'You do things faster than the speed of light?'

'Sure. That's just one of the constraints I put on the experiment.' It scratched its chin. 'Think I'll leave it. Otherwise you'd be all over the place.'

'The Moon and Mars? Heaven and Kysos?'

It nodded. 'Mostly cold and hungry. Hot and hungry on Heaven. But they'll all probably find some food before they're reduced to eating one another.'

It looked at Marygay and me. 'You two are special, since nobody else remembers as far back as you do. It amused me to construct your situation.

'But to me, time is like a table, or a floor. I can walk back to the Big Bang, or forward to the heat death of the universe. Life and death are reversible conditions. Trivial ones, to me. As you have seen here.'

I shouldn't have said it, but I did. 'So now it amuses you to let us live?'

'That's one way to put it. Or you could say I'm leaving the experiment to cook on its own. I'll walk forward a million years and see what happens.'

'But you already know the future,' Marygay said.

The thing inside Max rolled his eyes. 'It isn't a line. It's a table. There are all kinds of futures. Else why bother to experiment?'

Sara spoke up. 'Don't leave!' He looked at her with an impatient expression. 'We see things like a line, a line of cause and effect. But you see millions of lines on your table.'

'An infinity of lines.'

'Okay. Is there anything else in the universe besides your table?' He smiled. 'Are there other tables? Is there a room?'

'There are other tables. If they're in a room, I've never seen the walls.'

Then it spoke in exact unison with Sara: 'So is there someone else in charge?' By herself: 'In charge of all of you and your tables?'

'Sara,' it said, 'in some of those many lines, you choose to be alive a million years from now, when I return. You may ask me then. Or you may not need to.'

'But if there isn't anyone else; if you're God'

'What?' Max said. He rubbed the white cloth between his fingers. 'What the hell is going on here?' He looked over at the fighting suit. 'I felt this horrible pain, all over.'

'Me, too,' Cat said. She was sitting cross-legged on the spot where she had died, one hand in her lap and the other over her breasts. 'And then I was suddenly here, back again. But you got clothes.' She looked at us with raised eyebrows. 'What the hell is going on?'

'God knows,' I said.

Thirty-two.

I worried for a few seconds about what to do with ten billion people and Taurans stranded naked in the middle of the desert. But the nameless had waved its wand one last time.

The air around us shimmered, and we were suddenly surrounded by a thick crowd of men, women, and children, all naked, many screaming.

A small cluster of people with clothes on does stand out in that situation. People began to approach us tentatively, and Marygay and I both braced for leadership.

Of course it didn't happen. An older Man walked straight up to me and started asking loud, pointed questions.

But I couldn't understand a word of it. I spoke a dead language that, on this planet, I shared with only a handful of scholars and immigration people.

The three Omni stepped up, tall enough to draw attention, arms up and shouting something in unison. The priest touched my shoulder. 'We'll see what we can do here. You help your own people.'

Marygay was standing with a protective arm around Cat. I took off my shirt and gave it to her; it was just big enough to cover the essentials.

In fact, it looked kind of sexy. A popular woman once told me that the way to attract attention at a party was to wear a long dress when you knew the others would be in jeans or shorts, and vice versa. So if you're at a party where everyone is naked, any old thing will do.

We finally herded everyone together in Molly Malone's. The cafeteria was jammed with hungry people, so we gathered in the 'Social History of Prostitution' room, or however it translates. The exhibits were unambiguous.

Seven of us had been killed and reconstructed. We tried to explain to them what had happened. As if we could actually understand.

God killed a bunch of you, to get our attention. Then He announced He was leaving, and revived you and ten billion others on His way out.

I kept waiting to wake up. Like the old guy in A Christmas Carol, I was thinking this had to be something I ate.

As it went on and on, of course, that possibility faded. Maybe everything before had been a dream.

The sheriff and Antres 906 got in touch with their Trees and let everybody know what apparently had happened. The Omni amiably revealed their existence and helped pull things together. There was a little more involved than just finding clothes for everybody.

Finding a 'place' for everybody was going to take a while: one thing human, Man, and Tauran cultures had in common was the assumption of the immutability of physical law. We may not understand everything, but everything does follow rules, which are eventually knowable.

That was gone now. We had no idea what parts of physics had been a whim of the nameless. It had laid claim to the constancy and limitation of the speed of light, which meant that most of post-Newtonian physics was part of the joke.

It had said it was going to leave that unaffected, to keep us in our cage. Were there other laws, assumptions, constants that did not please it? All of science was in question now, and had to be checked.

Religion was less in question, interestingly enough. Just change a few terms, and ignore uncertainty as to the existence of God. God's intent had never been that clear, anyhow. The nameless had left the faithful incontrovertible proof of its existence, and enough new data for millenniums of fruitful theological debate.

My own religion, if you can call it that, had changed in its fundamental premise, but not its basic assertion: I'd always told religious friends that there may or may not be a God, but if there is one, I wouldn't want to have him over for dinner. I'll stand by that last part.

Thirty-three.

After a couple of weeks, there was little we could do or learn on Earth, and we were anxious to get back. The Omni who had met us at our arrival wanted to go along, and I was glad to include it. A few magic tricks would make our fantastic story more acceptable.

Nobody died on the jump, so five months later we came out of the SA coffins and stared down at Middle Finger, blinding white with snow and cloud. We should have found a few years of stuff to do on Earth; come back in thaw or spring.

There was no one on duty at the spaceport, but we were able to get through to the Office for Interplanetary Communications, and they had a flight controller sent out. It took us a couple of hours to transfer to the shuttle, anyhow.

The landing was a big improvement over our last one: reassuring lines of smoke from chimneys in outlying towns; a snarl of winter traffic in Centrus.

A woman who identified herself as mayor came out in the transfer vehicle, along with her Man liaison and Bill, who got the most attention from Marygay and Sara and me. He was growing a beard, but otherwise hadn't changed much.

Except perhaps in his attitude toward me. He wept when we embraced, as I did, and for a minute couldn't do anything but shake his head. Then in heavily accented English he said, 'I thought I'd lost you forever, you stubborn old bastard.'

'Sure, me stubborn,' I said. 'Good to have you back. Even though you're city folk now.'

'Actually, we're back in Paxton' he blushed 'my wife Auralyn and I. We went back to set the place up. Plenty of fish. Figured you'd come back soon, if you were coming back, so I came into Centrus last week to wait.

'Charlie's with me in town. Diana's stuck in Paxton, doctoring. What the hell happened?'

I groped for words. 'It's kind of complicated.' Marygay was trying not to laugh. 'You'll be glad to know I found God.'

'What? On Earth?'

'But he just said hello-goodbye and left. It's a long story.' I looked out at the snow, plowed higher than the vehicle's windows. 'Plenty of time to talk, before things get busy in the thaw.'

'Eight cords of wood,' he said. 'Ten more on the way.'

'Good.' I tried to summon up the warm memory of sitting around the fireplace, but reality intruded. Slipping around on the ice, pulling in fish that froze in the air. Plumbing jammed by frozen pipes. And shovel, shovel, shovel snow.

Thirty-four.

We resumed 'everyday' life in the sense of fishing and fighting the winter, though we were suddenly a household of five adults. Sara still had a term of school left before she could start university, but she got permission to wait a few months rather than start at midterm and play catch-up.

Life in Paxton had resumed pretty much unchanged, once people found their way back from Centrus. We lived with constant power outages during the winter in the best of times, so it wasn't hard to cope with a semi-permanent one.

The town had been almost completely repopulated in a few weeks. Centrus had put a high priority on getting rid of anybody who could leave, since the city's resources were strained to the limit, providing essentials for the people who normally lived there.

The capital was settling down after five months of chaos. Eight winters' exposure had left the city a shambles, but it was obvious that most repairs would have to wait till thaw and spring. Our group of involuntary pioneers had helped the city organize itself on a temporary bare-survival footing. The lack of a central power system would have been the death of all of the city dwellers, if anybody had been simple-minded enough just to go home. Instead, people packed together in large public shelters, to conserve heat and simplify the distribution of food and water.

I'm sure it was all very chummy, but I was just as happy to be out in the provinces, with our cords of wood and boxes of candles. The university was open in the daytime, though most normal instruction was postponed, waiting for the power grid to give us back our computers and viewscreens, and most of all our library. We did have a couple of thousand printed books, but they were a disorganized collection of this and that.

One of them, fortunately, was a thick text about theoretical mechanics, so I could start on what was going to be my life's work. I'd discussed it with some Man physicists on Earth: all of us had to go back to Square One and find out how much of physics was still intact. If the whole thing was just a set of constraints that the nameless had set up, and changed at whim, then it behooved us to find out what the current state of whims was! And it seemed like a good idea to do the experiments on other planets, as well as Earth, to see whether the laws were uniform.

Bill joined me in the laboratories that winter, acting as my assistant while we reproduced the basic experiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physics. Weights and springs. We did have the advantage of accurate atomic clocks, or so we thought. Within a year we'd find out, from Earth, that the nameless had left us a truly Sisyphean job: the speed of light was still finite, but it had changed by about 5 percent. That screwed up everything, down around the fourth decimal place. Little things like the charge on the electron, Planck's constant. While he was at it, he should have made pi equal to three.

But things were all right with us, waiting out the cold in our warm lab, rolling balls down inclines, measuring pendulums, stretching springs, then going home to the women. Bill had met Auralyn when they'd both volunteered to become Man, and they fell in love before any damage had been done, and came back here. She was going to have a baby in the spring.

Meanwhile, we chip ice, shovel snow, thaw pipes, scrape windows. Winter lasts forever on this god-forsaken world.

Forever Peace

Caveat lector: This book is not a continuation of my 1975 novel The Forever War. From the author's point of view it is a kind of sequel, though, examining some of that novel's problems from an angle that didn't exist twenty years ago.

It was not quite completely dark, thin blue moonlight threading down through the canopy of leaves. And it was never completely quiet.

A thick twig popped, the noise muffled under a heavy mass. A male howler monkey came out of his drowse and looked down. Something moved down there, black on black. He filled his lungs to challenge it.

There was a sound like a piece of newspaper being torn. The monkey's midsection disappeared in a dark spray of blood and shredded organs. The body fell heavily through the branches in two halves.

Would you lay off the goddamn monkeys? Shut up! This place is an ecological preserve. My watch, shut up. Target practice.

Black on black it paused, then slipped through the jungle like a heavy silent reptile. A man could be standing two yards away and not see it. In infrared it wasn't there. Radar would slither off its skin.

It smelled human flesh and stopped. The prey maybe thirty meters upwind, a male, rank with old sweat, garlic on his breath. Smell of gun oil and smokeless powder residue. It tested the direction of the wind and backtracked, circled around. The man would be watching the path. So come in from the woods.

It grabbed the man's neck from behind and pulled his head off like an old blossom. The body shuddered and gurgled and crapped. It eased the body down to the ground and set the head between its legs.

Nice touch. Thanks.

It picked up the man's rifle and bent the barrel into a right angle. It lay the weapon down quietly and stood silent for several minutes.

Then three other shadows came from the woods, and they all converged on a small wooden hut. The walls were beaten-down aluminum cans nailed to planks; the roof was cheap glued plastic.

It pulled the door off and an irrelevant alarm sounded as it switched on a headlight brighter than the sun. Six people on cots, recoiling.

'Do not resist,' it boomed in Spanish. 'You are prisoners of war and will be treated according to the terms of the Geneva Convention.'

'Mierda.' A man scooped up a shaped charge and threw it at the light. The tearing-paper sound was softer than the sound of the man's body bursting. A split second later, it swatted the bomb like an insect and the explosion blew down the front wall of the building and flattened all the occupants with concussion.