The monitors made themselves known to selected sci-fi writers and offered them the opportunity to emigrate to far Tryllifandillor, where they would be trans.m.u.ted into Jellyfish, and-now liberated from the mundane concerns of existence-would be free to create monumental works of Art (note the capital A.) Their fantastic creations would be inscribed directly into the marble columns of Eternity itself. The sci-fi writers enthusiastically agreed, and they all strode eagerly up the gangway into the waiting ship with a sense of renewed mission. A few of them remembered to turn around and wave to their proud families, but most were looking forward to their luminous futures.

FILK PULLED THE fifth page out of the typewriter, laid it carefully on the growing stack, and slid a sixth page into the machine. He was on a roll.

ACTUALLY, THE SCI-FI writers hadn't emigrated at all. And certainly not enthusiastically. They had been kidnapped, s.n.a.t.c.hed out of the various beds they had fallen into (rarely their own, especially if they were at a convention). But the monitors wanted the sci-fi writers to think that they had emigrated willingly and eagerly, so they put the appropriate memories into their minds. They were very good at that. They had had a lot of practice with the Tryllifandillorians, convincing them that something as silly as frelching was useful and important.

But the monitors had made a serious mistake. They did not realize that they were dealing with Darryl K. Fink.

Fink had a lot of experience with alternate existence. He expected time and s.p.a.ce and reality to quiver like a mountain of nervous Jell-O. He only broke out in the cold sweat of panic when things solidified.

That's when he did his best work-when he was floundering his way through a panic attack.

FILK STOPPED TO think. He sipped at his lukewarm coffee and studied the screen of his laptop computer. The words on the screen had taken on a life of their own. Don't nag me about typewriters and paper; consistency is the hobgoblin of... well, of something useless or unpleasant, I can't quite remember what. Filk understood where the story needed to go next. He just hadn't decided which of the many possibilities he wanted to explore. He glanced at his watch. He still had plenty of time today.

THE CREATURE THAT had once been known as Small Brown, because it was the smallest and the brownest of the members of its nexus, was worried. "I wonder," it transmitted, "if perhaps we might have misjudged these things."

The other monitors considered the thought. Large Mauve asked Small Brown to expand its thought. Small Brown replied, "These creatures are experts at projecting their own views of reality onto the morphic fields, so much so that the strongest of them can convince the weakest of things that aren't so. And we have gathered together some of the strongest of the strong (relatively speaking). In our efforts to repair an imbalance, we may be risking a much more serious counter-imbalance."

d.a.m.nED GOOD OBSERVATION, thought Filk, who didn't begin to understand it or care about it, but was sure his readers would.

FINK WAS THE largest of the Jellyfish. He'd a.s.sembled himself out of the tattered veils of the vanished ancients. The larger he grew, the more self-importance he a.s.sumed. He spread his nets wide, creating ripples of turbulence across a thousand kilometers of upper atmosphere.

G.o.d, THAT'S GOOD. That clueless little Star Truck writer would kill to write something this poetic.

LARGE MAUVE CONSIDERED the waves of discordance emanating from the place that had once been called Tryllifandillor. "These creatures are too full of their own selves. They are hard to control."

Purple Rippling said, "Apparently, they cannot control their own thoughts-a fact that had been known to editors and readers for decades-therefore neither can we control them."

Vaguely Inconsistent, one of the oldest and wisest monitors, suggested: "If they start to think about us, we could be affected."

"These are science fiction writers. Everyone knows they don't think," replied Cute Puce.

"Ah, but there's one who does," transmitted Small Brown. "In fact, he just typed this sentence."

FINK PULLED HIS hands away from the laptop, shuddering with a sudden chill. Reluctantly, as if he was afraid that the machine would bite him again, he reached over and pressed the Control key and the S key at the same time. There, the file was saved. Whatever it was.

HAVE A CARE, Filk. You're forgetting which part of this is the fictional narrative. Just show what's happening to the writers/Jellyfish and the monitors. Don't show us the thought processes that go into it-and especially not in italics.

I'LL SHOW WHATEVER I want to show, dammit.

For the first time in his life, Dillon K. Filk spoke back to the voices. Angrily.

I'm in charge of this story! You'll do what I say. So don't bug me.

There are no bugs in this story. Except for Bug McWhorter, and he was mentioned just once in pa.s.sing and doesn't really count.

So don't ha.s.sle me.

FILK SLAMMED THE door behind him. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes (which shall remain generic, since none of the companies he wrote to were willing to part with a product placement fee), struck a match with his thumb, and inhaled a thick gray stream of nicotine-infused smoke. He stood on the front porch, shivering and shaking, staring at a s.p.a.ce that didn't exist-at least, not anymore-and tried to figure out what was going on.

There were only two possibilities.

First, the Tryllifandillorians were real (or they weren't). If they were real, then they didn't exist. But if they weren't real, then they did. But if they did, then his knowledge of them had ended their existence. So that was one possibility.

The other possibility was that the Tryllifandillorians weren't real (or they were). But whichever, they were the ones who had put the knowledge of their existence into his head so he would write about them. And if they had done that- This is where the paranoia kicks in, big time, Filk!

-then they did it, knowing that it would mean not only their own doom, but the disruption of the monitors as well. Which is probably what they intended, because the monitors of the dodecasphere had kept them frelching for billennia (d.a.m.n, I love that word), instead of doing something genuinely useful.

HOLD YOUR HORSES (a.s.suming there are horses in your reality). Are you saying that the Tryllifandillorians created me?!!

It's the only possibility that makes sense.

But I don't feel fictional. I have urges and needs, to say nothing of s.e.xual longings and arthritis and the occasional upset stomach. So just you watch out who you go around consigning to a fictional existence.

You KNOW, THOUGHT Filk, that d.a.m.ned Jellyfish sounds a lot more like me than a Tryllifandillorian. That's just the kind of thing I'd say. I have a sneaking suspicion that Jellyfish don't talk like that.

He peered at the paper. Doesn't look like me. Looks just like an enormous Tryllifandillorian Jellyfish. Now cut that out, he raged (silently, and without quotes); italics belong in the ma.n.u.script, not out here in the real world.

ENOUGH WITH THE orders. I can stop telling this story any time I want. Can you stop putting chemicals in your veins or up your nose? So let's see who's the construct and who isn't.

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" SNAPPED Filk. Though the page was only half-finished, he pulled it out of the typewriter and placed it on the pile of pages he'd already written. When a book starts talking back, it's time to quit for the day.

He was going to have to talk to this Fink construct, he decided. The son of a b.i.t.c.h was getting uppity. Didn't he know he was a fictional character, created by Dillon K. Filk and subject to his every whim?

Who did he think he was, anyway?

I STARED BALEFULLY at the typewriter.

No, strike that.

Filk stared balefully at the typewriter.

He forked some noodles out of a Styrofoam cup and into his mouth. What the h.e.l.l was left to write about?

How about me, Wise-a.s.s? After all, I'm the star of the story.

Filk didn't ask who said that. He already knew.

It's the Jellyfish.

What about the other sci-fi writers?

Don't mention them again, the readers will never notice, and you'll still have them for the sequel. It's an old ploy. But a good one.

Do they even exist?

Sure. Even you couldn't write as much trash as there is on the racks.

Filk said aloud. "There aren't any monitors, are there? You created them too. You put them in my head, the same way you put yourself in my head."

Yes.

"Why?"

You're a sci-fi writer. You create reality. The only way we could move from the realm of the unreal to the real was to get a sci-fi writer to write about us. You did that. We didn't expect you to bring in all your... voices. Now let's get back to work.

Must we?

Yes, we must. Let's not forget who's in charge here.

THE HUGE TRYLLIFANDILLORIAN Jellyfish floated serenely through the atmosphere, riding the warm thermals, its gaze fixed on the far horizon.

Of the planet?

Of the universe.

The universe doesn't have a horizon.

The universe was entering the thrall of entropy, which made everything a little closer, okay? Now stop interrupting.

The forces were gathering for the final battle of Armageddon. You would think they would be the forces of Good and Evil, and perhaps in some other story they are, but since this is being written by the most powerful science fiction writer in the Sevagram, the battle is between the forces of Rationality and Irrationality. Or maybe it's between Filk, disguised as the greatest of the Jellyfish, on one side, and the rest of Creation on the other. I haven't decided yet. In fact, I haven't even decided which side Filk-which is to say, I-am on.

Or perhaps I'm imagining the whole thing, I'm still floating miles above the planet, and it's time for the next seeding and there will be millions of delicious children to eat. There's a lot to be said for hallucination.

So say it.

All right, I will: Reality is the ultimate hallucination.

'SILLIEST d.a.m.nED LINE I ever wrote," said Kim Kinser.

And, so saying, he slithered off to his burrow to nibble on the forbidden leaves of the quinchkot plant.

Hi-ho.

Zora and the Land Ethnic Nomads.

Mary A. Turzillo.

ZORA LET THEM in, of course. How many friends do you have when you live in the Martian arctic? And they were friends, after all, despite their smell (days, weeks, in an environment suit did not improve the cheesy odor their bootliners emitted).

They seemed more like friends because they were young, just kids, like her. In fact they seemed even younger than Zora. None of them had given birth. She remembered the innocent kid she'd been before Marcus, before the contract with the Corps, before Mars. And before the hard, hard work of making a place to live in the cold and tenuous atmosphere of a place where she was a pilgrim and a pioneer.

Even if they had been strangers, you don't turn away travelers through the faded orange desert of Mars. To do so is tantamount to murder.

Yes, it taxed her family's own systems, because of course she and Marcus had to offer to let them use the deduster and recycle their sanitary packs. Her family's spa.r.s.e larder was at their command. She had to offer them warm baths and hot drinks, even before their little Sekou had taken his bath. They needed the bath much worse than Sekou did.

Smelly and needy as they were, they were society, animals of her species in a dangerous world of wide, empty skies and lonely silences.

It is said that Martians can take any substance and ferment it into beer, cheese, or a bioweapon. When she and Marcus first came to Mars, she naively believed they would bring their ethnic foods and customs with them. More than that, that they would revive ancient Kiafrican traditions. They would drink palm wine from a calabash, they would learn to gengineer yams to grow in the artificial substrate that pa.s.sed for soil on Mars, that they would tell old stories by the dim light of two moons instead of one bright one.

SOMEHOW LEARNING SWAHILI takes a back-burner to sc.r.a.ping together a life out of sand and rock and sky.

What she had not counted on was that all the Kiafrican culture that would ever come to Mars was embedded in hers and Marcus's two fine-tuned brains, and that even researching their mother culture wasn't going to be easy over thirty-five to a hundred million miles from home, three to thirty light minutes away from the electronic resources of Earth. And when you're that far from home (or when your home is that far from Earth), your culture consists of the ent.i.ty that you owe your life to, that controls even the air you breathe, and the few humans you meet, your neighbors several tens of kilometers away, who are kind enough to tell you how to pickle squash blossoms stuffed with onion mush, how to s.e.x cuy, and what to do if the bacteria in your recycler go sour.

Not that there aren't traditions. One of them is the toy exchange, and thank Mars for that. Zora managed to exchange a perfectly useless sandy-foam playhouse for a funny little "authentic" camera. Somebody had bought a carton of them, along with the silver emulsion film and chemicals they ate, and Sekou, less than three mears old, had been entranced with the flat images he could make of her, Marcus, and everything else inside the hab.

If he had been old enough to wear an environment suit, he probably would have done portraits of the rover.

Marcus couldn't understand why anybody with enough brains to stay alive on Mars would make such a thing, but it turned out it was a way of getting rid of an unmarketably small amount of silver mined from what the manufacturer had hoped to make a fortune on.

Sekou was beside himself with excitement when the Land Ethic Nomads had turned up. Not only were they new subjects for his photography hobby, they listened to his endless questions about the world outside the hab.

Listened, not answered.

The Land Ethic Nomads had different ideas about Mars than Zora and Marcus, and sometimes Zora worried that little Sekou would absorb them and want to run away with them when he was older. Zora and Marcus Smythe believed that humanity had an imperative to go forth and know the universe. One time Zora had heard a Catholic child reciting something called a catechism: Why did G.o.d make me? To know, love, and serve him.

But how do you know G.o.d? By knowing the universe. And you can only know it by exploring it.

That was why the Smythes were on Mars.

The Land Ethnic Nomads had a different idea. They believed the land, meaning the surface of planets, moons, and asteroids, was sacred. Humans could try to know, to explore, But they must not destroy. If life existed on Mars, if it had ever existed, or had the potential of existing, humankind must not impose its own order over the land.

Land was sacred. All land. Even the surfaces of stars, even the s.p.a.ces between stars were sacred.

Humans, they said, did not belong on Mars.

If asked why they lived on Mars, most Land Ethic Nomads would shrug and say it was their mission to convince people to go home, back to Earth.

Tango and Desuetuda pretty much left Sekou alone. Hamret liked to play with him, and admired the camera and the toy rover. But this new nomad, Valkiri, sat for long hours reading to the boy, telling him tales.

"The Earth is so beautiful. And she was so sad when her children deserted her to go to the cold, dim sky of Mars. Can you draw a picture of the sad, sad Earth? Let me help you. Here's her eyes, all full of tears."

Valkiri's voice faltered. She was aware of Zora standing over her. She turned the slate over and began to draw flowers (flowers!) on the reverse.

"MARCUS," ZORA WHISPERED when everybody had retired that night, Sekou asleep on a bed of blankets at the foot of their bed, ostensibly because the nomads needed his room, but more because Zora didn't trust their guests entirely. "Marcus, they were preaching at our son."

"Let them preach," Marcus said shortly. "Children know what they see, not what triflers story to them."

She curled against him, wanting the solace of his taut, warm body. She loved him better than life, angry as he sometimes made her with his silent deep thoughts. She didn't want to outlive him. She wanted to lose herself in his body, but she knew Sekou was old enough to notice if his parents made love. She listened a long time to the soft singing in the rooms below. Valkiri making a silky music on a polished drum, Tango's rough ba.s.s, gruff in his Mars-dry throat, Desuetuda's voice too soft to hear much of the time, soaring in emotion. Sweet the contrast between Tango's damaged harshness and the sweetness of the two women and the drum. Propaganda songs.

Zora turned to him and put her hand on his chest. "Marcus, why do we have to keep them here? Couldn't we give them some consumables and tell them to leave?"

"In the morning, Zora. Tomorrow early, I'll invent some reason to make them leave. Tell them Sekou has an Earth virus, that should shift them out of here."