Today, before he could put the kettle on to boil, before he had even risen from the bed where he sat facing the typewriter on the TV tray, there was a knock on the door. Not exactly a knock. More of a slithery sound. But the intention was a knock.

Filk rarely answered the door. When he answered the door, people wanted things from him-attention, time, money, sometimes even what little was left of his soul. Not wanting to give up any of those things-he simply didn't answer the door. If he didn't want to be interrupted, he had the right to choose not to be.

The sound repeated and there was something imperative about it.

Dillon K. Filk made his own sound now, one of annoyance and frustration. He pushed himself up off the bed, causing the ancient springs to squeal their own annoyance and relief. Then he padded barefoot to the door and opened it suspiciously.

He peered out of the narrow crack between the door and the jam.

He saw a small brown man. The man had brown eyes, brown skin, and wore a brown suit. He had brown hair and a brown hat. The ring on his brown finger had a brown birthstone.

"Dillon K. Filk?" he asked.

"Who wants to know?"

"My name. Is Brown. Small Brown."

Of course.

Small Brown held up an ID card in a leather folder. It had a brown picture on it. It looked very official. But the type was too small for him to read.

Filk blinked from the card to the man. They had found him again.

What Small Brown saw was a grizzled old hermit, forty-six years old, with a six-day growth of gray beard, an unkempt frazzle of thin graying hair, small beady unfocused eyes, a possibly blue sweatshirt, a sagging pair of shorts, and two skinny hairy legs ending in two ugly dirty feet tipped off by ten very frightening yellow and black toe-nails. He smelled of unwashed decay.

"Mr. Filk, may I come in?"

"No. I'm working."

"I'm here. On behalf. Of the. Tryllifandillorians." Brown p.r.o.nounced the words as if he were unfamiliar with the task of using a larynx and a tongue to cause air to vibrate in a precise pattern of sound. He was particularly uncomfortable with the last word of his speech.

Filk blinked again.

"The Tryllifandillorians?"

Filk took an involuntary step back. Startled.

Brown took that as a.s.sent and pushed the door open. He stepped in. The door shut itself behind him. Without Brown touching it. Filk's eyes narrowed. "You a lawyer?"

"Lawyer?" Brown considered the word. "I am. Representing. Yes." Then he added, "But not. Lawyer."

Filk scratched himself. First his belly, then his head. Then his neck. He itched a lot. Especially when he was awake. "Okay. Fine. What do you want?"

"It is not. What I want. It is. What. Tryllifilli- excuse me. Tryllifandillor. Wants."

"What?"

"You. Stop. Writing. About. Trylli. Fandillor. Ians."

Filk frowned. "Can't," he said, unconsciously imitating Brown's staccato hesitation.

"Existence. Is unstabilized. If Tryllifand. Illor. Exists. It stops."

It took Filk a long moment to decode that sentence. He stood unmoving. To an external observer, he would have seemed catatonic. When Filk had to consider things, he also had to consider all of the sidetracks and tangents and a.s.sociated spin-offs attached to them, the curse of being a sci-fi writer. It usually took a while.

In this case, Filk had to remember what he had written about Tryllifandillor yesterday. Yesterday? Yes. Tryllifandillor exists only in the realm of non-existence. By writing about it, he was threatening to move it into the realm of existence, in which case it would cease to exist in the realm of non-existence. It would stop being non-being. As soon as it became possible in the universe of existence, it would stop existing in the universe of non-existence. It would be the end of their existence as non-existent beings. The Law of Conservation of Sentience. Good. He tried to repress a smile. That was certainly good enough for another three hundred words. He could finish his pages today.

The room was empty.

Filk put on the kettle to boil. Brown had not been his usual hallucination, but he had been a very useful one. He wondered if this had been a side-effect of the small brown pills in the small brown bottle in the drawer of his nightstand. Maybe. It might be useful to explore the pharmaceutical aspects of this situation in some depth.

A possible hi-ho!

But first, he had another page and a half to complete. He scratched his cheek, considering. The kettle began to whistle. Filk dropped a soggy peppermint teabag into a stained mug with a chip on its handle. He had used this teabag for two-no, three-days already. That meant it still had a few more days of usefulness. He poured boiling water into the mug. He imagined-or maybe he hallucinated-that he could hear the teabag screaming. Its screaming was a lot less noticeable now. The first day, it had not stopped shrieking for several minutes.

Filk put the mug of peppermint-flavored hot water on the counter. A sentence had popped into that place that most people would have identified as consciousness, but which Filk perceived only as a travel hub for delusional incidents in transit from one realm to another.

He sat down on the bed, his tea forgotten. He began to methodically type. This time, his two index fingers moved from key to key like beakless chickens pecking at a science-fair exhibit. If they pecked long enough and hard enough, Thorbald Helmholtz would send them a check.

Of course. So it goes. See?

ON THE THIRD day, Filk rose from that non-fatal state of death that pa.s.sed for sleep in his metabolism. Without noticing the transition from bed to bathroom, he stood in the tepid shower and began to wash himself with a fading sliver of soap, which probably wasn't quite as old as he was. He thought about shampoo, remembered again that he didn't have any, and washed his hair with the last of the soap instead. Maybe that would stop the itching for a while.

The teabag moaned when he poured the hot water onto it. It was too weak to scream.

At last, having tended to all of the needs of his body that he could identify and localize, Filk returned to the bed, the TV table, and the battered portable typewriter. He rolled in a fresh piece of paper. He hesitated. He picked up the top page from the stack to his left. It was face down. He turned it over. He looked at the page number. Page 8. He replaced it on the stack, face down.

He typed Page 9.

And stopped.

Now that he had invented the Tryllifandillorians-and made them real enough to scream even louder than a peppermint teabag-it was time to invent the hero of the story.

In the past, Filk had invented protagonists the same way he invented planets. He paced around the room, putting together syllables until he found a combination that he could p.r.o.nounce in human words.

Today, he had a different idea.

Hi-ho!

It was something that Belvedere Atheling had said one time at a science fiction convention, and Filk had always wanted to try it. Atheling had been a well-respected English author who, upon succ.u.mbing to the frailties of existence within a human body, had begun a series of books based on a popular television series. His readership numbers had swelled enormously. Instead of selling 5,500 copies of a book, his Hollywood sharecropping moved 550,000 copies off the shelves. And even though he was splitting the royalties with a gigantic faceless monolith on the left coast of the continent, he was now earning almost twice as much as before.

But Filk was thinking about the Atheling that had existed before he became the Atheling that was. That Atheling had said something that had stuck in Filk's mind like a fish bone caught in his throat. "Who does it hurt? That's who your story is about."

On that same panel, another author, Robert Goldenboy, had said it less succinctly. "What does your hero want, why does he want it, and what's keeping him from having it?" Filk had never been able to answer this question. Indeed, he had never really considered it at length. The one time Filk had thought about it at all, his answer was simply, "He wants to get to the end of the story so I can get paid."

Also on that same panel had been Harlow Halfweight, the eighty-seven year-old enfant terrible of speculative fiction. He had seized the microphone and ferociously declared, "What do you think writers do? We're specialists in revenge! We lie awake all night thinking of nasty things to do to other people! Writers are the Research and Development division for moral malignancy in the human species! What you do is put your hero in a tree and throw rocks at him! Rabid coyote t.u.r.ds! Flaming asteroids! Whatever! The worst that you can imagine! That's what your f.u.c.king story is about!"

In Filk's mind-in that perambulated state that pa.s.sed for consciousness-Atheling's original question had now been trans.m.u.ted. "Who does it hurt?" had become "Who do you want to hurt the most?" And this was the kind of question that Filk enjoyed thinking about. Very much.

Hi-ho.

There were a lot of people Filk wanted to hurt.

He hated the FBI, for starters. And the police. And all of the other government agencies he'd had dealings with. In fact, he hated anyone who behaved as an agent of authority, inst.i.tutional, or otherwise. Two ex-wives. Lawyers, of course. Several junior high-school bullies. Two college professors. Three editors, especially the one at Barrister Books. Fans. Thorbald Helmholtz. Movie studios. And the two guys who wrote that song-the song in the Horrible Little Children Ride at Disneyland.

But there was one cla.s.s of person he hated more than all the others.

So today, there was no question about it. Filk knew who his protagonist would be.

A science fiction writer.

Hi-ho!

That's who he wanted to hurt the most. Very much.

Of course.

See?

Best of all, there were so many wonderful targets of opportunity. Kurt Kazlov, who styled himself as a lecherous old scientist; Toffler Cadbury, notorious for inflicting his audiences with interminable poems about giant l.u.s.trous whales wailing mournfully in forgotten fabled seas; Zormella LeFrayne, whose strained literary convictions had multis.e.xed wizards dueling to the death (two out of three falls) for control of the Sevagram; Archibald Manticore, the lyrical guru of love, who with his wife du jour slept with everybody, married or not; Bug McWhorter, who had never recovered from the Sixties and fancied himself the literary reincarnation of Donovan Leitch; Burt Franklin, who had stumbled into success by recasting the ageless enmities of nomadic tribes as an epic family feud on an ancient desert world; Gathermon Grift, who had raised the art of self-promotion to new depths; Ralph A. McDonell, whose didactic tracts on personal responsibility had left generations of readers arguing with each other about what kind of a fascist he really was; Arnold Zink, who wrote salacious parodies of other authors; Willa Strabismus, who never used a sentence where several paragraphs would do; Frelff Rondimon, who invented Scatology, a whole religion based on the idea that everyone and everything were just so much s.h.i.t, and had made himself despicably rich in the process. And the two worst were Kim Kinser, who won a ton of awards transferring Africa to some alien planet solely so he could deduct his safaris on his tax returns, and whatsisname, that sissy little creep who sold that stupid script to Star Truck while still in college, stealing the opportunity from a real science fiction writer. All of them were on the short-list.

Plus several hundred others. Filk had a very long short-list.

He paced for awhile, ate some noodles from a Styrofoam cup, paced some more, and realized that what he hated the most was pretension.

Science fiction was a gutter literature, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child of Thirties-era pulp magazines and Sat.u.r.day matinee serials. The postwar era had infected more than a few authors with delusions of relevance. They started showing off for each other. It evolved inevitably to a community of cancerous self-indulgence and an annual cycle of tawdry ceremonies where people in blue jeans handed each other awards. As opposed to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where people in tuxedos handed each other awards. And every time, the winners would stand up and talk about the higher aspirations of writing-to seek out new worlds and all that s.h.i.t and what does it mean to be a human being?

No, decided Filk.

The purpose of science fiction is not out there. It's down here. In the gut. It's about naming the nameless horrors. All that other c.r.a.p was just wallpaper. This thing we really do at the typewriter, at the keyboard, or even with pad and pencil-it's about giving voice to all that malignant malevolent festering stuff that lurks in the underneath and mutters, like the undigested detritus of last night's falafel, making its presence known with uncomfortable rumblings and occasional bad smells. Forget about the top of tomorrow. This is about the bottom of today and the nightmares that creep out when you stop pasting illusions all over everything like bunny-rabbit wallpaper in a slaughterhouse.

Under all those self-indulgent euphemisms and sick civility were the flashing teeth and claws of b.l.o.o.d.y truth, violent, unforgiving, heart-pounding, adrenaline-flushed, enraged, muscle-tautening, sc.r.a.ped and scarred, the unspeakable need to battle and rage and conquer and mate and fill oneself with raw organic sensation, all those turbulent storms that we politely call emotion-all the c.u.mulative capacity for violence of a million years of DNA scrabbling to a.s.semble itself into ever-more aggressive combinations, each one more cunning than the last, so it can repeat the process over and over again, each time in a more ferocious form.

That's all it was, all it ever would be, and everything else was pretension. And the best that any human being could ever hope to achieve wasn't escape, but merely respite from the relentless struggle. That's what was under all that c.r.a.p all those people kept shilling. Vision, my fat flabby white a.s.s, Filk thought. It's all about the next big paycheck. That's what we've trans.m.u.ted the killing field into-a banquet. Instead of gutting one's enemies with stainless steel, you do it with words, leaving them smiling and applauding while you walk up to the podium to grab the Lucite, and then you return to the arena to do it all again in time for next year's phony potlatch.

Of course.

Hi-ho!

So it goes.

See?

And that's how you make cynicism palatable. You put it in a silver s.p.a.ceship and hurl it out toward the stars at FTL velocities. It's another way to run away.

Filk paused and considered.

The Runaway Rocket. There's a possible story. Filk scratched the t.i.tle onto a pink Post-It note and stuck it to the wall, where it would sit unnoticed for months between a hundred or more other pink Post-It notes, until one day the adhesive would wear out, the note would fall to the floor, and Filk would pick it up, read it, and frown, trying to remember what he had intended when he wrote it. Then he'd either abandon the effort of memory and discard the note or he'd invent some new meaning for himself.

But today, for some unknown reason, when his cycle of thought finally came down from the last hillock of distraction, he stumbled his way back to his typewriter, sat down, and began pecking.

Once upon a time, when the world was young enough to still be wetting its bed, there was a man named- d.a.m.n.

Once, Filk had attended a convention. They'd put him on a panel. Someone in the audience had asked him what he thought the hardest part of writing was. He'd said, "Thinking up names for things."

Everyone in the room had laughed. They'd a.s.sumed he'd been making a joke. Filk had frowned at that.

Things weren't simply known by their names- they were their names. And whatever the name meant, that's what the thing was. Words existed in their own fantasy realm and the real things were servants to the words that represented them. A thing's name defined it. That was the magic of language.

So, yes. Naming things was the hardest part. Because naming them made them real. Naming things gave them existence.

And that's why there are no more Tryllifandillorians. As soon as they were named, they could no longer be.

Filk had to consider this thought at length. He finished his tea and put the chipped mug down. He picked up the kettle and refilled it. The teabag rolled over and died without a sound.

Filk walked over to the grimy window that opened out onto the alley and stared at an old wooden fence that was sorely in need of paint. He had just wiped out an entire sentient species. He tried to a.n.a.lyze how he felt about it.

Not bad. No, not bad at all.

There was a lot you could do with that kind of power.

Of course.

ONCE UPON A time, when the world was young enough to still be wetting its bed, there was a man named Darryl K. Fink.

Fink wrote stories.

Fink was a sci-fi writer.

Unlike other sci-fi writers, Fink didn't mind being a sci-fi writer.

But most of the others did mind. In fact, most of the others didn't even like the words "sci-fi," so calling them sci-fi writers was like increasing the water temperature in the turtles' tank by fifteen degrees; it made them aggressive and hyperactive, and sometimes even caused them to write rather than merely talk about writing.

More often, though, they simply attacked each other.

Or slept with each other's wives and husbands and significant others. Or even their insignificant others. It made perfect sense-s.e.x is a lot easier than writing. You only have to please one person at a time. Yourself. Or two, if you're feeling exceptionally generous.

Most sci-fi writers thought they were sci-fi writers because they were visionaries. The truth is most of them were sci-fi writers because they were suffering from a contra-terminal disease and the sci-fi writing was a symptom. The disease had no Earth name, because no Earth doctor had discovered it yet, but it manifested itself as a kind of aggravated morphic hypertrophy. That was the primary symptom. The disease itself was a ninth-dimensional inflammation of a pinhead-sized organ on the posterior part of the hypothalamus, which inflicted the victim with a vague sense of the scale of time and s.p.a.ce, and a corresponding degree of paranoia. In human beings, this usually created a deep-rooted (and generally unfounded) sense of self-importance.

However, at this particular confluence of time and s.p.a.ce, the sci-fi writers were justified in being both paranoid and self-important.

The disappearance of the Tryllifandillorians from the Sevagram had created a cosmic imbalance in the morphic fields of several dimensions of fortean s.p.a.ce.

There was no Law of Conservation of Sentience. There was, however, a group of monitors who understood that too much sentience in the dodecasphere could produce disastrous ripples of psychic torment. The sudden startling disappearance of the Tryllifandillorians was evidence of that.

In an attempt to repair the damage and restore the cosmonic balance, the small brown monitors had located the most discordant nexus of the strongest morphic broadcasters. Sci-fi writers.

The monitors were not motivated by any kind of healing impulse. The survival of the dodecasphere and the remaining sentient species in it, including themselves, depended on rebalancing the still-ringing morphic fields.