blankets, "Please stay."

"OK, if you don't mind," he said lamely, as she sat up for a moment and kicked off her slacks, and she gave him the strangest look, and said, "I don't mind, I just invited you! Be sure that you want to, though," and he asked, "Do you mind if I get comfortable too?"

"Please," she said, and he took off his pants and dress shirt, and feeling foolish in his underwear, he crawled under the covers, and she still shivered. I need your warmth, her body said, as she snuggled up to him, and she warmed him as well. She gently laid an arm around his chest, and when their eyes met, her tears were dry. Somehow, she still reminded him of a kitten, and when she gave him a sweet little cat-kiss, saying, "Thank you for being here... and warm. Goodnight," and laid her head again on the pillow, he found himself gently scratching her behind her ears, and could almost hear her purr.

When he woke, she was wrapped around him, a leg across his leg, her ankle behind his knee. Her arm was beneath his, and curled up his back so that her hand rested upon his shoulder, and she murmured something in her torpor, and her thigh gently moved, silken and welcome, against his rather prodigious erection. She tossed her head in her sleep, and gently clutched him to her. There was no way that he was going to get back to sleep like this, and so he covered her sleeping face with tiny kisses, and she pulled his face into the hollow between her shoulder and neck, and moaned softly, and her smell filled his nostrils, and he felt his pulse slamming against the walls of his arteries. She continued to move against him, and pulled herself closer, so that the tip of his hard-on was drawn to the place where her thighs met her mound, and she almost woke as she rolled herself against him. The insistency of her motions left Ron with no doubts that Lace needed a man at this moment, and the subtle melody of her tiny gasp as his hand filled itself with her breast hit some ancient place deep within his mind. He kissed her lips, and they kissed back, and they somehow were sleepily undressing each other as if controlled by each other's passions.

Her hands never left him, and she clung not tightly, but with the subtle tenacity of a mountain willow, and he found himself straddling her as she kissed him, with a world of love in the taste on her lips. She worked her thighs gently, insistently, and the head of his penis was drawn towards the moist folds of her labia, and she lifted herself a bit so that he felt himself pulled into the entryway, and she gently clenched her thighs, not in any way rejectingly, but in a manner that assured him that she wanted him right where she had him. Her smell and taste filled his mind, and her lips were like velvet upon his, though her sharp teeth upon his lower lip sliced him painlessly. He didn't mind a bit as she gently worked him inside of her, and within his groin was an animal urgency to thrust, but he was at his full extension, buttocks clenched tightly, and she broke off her kiss.

Her tightly flexed but invitingly parted legs held him in a silken grip that he wanted never to escape, allowing him no further access, yet caressing him in an unmistakable invitation, and behind her eyes was a strange animal as old as Woman, hidden behind the drifting fog of shifting colors. Topaz, green, finest turquoise, and impervious emeralds, gems beyond price were in her gaze, and soft affection, and a personal power that looked from the soul of that ancient animal through the eyes of the young woman whose moist smell and taste, and gentle arms and powerful legs held him in a grip that nothing in the world could compel him to relinquish... that personal power looked deep into him, saw parts of him that he himself would possibly never know, and did not judge him. For a moment, he almost forgot where he was, almost forgot that between her arms and legs and gentle kiss, between those wonders and his own desire, he was held entirely captive by her embrace, and he was held captive by that power within her also. Now it was he who was a tiny kitten, held by a giant, a giant that could give food, and warmth, and love, and wanted only to hear him purr, and to stroke his fur... And the giant's eyes were moist, and loving, and gently fierce.

"You'll fall in love, Ron, you'll fall in love if you do this. You'll fall in love with me. Are you sure you want to do that?" Lace asked him, and then it seemed that Lace was all of the women that have ever lived and loved, all of them, and more... And again, that strange animal behind young Lace's eyes regarded him with a life and will of its own, and she said, "I'm not sure I can let you do that."

"I think it may be too late for me to make any such decision consciously," he gasped, for as he spoke, the stranger behind Lace's eyes smiled at him, and Lace's magnificent thighs churned a bit, and changed the angle of their velvet restraint, and drew him slightly further inside of her.

The animal smiled, a strangely tender yet predatory smile, and spoke with Lace's lips. "I might want you to fall in love with me. I might try to make you. I think I can, in fact, I am sure of it." With that, she eased him fully inside, and gripped him tightly, and did something, something that made him shiver with pleasure, and lust, and then her thighs rejected him slightly, and again, he was only slightly within her. The giant's eyes looked at him tenderly, and scratched the kitten behind the ears, and the kitten purred, and sought to rub its head along the stroking fingers...

"I'm sure of it, too!"

"But Ron, dear, you ought to ask yourself something..." and the animal was back, teasing, predatory, wise beyond time, powerful beyond words, and as he saw the measuring look that hawks reserve for rabbits, he shivered in the embrace of his goddess, and could no longer meet her gaze.

"What?" he murmured, eyes downcast to the magnificent body his body already loved.

"Dare you as a man love a woman who can make you love her? And can any woman who can make you love her love you in return?" The goddess was quite serious now, and all of the silent mockery was gone, and there was a strange concern for the hapless mortal, and within those incredible eyes lay an unanswered question, a question unasked, and a question answering a question. "Be careful how you risk your soul."

She released him, and he was able to move away from her embrace, much though he wanted to remain, but he could not turn his back to her, and so he lay beside her, to face her, and he mustered up all of the courage he possessed to meet her gaze.

The goddess was still there, as was the gentle giant with its bowl of warm milk and gentle hands for the tiny kitten,and there was a lovely young naked woman with strange wild smile full of sharp strong teeth that meant him no harm... madness also beckoned, with an equally sharp smile, but with eyes a-glitter with an evil glee, and nothing like love within them at all. He rejected madness.

"What are you, Lace? A witch?"

"Maybe. What's it to you?" She continued to smile, showing a lot of nice teeth. "I could have cast my spell on you, that's for sure. I didn't... much. Dare you love me?"

"I loved you before. Was it like... it almost was just now?"

"Nope. I was a kid then... I'm all grown up now." In her eyes was the question... are you grown up now? He could tell that she'd take whatever answer he gave her with a calm acceptance.

"I could love you easily, but you scare me."

"I thought I'd better get it out in the open. I have no wish to harm you." He searched her eyes, and all there was within them was Lace, and just perhaps, the hint of a ready tear.

"No, you don't, do you?"

The unanswered question hung between them for long moments, and for once in his life, Ron kept his mouth shut when speech would only have made a mess of things.

Ron put his hand out to her shoulder, and she covered it with her own, and something like an electric shock went through them both, and she said, "If you dare love me, I will dare love you."

"I think," he said, "that as long as it's my decision, I will dare to love, and dare to love you."

Loving her was easy, and making love was sweet fierce passion... from somewhere within him came forgotten skills, and she knew and used wild tricks of her own, and they found themselves caught up in something much greater than themselves. His joy was not diminished, but somehow enhanced when, as she cried out and writhed beneath him as he approached his own climax, he suddenly spied those grinning animal eyes of the ancient animal stranger enjoying his rapture, and when the quiet, quite compelling Voice of the goddess bade him "Come!", he did, in buckets.

It was the insistent ringing of the telephone that woke him.

Groggily, he dragged himself upright. God what a hangover, he thought and then he began to recall the events that had led to his close encounter with the cold floor of the computer room. He leaned over the desk, and picked up the phone.

"Holden," he said, wincing at the sound of his own voice.

"Tanner here. Dr. Simms is dead. Murdered."

"No shit," said Holden. He had, he decided, been rather foolish in exposing himself to Lydia, who might have been waiting for him to do something stupid, but Lydia was obviously dead, her blackened tongue protruding, half bitten through in the spasms of whatever poison had broken her back and popped her eyes right out of her head.

"Lemme guess, Tanner. Poisoned, right?"

"Good guess, Holden. How'd you know?"

"I just missed out on some of that action myself. Remember Lydia?"

"Yah, your secretary? Kinda dizzy blonde, bit of a dish?"

"Yah, but not dizzy. She's dead as shit over here, tried to kill me, almost got me. Haul ass over here, and try to round up a doctor while you're at it. I need somebody who can interpret medical imaging. I also need somebody who can do a little bit of wound cleansing. Damn! Tanner, we're onto something really big here."

"Shit. Are you all right?"

"I don't know, that's why I need a doctor."

"Yah, look, I thought that we were already onto something really big."

"Well, it just got bigger."

Across the country, phone calls were being made, not in itself an unusual occurrence, but these phone calls were between people who normally would never speak to each other. They decided that the stakes justified the risks, and called each other for the first time in years. Some had not heard from each other in years, some had never met.

"Hello..."

"Hello, John Smith? (pop)"

"Yes, !this is #'John ($)Smith..."

"This is your cousin, Regg'ie ($)Smith..."

Nightspeech clicked and stuttered and whistled across the wires, and bounced from satellite to satellite, and in the undernets of the IRC, decisions were posted for approval, and approval was given.

Flights were scheduled, and bags were packed, and men and women who never went anywhere left their homes. They often left the doors unlocked, as they lived deep within the countryside, in small towns and on rural estates great and small. It seemed that they were abandoning their possessions, and taking leave of their previous lives.

There was an interesting little convention in a small town in Minnesota. Everybody seemed to be named Smith or Williams or Jones. They all had a family look to them... they quietly discussed grain futures, and cattle diseases, and metal fabrications facilities. Overall, the staff of the hotel where the convention was held was greatly reminded of a class reunion. From the subject matter, and the depth of the conversations, it would not be a bad guess to assume that this was the reunion of people who hadn't seen each other since graduating thirty years previously, but that didn't fit well with the appearance of these people; none seemed to be much over thirty.

There were massive movements on the stock market. Interestingly enough, there was a pattern of extremely heavy trading, with very little market change. Wall Street remained near the 7750 mark, and nobody seemed to be able to tell where all of this trading was leading. Major investment groups tried to edge their ways into the forefront of whatever wave was breaking, but were baffled by a lack of direction coupled with massive withdrawals from their own common funds, leaving many of them quite crippled. It appeared as if a group of extremely wealthy private investors who had allowed laziness to move them into mutual funds investments had decided to again assume control over their money's destiny.

When a direction was finally discernible, and extremely discernable it was, panic struck.

Industrial metals, particularly industrial silver, went through the roof.

Vanadium, platinum, gold, all of these and all available stocks of most industrially useful metals were bought, not in the more usual mode used by market players, who usually merely took a certificate of ownership. These new market players, all new players, previously unseen, actually took possession of the metals, often paying ridiculously high prices, and suddenly, stockpiles of industrial metals dwindled. Industries began to scramble for their requisites of production, and along with those massive scrambles came the first stutterings of potential industrial shutdowns.

A series of lightning withdrawals from Savings and Loans prompted State Governors to freeze assets, but the damage was done. The banks had shut their doors, shut them for good, when suddenly, there was money, private money in gold, silver, and platinum, of all things, available to bail them out, at the rate of fifteen cents on the dollar, a better deal than they'd get anywhere else, and it was available now, and the S & L's went tits-up across the country. In a cascade of buy-outs and foreclosures, mortgages and deeds to entire counties were bought up.

The Balkanization of America was unofficially underway.

The stock market crashed in a really phenomenal way. The 1995 crash was a mere "inflationary adjustment" compared to the crash of 1999. The late heavy trading had been mere frontage for a lot of sharks feeding on each other in a massive frenzy, coattail-grabbers and waveriders jumping on bandwagons. All of the real money had quietly, rapidly converted itself into real estate, industrial metals in possession, and ready cash as gold and silver. The market had been trying desperately to adjust itself to a lot of previously quiescent hidden players universally asserting themselves in apparently senseless directions, but there is a limit to how much adjustment any homeostatic system can make under ceaseless prodding from the outside, and excessive bloodloss is generally fatal.

Wall Street was bled to death. It was intentional, well- orchestrated, and had been an established contingency plan for at least a decade.

The paper dollar was worthless. Only precious and rare-industrial metals had any establishable exchange value, and otherwise the nation returned to barter.

Bread was not to be had.

There were two currencies, ammunition and precious metals, as manufacturing facilities ended production due to lack of materials, and locked their doors against workers. The workers rioted and factories burned, with certain exceptions, those exceptions being the cases where consortiums of previously quiescent market players had purchased the factories outright with precious and essential metals, and had in possession reserves of the industrial metals required to continue operations. They paid the workers in metals, as well.

Various meta-states, which had been forming in the backwoods under the auspices of the Patriots and Militias Movements began to divorce themselves from all authority based in Washington, and with the government being essentially reduced to automated disbursement and information systems, or protective services themselves amounting to militias, these regional meta-states began to assert their new primacy. Local sheriffs suddenly found themselves regarded as the sole legitimate authority, and well-stocked survivalists found themselves suddenly respectable as county after rural county began to revert to aldermanic government.

Washington, the District of Columbia was quiet, very quiet. All of the buildings adjudged necessary archives and historical landmarks were finally considered mothballed, sealed and guarded, National Shrines in fact, guarded by intelligent armor which repelled all two-legged interlopers. All classes were over, and students, the last legitimate inhabitants of the District (besides the forces and authorities that were even now withdrawing from DC), were leaving town in droves, and in the line waiting for exodus from the District, Tillie encountered Jasmine.

It was common knowledge among the students (who had noticed that mere days before Finals a most of a certain set of students had stopped going to class, with the notable exception of that certain set's subset of medical and chemistry students... then had come the plague) that all of the young vampyrs in DC were out of control. Lots of the students had watched their long-time buddies turn from troubled loners into dangerous violent predators, and there was much wondering done as to the reasons behind this. There was massive conjecture as to the origins of the giardia plague, and there was also a great deal of curiosity about those students who were known to have been buddies with vampyrs. Tillie had fended off question after question about K'at and some of the other nightcrew with the universal response, get out of town.

Jasmine, who had dutifully reported her fateful encounter with Donovan and the bat-faction, had for personal reasons left all references to K'at out of her story. It hadn't sat well with the cops. They weren't quite ready to believe that she'd killed Fania by herself, but she had permitted herself a rare demonstration of anger, and had kicked the shit out of all of the questioning officers, who thereafter were willing to not only to give some credence to her fabrication, but were also willing to lock her up for half of forever. The captain who resolved this issue by telling the officers to henceforth not challenge anyone named Kim to an ass-kicking contest assumed the role of interrogator as the officers left to nurse their wounds. The captain seemed to be willing to pretend to believe her story, had taken her deposition, and dismissed her. "We'll be needing sociologists and historians a lot over times to come," he had told her with a smile. News of the Wall Street crash had finally reached town.

"I really think we'll be needing more cops," she said, and he agreed with her on that score. "Any force you want to join," he told her, and shook her hand, "tell them to call me for a recommendation. Good day, Ms. Kim, go on to the graduation ceremony."

Tillie wound up in the line for vehicle searches next to Jasmine, a not-unlikely event considering that they had been in the same graduating class, which had been pretty much escorted as a group from the University to their dorms, instructed to load their belongings under guard, and then convoyed to the staging zone. Tillie's ancient Chevy station wagon was already piled to the brim with four years worth of knickknacks and textbooks.

The line was not moving very quickly. It hadn't gone anywhere since almost noon, and it was getting on three. The soldiers guarding the staging area were searching some people, and some of those they searched were led away to a more private area for strip-searching. Occasionally there was gunfire. Jasmine had wandered over to Tillie, and engaged her in small-talk, which had led to deeper subjects, like, what are you going to do now that we've graduated, where are you going, where is the country going, what's going to happen to all of us?

All of them had full gas-tanks, a graduation gift from the University that had taken so much of their parent's (and various financial institutions', of course) money over the preceding years. The full gas-tanks were going to be an absolute requirement, as those full gas-tanks might be the last such that they would see for years to come. Jasmine was going to meet her family where they lived in Gaithersburg, and they would see what developed from there.

Tillie had less certain plans. Well, she knew what she was going to try to do, and that was to make train connections in Frederick, there to head west to ideally meet her family in Peoria.

Jasmine was baffled. She said nothing, as an idea entered her mind. Why was Tillie so loaded down with all of the bullshit she'd accumulated over four years of residence at college? She pondered the possible reasons, trying to not think of the obvious reason. The question on her lips remained unasked as well as unanswered, as the line began to move.

Tillie's station wagon eventually reached the border crossing, with the inevitable border defenders crouched menacingly to either side of the vehicular port, with another covering the entrance to the Friendship Heights Metrorail entrance. Razorwire stretched to the limits of vision, and the National Guard was much in evidence. A Guardsman patted Tillie down, and examined her backpack, running it through an X-ray machine installed on a wooden palette under a large heavy tarpaulin. Evidently there was nothing amiss. He gave it back to her and called an all-clear to the Guardsman who was checking ID's off of a hardcopy list. He smiled briefly at Tillie, and searched out her name, scratching it off of his list as a border defender approached her car. It craned its head about the car, spending some time examining the contents of the rear. The Guardsman watched the border defender for a while, and then the border defender asked Tillie to move away from the car. Tillie backed off, and the border defender returned to the rear of the car, and positioned itself so that it was not "looking" directly at anyone, and illuminated the interior of the car with its tactical radar. It completed its examination in a moment, and gave an "all clear" to the Guardsman, who told Tillie, "Good Luck. You'll need it out there."

"Looks like we all will," Tillie responded. She got in her car and drove, as per instructions, away from the District line, headed north on Wisconsin Avenue. There were men and armored vehicles at every intersection as far north as she could see.

Eventually, Jasmine got through the checkpoint, after being subjected to the same procedure. She was driving north when she saw Tillie's station-wagon loitering in Bethesda. She pulled it over.

Tillie was tossing four years worth of mementos and other assorted crap into a handy dumpster.

"Need a hand, Tillie?"

"Uh, yah, Jasmine. I just decided that I'll get better mileage if I toss all of this stuff out. Wanna give me a hand, then?"

"Sure," said Jasmine. She grabbed stuff, and began to heave. She wanted to get to the bottom of this pile, and judging by the increasingly strained look on Tillie's face, Tillie also wanted to unload as rapidly as possible.

Jasmine took a chance. "I hope you had it Faraday-shielded."

"Yah, I shorted out the battery to the storage compart..."

Tillie jumped out of the back of the station-wagon and drew herself up to her full height. Tillie was a big girl, standing about five-ten, and Jasmine was suddenly wary, as Tillie almost shrieked, "What do you know, Jasmine?"

Levelly, Jasmine said, "I know that my parents used to own a station-wagon just like this one, and this is one of the models that has a hideaway seat, that's a pretty large hidden space, big enough for me... I hope the sentinel's Tac-radar didn't cook her."

"I heard about the way you treated her after she saved your life the other night, dammit! What are you gonna do now, narc on us?"

"Actually, no. I got to thinking about the way I treated her, and y'know, it's weird," Jasmine said. As she spoke, she turned back to the rear of the car, and resumed pitching stuff out, ignoring the dumpster, merely flinging things out of the back. Jasmine continued:

"I still get cold chills, and those guys walk in my nightmares every night... and I'm still afraid of K'at. I just don't believe that I acted honorably in treating her that way, but I couldn't help myself, OK? She just scares me."

"Why, dammit? She's the same ol' K'at, unless she's Hungry!"

"So why aren't you afraid? Been feeding the K'at, have you? Been feeling tired, run down lately?"

Tillie was trying to say something, anything - without sputtering. K'at's voice, muffled by the intervening metal and once-precious knickknacks inarticulately reached them.

"Hey, she's alive!"

Jasmine and Tillie redoubled their efforts.

Go back to the Darkness Page.

Go to my Home Page.