"So after all this time," said Veruh w.a.n.g Ho, "I am simply to be referred to as 'that'?"

"It is all that you deserve and more," said the Imperior with greater force than ever. "You are a disgrace. A travesty, a--" "Hey!" Fury was building in me. I was becoming so angry with the Imperior that I was starting to reach a point where I didn't trust myself. Where I might actually a.s.sault him for his abuse. "Hey, that's enough! How dare you? How dare you? Whatever it is you believe she did to you, or you to her, Veruh deserves better treatment at your hands than this. She saved your life, and gave you your daughter. You may not think much of Mitsu simply because of her gender, but still, this woman," and I pointed at Veruh, "is the mother of your child. A woman that I love with all my heart, and who loves me as well! At least I can appreciate her for the wondrous creature she is! How can you not also--"

There was a chuckle then, from one of the men of the Forked Tong. A guffaw from another. A snicker from several of the Anais Ninjas.

"What?" I demanded. "What's so funny?"

The laughter grew, and grew. I looked at Mitsu in a quandary.

"What are they laughing at?"

Mitsu appeared chagrined. "I... I thought you knew."

"Knew?"

"You..." She lowered her voice... why, I don't know, since everyone could hear her anyway. "You said your time with the bathing maiden... it meant nothing to you. That you wanted something else. And all that time with me, you never... tried to touch me, or..."

"Because I thought of you as a friend! I didn't want to presume, to..."

And the laughter was getting louder still. Above it, I fairly shouted, "What does any of this have to do with your mother!" and I pointed at Veruh.

"You idiot," snapped the impatient Imperior. "That is not my daughter's mother. That is my daughter's uncle... my sick brother. Except I have no brother."

A faint buzzing started in my head, behind my eyes. Just as everyone else was laughing, so did I start to laugh, even as my mind began to shrink away in horror. Veruh was smiling at me sadly, shaking her head. Her head. Veruh's head her head she...

She...

She...

"Yes. No, I..." I laughed louder than any of them, for it was driven by mounting terror and nausea.

"Yes, this is... this is a joke! An amazing joke! Some... sort of indoctrination, or ritual of acceptance, I understand that now. You... you wacky Chinpanese! I'd never have thought that you--"

"When you disappeared," said the Imperior to Veruh, "I thought you had the good grace to go somewhere private and kill yourself, and not even leave us a body to clean up. I never dreamt, when I heard of this 'Veruh w.a.n.g Ho,' that it was you. Would that I never had."

She... She...

Veruh continued to shake her head and stepped back into the adjoining room, and she...

She. She was a woman. Of course she was a woman. She was my soul mate, the love of my life, the creature of my dreams, and besides, any number of times, Mitsu had referred to Veruh as "she" or "her,"

why, there was the time that...

... that...

And I ran our conversations through my head with the same type of copious memory that lets me write down my memoirs now, and desperately sought for Mitsu using the female p.r.o.noun in reference to Veruh w.a.n.g. There must have been one time... one...

"No," I said, and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to scream, and I charged after Veruh with the hysterical braying of the most villainous beings in all of Chinpan ringing in my ears.

I staggered into the next room, and Veruh turned to face me, and there was such sadness in her eyes.

Me, I was still giggling, which was all I could do to force down my temptation to scream, because I was afraid that if I did, I would never stop.

"It's a mistake. Tell him it's a mistake," I said, sounding crazed.

"We were not a mistake, Apropos," Veruh said softly. "We are as one. We saw each other truly from the moment we set eyes upon each other. What do the details matter?"

"This is... this is taking a joke too far."

"He never understood, Apropos," she said, slowly coming toward me. "Never. But you... you understood me more in our short time together than all the time when the Imperior and I were brothers..."

"We were lovers!"

"Yes, we were. In new and exciting ways for you. Isn't that enough? Isn't that--"

"But..." I shook my head desperately. The laughter was still resounding from outside. Me, I had stopped. "But it simply can't be, because I would never fall in love with another man! It couldn't happen!

That is the province of... of sick, demented men! Of perversion! Not of normal..."

"Has it never occurred to you, sweet Apropos, that 'normal' is not an absolute? That we are what we are? And we must accept ourselves for what we are? You accepted me. You accepted our bond."

"The... the only way a man could make me fall in love with him--and not that it's possible, you understand, but if it was--was to do something to sap my mind. Brain-warping perfumes, or trick lights or--"

"No," she said. "No, I did nothing like that. The fragrances you smelled, the dim lighting... simply atmosphere. I would never have done anything to impair your judgment, sweet Apropos. What we have is real. What we have transcends physical limitations. What we have--" "You're not a man!" I shrieked. She reached toward me, and I stumbled backward and fell. "You're not the Imperior's brother! You're Veruh--"

She threw open her robe, revealing her nude body.

"--w.a.n.g Ho," I finished weakly.

She... he... it... looked at me with infinite sadness, allowing the robes to drop, covering the indisputably male body she... he... it... possessed. "Apropos... you love me. I know you do, for I love you." He reached toward me. I backed up, crab-walking across the ground, shaking my head furiously.

"And what we had," he said, "we can still have, only greater than ever, for we know each other now fully.

No more hiding. No more uncertainty."

I couldn't think. Couldn't feel. I wanted to rip my body away and leave it behind and run off into oblivion.

"Apropos... there is so much good that can be between us."

"I don't care," I whispered.

"But don't you see? It--"

"I don't care," I said again, this time a bit louder. There was a warning vibration at my hip. At that moment, I didn't notice. All I was trying to do was get myself as far away from him as possible.

"Apropos, I love you!" cried out Veruh w.a.n.g Ho, baring his soul to me since he had already bared his body.

It was the words no one had truly spoken to me and meant since the death of my mother. It was the words that could have filled my life with meaning.

And I looked at the face of the man who said them, and screamed, "I don't care! I don't care! I DON'T CARE! I DON'T CARE I DON'T CARE I DON'T CARE! I DON'T CARE! I DON'T.

CARE! I DON'T CARE! I DON'T CARE! I DON'T C--".

And then the blinding white light exploded.

The world crashed and smoked around me, and burned into my inner eye was the image of a cloud going up and up and up, spreading outward in all directions like a giant toadstool. Something burned at the side of my head, and then nothingness enveloped me.

I welcomed it.

Chapter 4 The Trinity Test.

I floated peacefully, wondering if I was dead, hoping that I was, because if I was simply dreaming or sleeping, then inevitably I would have to awaken. And I had no desire to do so.

I saw an image floating toward me. It was my mother. She was shaking her head, and she looked disappointed in me, but also appeared to understand. "It's all right," she whispered to me. "Everything is all right."

"What happened? Am I..." I hesitated to ask. "Am I dead?"

"Oh, no, my love. No, you're not dead."

"Then... then what...?"

"You were warned, my love. Warned about intensity of emotion. Warned about what it could do, especially when it came to unleas.h.i.+ng of power."

"But... but I don't..." I was trying to understand. "The sword. I... didn't pull the sword. It shouldn't have..."

"Ah, that's the problem with destructive power," she a.s.sured me.

"You think you control it. You think, 'As long as I don't intend to use it, it won't be used.' But it does get used. In this case, because of the intensity of your denial. You wanted Veruh gone."

"No."

"You wanted all of them gone. All of them. Their laughter, their pity, their knowledge of what a complete and utter fool you'd been. It ripped a hole in your heart greater than any that had ever come before. Your antipathy for their very existence, your revulsion for your own, was so overwhelming that it activated the demon sword even when you weren't planning to do so. But because it was still within the sheath, the energy built and built and then just... just released. And now they're gone. Just like that."

"No," I whispered. I wanted to push her away, but I felt as if I had no body with which to do so.

"It's all right. Don't be concerned. You were right. Eventually they would have just killed each other anyway. Gone to war in a long, protracted power struggle. By unleas.h.i.+ng the power of the ultimate weapon, you avoided that war. You did them a favor."

"A favor?"

She smiled at me with all her mother love. "Yes, my dear. It was for the best. It truly was." She patted my face. Her hand felt cold. All around us was pure, stark, white nothingness. "There's only one problem."

"Just one?" "The power is unleashed now. More power than the demon sword even knew it was capable of. It loves that power now. It wants to release it again. And again."

"I'll... I'll destroy it!"

"You can't."

"Throw it into the sea!"

"If you wish," she said. "But the seabeds s.h.i.+ft, tides come in and out. Sooner or later, the weapon will surface. Who knows who will have it then? Anyone could acquire the power. Anyone at all."

"It could... it could obliterate the world..."

She considered that a moment. "Yes," she decided. "Yes. It could. That would be... interesting..."

"But... you said I'm not dead. It didn't destroy me?"

"No. You are its master. For the moment, in any event."

"So I'm... unscathed?"

"I didn't say that, my love," she said sadly. "Such power as you unleashed does not come without a price. A pound of flesh, as it were. The sword chose the price. And you will have to live with it."

I started to sob. I had never felt so miserable. She clucked disapprovingly. "Oh, now, Apropos..."

"I ruined it, didn't I, Mother," I said.

"Yes. But that's all right, my love. You ruin everything."

The last words had been said with a deep, fearsome growl, and it was no longer my mother standing there, but Aulhel, and he was laughing, loud and long, and others began to join in, also laughing at me, and my head was swimming in laughter and humiliation, and then I awoke.

I was lying right where I had been, except that sunlight was streaming down upon me. That should not have been possible. This was the shadow town, where the sun never shone.

The buildings were gone.

All gone.

There was a faint ringing in my ear. I reached up automatically to touch it, and came away with dried blood on my fingertips.

My right ear was gone.

Something sharp had violently cut it away.

The ringing... which nowadays is reduced to faint background noise, but I can still detect every now and then... continued. Among my possessions was a small tapestry I had been given. It showed me as older, grim-faced...

and missing an ear.

Was it all fate, then? Had all of this been completely out of my hands? Could it truly have been that, no matter what I had done, the same appalling fate awaited me and everyone who had been near me?

Could the G.o.ds truly be that cruel?

Sadly, I knew the answer to the last question instantly. And that was enough to answer all the ones previous to it.