GREENACHE

1

Waking in the ashgrey hours of the morning he heard his dead wife sing. Dimitri kept his eyes tightly closed and felt his muscles grow rigid with dismay.

Footsteps. A shadow fell across his eyelids, turning the pulsing red a darker shade. She seemed to hesitate.

No, don't kiss me!

The shadow vanished and her voice drifted to the tiny kitchen. She still sang, her voice clear and glad.

"Starman, o starman,

whatever you do,

don't shift

my red eyes blue!"

A surge of the house current must have nudged the sensurround recorder in the display mode, resurrecting a ghost almost seven years old.

He stil remembered spraying the recorder on the wall. Thin filaments, invisible to the naked eye. It had a ten billion byte memory and it would keep recording their conapt forever.

"When we're old," Jocelyn had said. "Real ancient, you know, old and gnarled, we can go visit our younger selves."

The recorder was flexible, that was the most horrible thing. It could interact, make those old recordings talk with their latterday versions.

He rolled from the sleep pallet and found the jutting control panel by touch.

"Dimitri? You're awake?"

He shuddered. She sounded so alive!

He touched the switch in the upper left corner and her voice faded. Dimitri opened his eyes. He was alone.

A succesful exorcism. But his wife would be back. Short of tearing down the walls he knew no way to stop the recorder permanently.

We wanted it to last, he thought. Only the very best was good enough for us. And we could afford it.

He walked to the kitchen and drew a glass of bitter coffee. The house was very silent. Like a tomb. And all the ghosts want to talk to me.

His computer chimed, the screen flashing an urgent blue. Government override. He drank the last dregs of his coffee and strode to his computer.

Just what he needed. A nice disaster. What would it be this time? A thousandstorey skyscraper crashing down on Tokyo's fission complex? A resurgence of the Red Tide?

He placed his thumb on the identification key and the screen cleared. TO: CITIZEN D. RIVERA, CONAPT 2567, THPL 835 098 23 GB YGK9 NA

FROM: WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION, SECTOR NA, GREATER BRIGHTON

DEAR CITIZEN,

YOU HAVE OVERDRAWN YOUR MEDICAL ACCOUNT BY 67 UNITS. ACCORDING TO

THE MIRKSEE AMENDMENT WE'RE NO LONGER ALLOWED

TO PROVIDE CARE AND HOSPITALISATION FOR YOU AND YOUR DEPENDENT(S). PLEASE CONTACT DR. OOKA OF THE CLINIC FOR TERMINAL PSYCHOSIS.

YOUR SON WILL HAVE TO LEAVE THE CLINIC BEFORE 2 P.M. TODAY.

MEDICAL INFO WILL BE PROVIDED.

FAILURE TO HEED THIS WARNING CARRIES A CLASS 2 PENALTY.

*

He stared at the screen, unable to grasp the message in its entirety. Carries a class two penalty. Instant and private euthanasis as opposed to a class one penalty, slow and lingering death, broadcast on the government educational channel. Your son will have to leave the clinic.

Your son will have to leave the clinic.

It was almost like a class two. After three years in a sterile environment the first newly mutated virus would kill his son.

*

The recombination laws had been stringent, but not stringent enough. Having defeated cancer and smallpox mankind now faced a whole new order of microscopic enemies. Mad scientists are rare, mad generals much more common. And it was so easy two centuries ago, when there were still competing nations. You didn't even need a real laboratory once the human chromosomes were mapped. Just offtheshelf, stateofart techniques.

The Biowar killed one fifth of the population. The newly formed world government didn't care. Its only regret was that the war hadn't killed more.

Fifteen billion citizens. One not so habitable world.

The first action the government took was making all medical care free. All medical care. Every citizen had the right to a fixed amount of counseling, hospitalisation and medicines. Constant medical care was the only way to survive. Like the now extinct influenza the wartime virusses had been designed to the mutate rapidly, to overwhelm any program of immunisation the enemy might devise. They had been an unparalleled succes. Even now with the names of the original combatants all but forgotten, the bioweapons kept their original virulence. Without his weekly shots the average citizen wouldn't survive for more than a month.

Medical practice without government sanction was a class two felony, a surefire way to get very rich and very dead quickly.

A productive citizen could count on about fifty years of vigorous life. His son had never been a productive citizen and there was small hope of him ever becoming one. In the eyes of the law he didn't even exist and should have been left to die. Still, the government wasn't completely unfeeling. It was possible to help your loved ones. There was only one catch: each medical unit lavished on those who had exhausted their own allotment would cost you twenty.

2

The sun was a red smudge behind his laserproof window when he called the clinic. Dr. Ooka wasn't in yet, but his computer had several suggestions. A mobile cocoon with a selfrepairing recycler, the kind used in longrange undersea craft. Certainly, the clinic sells them. Virusfilters of course (change onceaweek). Several, say twelve, hundredlitre containers of AllNurit which was the best choice for intravenous feeding. Though the government usually classified Allnurit as a delicatesse and charged accordingly. A cybernetic masseur, on sale in the more specialised sportshops.

"With judicious care your patient should last another month," the computer concluded in its most soothing bedside voice. "Perhaps even two weeks more."

*Dimitri rode the lift down to the streetlevel. So early in the morning it wasn't crowded yet. He was able to put both of his feet on the floor. In the hall he checked his gun. All three LEDs glowed and he pushed the vernier on "Alert". Black letters appeared on the tiny screen: "Stun. Killing optional". The small weapon wriggled in his hand and unfolded spidery legs. Using small suckers it scurried to the top of his head and hid in his hair, its minuscule eyes scanning the faces of hurrying pedestrians.

Dimitri didn't like his weapon. It was too baroque with its enamelled carapace, its barbed legs and swaying sensors. He felt slightly ridiculous, like a twopenny warlock attended by an untrustworthy familiar. Still, it had saved his life. Several times. And I got onetenth of their units. The law loves citizens who know how to defend themselves.

*

He arrived at the Clinic two hours early, the monorail not even breaking down once. Commuters thronged the streets, their wan faces looking dead. Reluctant zombies, powered by imperfect spells.

He crossed the street, his weapon buzzing warningly. Perhaps his uniform helped too, the members of Disaster Control enjoying a certain reputation.

The steps of the wide stairs were corroded, the artificial quartz pitted to a brittle foam. Nothing manmade survived the acid rains for very long.

He paused in front of the entrance. Wait inside? The waiting room was already crowded and the faces of the visitors seemed to echo his own desperation.

A young woman sat at the edge of a bench, biting her nails. Her teeth moved in steady grinding motion, like a cow munching grass. The fingertops looked like raw hamburger. Dimitri shivered, unable to avert his eyes. It went on and on until he wanted to scream. He abruptly turned and strode away. Misery doesn't love company. To know that your sorrow is the sorrow of millions doesn't help at all. It just cheapens it. Clinic for Terminal Psychosis. Nice doubletalk. There existed only one terminal psychosis, only one mental disorder that neither drugs nor mental probe could cure. Greenache.

Never speak the word for it means that we have no future, that mankind has no future. Three of every five children born in the last decade suffered from greenache. Let me tell you our tale, traveller. The Piper stole our children. They heard his music, his green flute and they all danced away, following him under the lost blue sky, over the green fields. Aching for the green

They followed the birdsong piper, his deerfleet feet, esteemed traveller. And none came back. None came back.

We know, can't blame the Piper, can't blame him for it could have been anyone, playing that song. Our children, they just didn't like the world we made. The hightowered rathives, the concrete, our burning rain, the sky so grey.

The psychomedics spoke of racial memories, of quiescent ancestral DNA activated by the unceasing stress of modern life. Children just took one good look at the world, their development quite normal for about a year, and then retreated. They fled in deep dreams, an autistic withdrawal into a fantasy world of endless grass plains, azure skies, rivers that still ran clear. The world for which homo sapiens had been programmed when he still was innocent and animal. Greenache. Terminal psychosis. Incurable.

*

The rational thing would have been to let the children die. They were only a drain on resources which had never been plentyful in the first case. But there were just to many of those small dreamers. They were the only future mankind had left. To kill that hope, to confess that they were truly incurable, it would have destroyed the whole social fabric. Also, to kill a sleeping child, that seemed somehow the most heinous of crimes. So the government prevaricated, issued bulletins that a cure was imminent, would be found in the next five year. And gladly allowed parents to waste their medical units on their lost children. In their eyes the only good citizen was a dead citizen and they would gladly allow him to hasten his own demise.

*An offshoot of the pedestrian river carried him to the pleasure district that had grown in the shelter of an abandoned airport. It was a meandering course he followed several times each week, always ending up in front of the Yemndiportal. He never went straightaway, playing a game with himself.

Shall I enter this cold neonlit cave where a bearded sage dispenses the wisdom of the ages? Shall I follow the scent of warm perfumed flesh and spend the night in the arms of a courtesan, geishasubtle and possessed of a skills older than Eve's? Or there, middleaged men, gambling their last medical units in desperation against government sponsored computers, the stake a brandnew heart, a vial of antibiotics?

He paused at a food stall to buy a cup of lukewarm beans. They tasted like old cardboard, reprocessed a thousand times, and left a sour aftertaste. He next inspected a tray of singing jewels, each lit by a tiny internal snowflake of pure light.

"Visit the rain forests of old Africa," a persuasive voice whispered. "Authentic reconstructions." The beam of sound was focussed on his inner ear and seemed to speak directly into his brain. He turned his head and the voice was abruptly cut off. Authentic reconstructions! He knew the sloppy work of your usual historical diorama. Yet, why not? Why not? He had time to spare and anything that took his thoughts off his son was welcome.

He scanned the colorful facades of the amusement halls. There, a pair of straggly datepalms. Behind a web of violent green lianas the outlines of low huts shimmered. He stepped inside and the entrance price of six yen was automatically deducted from his bank account. A sombre olivegreen twilight enveloped him. The smells at least were just the right mixture: the heavy perfume of moldspotted orchids, acid humus, stagnant water. Nor had the managment skimped on the soundtrack. Small monkeys shrilled in the treetops, an ara screeched his almost supersonic sorrow. And behind it all the dull roar of mosquitos. The visuals, though, were lousy, barely adequate to deceive a citizen who had never seen a living plant. The green was the green of dayglow paint, luminescent, yet cold. All in the same hue. A true forest was a symphony of tints, none exactly the same. When he peered at the leaves he noticed the absence of veins. They were just smooth ovals, not even serrated. Like a mathematicians dream of a forest, he thought.

He snorted and strode back to the entrance, suddenly unreasonably angry.

"Six yen is too cheap!" he snapped at the surprised owner. "Ask three times the price and build something that works!"

"Nobody would notice the difference, sir."

"I would!"

*

"I would," he repeated, while he pushed trough the milling crowd. "I saw the real forests." 3

The Yemndi timeportal was located in a sidestreet, one of the less frequented parts of the pleasure district.

He purchased a Yemndiwafer at the booth of the moneychanger, who seldom had to change any money, credit cards having superseded all coins and bills two centuries ago. Still, the man did a brisk trade selling the honeycombed wafers of lead with the merest traces of platinum, chrome and niobium.

The Yemndi had been a fixture ever since about fifty years ago, when they had suddenly arrived from the incredible far future to set up their timeportals. The government had tried to classify the timeportals, cordoning them off, warning the citizens away. They soon discovered that it is pretty hard to keep a secret that is duplicated on more than three million locations.

The Yemndi brought a technology so advanced that the scientists hadn't been able to duplicate a single item. After half a century the laboratoria were still trying. Take for instance their fuel cells, a simple disc of layered materials that slowly turned to iron, discharging a steady stream of electrons. Or light. Or gravitywaves.

Easy to duplicate. The Yemndiwafer Dimitri had just bought was in fact a very good imitation. Which only worked inside a Yemndi dome.

The governmentpaid guard in front of the airlock didn't even look up from his wargame. Miniature soldiers advanced across a simulated First World War battlefield, dying with shrill electronic yelps in the centimeter wide trenches.

Dimitri obediently halted in front of the sensorstudded laserguns, which covered the entrance of the dome.

The government, having reeducated all its former enemies, had never quite lost its suspicion of the time portals. Every day upward of five thousand players took the big plunge though the one way portals. Most would be caught by the timedrift of a shifting portal, their molecules scattered over millennia. But some at least emerged in the spiderinfested forests of the Carboniferous, the sandstorms of the Trias. Only the most adept players ever got as close to the present as the Jurassic. Still the dreams of the officials were haunted by the idea that they might be creating their own barbarian hordes in the far past. Someday the polarity of the gates might reverse, disgorging their savage descendants in the present.

*

"No gun, huh?" the guard said. "Not inside. Just leave it on my table. You get it back if you get back." It was clearly an old joke and in poor taste too. Stepping through a portal was considered an interesting way to suicide. At least there had been no Ishmaels, for none who had stepped through the portals had returned to tell the tale. The interior was a mosaic of black shadows and glittering surfaces, lit by the dazzling pointsource beyond the portal. Behind the portal the Yemndi hometime stretched: an Earth so incredibly aged that all her isotopes had turned into stable elements. The oceans were long since gone, leaving the dust, the airless deserts. A white dwarf lit the desolate landscape, never rising or setting.

It had taken the biologists a long time to identify mankind's successors. The Yemndi's ancestors had been most humble insects, the common sandflea, grown gigantic and, for a time, quite intelligent.

They had mined all Earth's minerals, constructing a shining ring of space cities. Masterful genetic engineers, they programmed all their knowledge into the genes of their offspring. A new born Yemndi larva was heir to a staggering technology, a living data bank of profound depth and diversity. And quite, quite unable to learn a single new fact. All useful powersources gone, their sun in its dotage, the guardian computer network of the Yemndi had send them back into the past. Hightech civilisations dotted Earth's long time stream, only some of them human.

The Yemndi craved minerals, energetic isotopes. The computers had made the right decision: all hightech civilisations were playful, unformed. They liked to gamble, they liked challenges. The Yemndi timeportals were the ultimate challenge, a way to wrestle with Chronos itself, and the nonYemndi were quite willing to pay with their precious minerals for their pleasures.

A Yemndi squatted on a low pedestal just in front of the sixcornered portal. Flexible cables emerged from her ruddy carapace, connecting her with the hardware of the portal. The Yemndi was clearly a part of the apparatus, no longer a selfdirected organism. Dimitri shoved past her torpid bulk and the small eyes, dull as lead, turned in the sockets to follow his progress. She lost her curiosity in a matter of seconds. Her powers of concentration had become as dim as her intelligence.

Dimitri inserted his wafer and the timeportal swirled, the white dwarf fading, fading, till only starstrewn space was left.

A dark cloud rose from the left quadrant, obscuring the stars. It rotated, faster and faster, and abruptly ingnited. A new sun shone, her fire lighting the accretion disc that soon would condense into planets.

Once again the view shifted and he gazed at an ocean of glowing magma, the uncratered moon filling a seventh of the sky. Blue flames danced along the yellow horizon. This was the base setting of the game, Earth still molten and violent. Dimitri's task was evolution, to force the oceans to condense, to raise mountain chains, to paint the barren deserts green.

Electrodes snaked from the portal and touched his brow. Dimitri merged with the timeportal, became Time itself, a master of change.

Strangely enough the Game itself was only a byeffect of the imperfect adjustment of the timeportal. It had been atuned to the Yemndi nervous system. The sluggish alien on her pedestal could have effortlessly opened the portal on any of Earth's ages. More than that, she could have held the portal steady long enough to allow short excursions and a safe return. For a human operator it was a quite different case. It took a major effort of will to move the portal from the base setting at all. It was even harder to keep the portal fixed for the half second needed to cross the interface. A slight hsitaton and you stepped through a drifting portal, the atoms of your body scattered over millennia. Leaper or Gamer. There were only two options for those who used the timeportals. The leapers were desperate, willing to cross to any time but the present. The Gamers, well, they had their own brand of fanatism. For them this was the ultimate video game, their reasn for life. But they would never step through the portal. They weren't that desperate yet. Also, stranded in a foreign time, they would be unable to play the Game and that would have been cause for desperation indeed.

Dimitri's breath escaped in a hiss and he embraced the Earth, radiated her heat away into outer space, forced the heavy radioactive isotopes to sink. A crust formed. Steam filled the portal for a moment and then the rain started. When the view stabilised he looked across a blue ocean, waters too pure to sustain life.

It took him several seconds to weave the long organic chains, to construct the first onecelled organisms. Parts of the shallows turned green and almost all anaerobic life started to die.

He urged the green to cling to tidal rocks, to migrate to the empty plain, the sawtoothed mountains. Sweat beaded his brow, his hands balled into fists. One moment of inattention and the Earth would devolve, time streaming back to the lavaoceans. He shifted continents, drew rivers and deltas, clad the lumbering saurians in armor. When his watch beeped to remind him of his appointment he had reached the Jurassic, watching a herd of dolphinlike saurians play in the waves.

He disconnected the electrodes and the portal reverted to zero, switching a moment later to the Yemndi hometime. Dimitri glanced at the huge scoreboard, the only humanderived piece of technology in the dome. Grandmaster Herbert von Brechten still held the highest score ever with his penetration in the Lower Cretaceous last month. The Grandmaster was a quadruple amputee, his whole life revolving around his daily struggle with the portal. Dimitri found his own name on the fifth place: his own position as champion of the Eurasian sector was still secure.

4

He sealed the throwaway isolationsuit and followed dr. Ooka through several airlocks to the inner sanctum of the clinic. Harsh violet irradiated his suit, turning the photosensitive plastic black for several seconds. Acids sprayed him, followed by a fuming caustic. The transparent doors of the ward finally slid aside.

"We'll provide a mobile stretcher, of course," dr. Ooka said. "It's not really medical issue, you see. Though it doesn't come cheap." He was a nervous young man, his pale grey eyes belying his Oriental ancestry.

"This here, it's completely sterile?" Dimitri asked.

"The ward? I certainly hope so!"

Dimitri's shoulders slumped. "You take good care of them. Nothing but the best. Two years in a sterile tank and all the time the microbes outside have been busy mutating. Did he have his shots against Ruhrdeco? The Chinese Spasm?"

The medic shrugged. "So he ran out of luck. If we had kept up his immunity we would have been forced to throw him out a year ago. Intensive care eats up medical units like crazy." He gestured to the softly glowing walls of bacteriophagic plastic. "Two days here costs the same as your weekly broad spectrum shot." His voice became harsh.

"Sometimes we have to make a choice. We don't like making choices you know."

"Sorry," Dimitri muttered. It was both unfair and useless to take out his anger on the hapless Ooka. The intern was clearly an idealistic young man, trying to work miracles while hoarding the medical units of his patients. One mistake and dr. Ooka would be forced to leave the patient in the middle of an operation, prohibited by force of law to close the gaping incision. And Dimitri knew there had been no choice, not a true one. His son was completely helpless and he needed the complicated machines of intensive care. Often the sufferers of greenache became so engrossed in their dreams that they even forget to breath.

They walked through the inscandently lighted ward. Murals lined the walls: rolling meadows, forests. The ceiling was a hologram of blue sky, a color which hadn't graced Earth's heavens for generations.

"An experiment," Ooka said. "Trying to recreate the fantasy world of the patients. Lure them back to the ward. Didn't work. They never open their eyes. Even if we peel back the eyelids they just don't focus."

"They're comatose?"

"No." Dr. Ooka stopped in front of a survival capsule. A toddler drifted in a yellow syrup, her muscles massaged by padded manipulators. "You see the screen? All jigs and jags. Brainwaves. We call those theta's. Means you're thinking, thinking very hard." He turned away but not before Dimitri had seen the pain in his eyes, the powerless sorrow.

"They dream. They never wake."

5

The streets were still crowded, the second morning rush only just beginning. He installed his automatic gun on the head of the stretcher and it seemed to help a little. At least people took care not to jostle the stretcher. A plastic cylinder enclosed his sleeping son, keeping the deadly air outside. The small filterpump purred, sterilising the air, but it wouldn't keep out subviruses. Some of the new mutations were no more than ten, twelve clustered atoms, yet capable of great harm.

He could try to buy shots on the black market, but it wouldn't save his son. Two years lost: there was no way Sergio could regain his immunity. The side effects alone would kill him. Also, this stretcher was a very poor imitation of the sterile ward. The integrity of his son's environment would soon be broken.

Dimitri kept on walking. It was no use trying to board the monorail with the akward stretcher. It would be a long walk home.

"Need a lift?" An small car halted next to the stretcher, the electrified thorns extended to clear a way through the pedestrians. Renfew, his supervisor, opened the door. The man had the face of a worried bulldog, all folds and creases. Hologaphic curlices, fireengine red, swirled over his shaven pate. "Heard about your son, Dimitri. Too bad." He flapped his hands, the very picture of concerned akwardness. "We can fix the stretcher to the roof I think. I have some instant glue. Got to get him inside." He glanced at the sky, the lowering clouds. "Looks like rain. I know this kind of plastic, completely nonallergic, sure, but the acid'll eat it like this!" He chopped downwards.

"Thanks," Dimitri said. "I appreciate this."

Two minutes later Renfew started the car. "Heard about the new policy? They finally classified the timeportals as a 'negative disaster'. Their way of saying that the portals are doing us a lot of good."

"They do? It isn't exactly what they have been saying for the last fifty years." Renfew nodded. "I know, but councilman Pavimurta took one look at latest statistics and turned completely around. Do you know that the portal suicide count has climbed to twentythree thousand a day? It looks like everybody who can afford the wafers is crossing over!"

"I see." It was just another meaningless statistic. "So what do they want us to do?" Renfew shrugged. "Make the portals more popular, I guess. Perhaps some airtime on the entertainment channels? The council also voted to provide five wafers a month to people on Social Security."

Dimitri felt his ears grow hot with embrassment. They were his portals! A way to pit yourself against the cosmos, an almost sacral act. The leapers had always been a minor annoyance, easy to forget, but now the council proposed to turn the portals into ordinary suicidebooths.

"Won't work," he grunted. "You need a lot of willpower to reach the epochs beyond the Great Rain. Nobody is going to step into a goddamn magma ocean!"

"You'd be surprised," Renfew said. "According to the records some even walked directly into the Yemndi hometime. Explosive decompression. If they didn't freeze first." They drove te rest of the way in silence, oily yellow drops spattering the windshield. 6

The filterpump sounded very loud in the appartment. Dimitri had retracted some furniture in the walls, but the huge bulk of the stretcher still made it almost impossible to cross the living room. For two hours Dimitri squatted on the edge of his pallet, his eyes fixed on the face of his son. Sergio was nine years old, but he looked barely five. As if the years in the hospital didn't count and he had only slept a single night and would presently awake. No doubt it had been some kind of drug, Dimitri thought, to keep him from growing up. Growing children are guzzlers of medical units. He didn't know if he should hate dr. Ooka for meddling with the very life of his son or praise his foresight.

He peered closer. The boy wasn't unconscious. Several times he saw the eyes move behind the eyelids, the rapid shifting associated with REM sleep. Dreaming. His son was dreaming. He wondered what green meadows his son was walking. Would there be flowers?

Dimitri had never seen a flower. They were a quite recent invention of Nature and the Jurassic, his present record, didn't have them yet. Only stately forests, their floors twilit and silent like cathedrals.

There was a stir at the edge of his vision. He slowly turned his head. His vision wavered and he felt the moistness of tears on his cheek.

"Please," he murmered. "Please. Not now."

His wife sat in the corner of the room, her face impossibly youthful and aglow with health. She didn't see him: her eyes were fixed on the baby on her lap.

Had Sergio ever been so small? He looked like a exquisite doll, the hands so tiny Dimitri could have encircled them with a single crooked finger.

Behind his wife the air grew opaque, solidifying in the outline of a young man. For a moment the new Dimitri kept looking at his sleeping son and then the interactive circuits of the recorder cut in and he raised his face.

Dimitri sat frozen. He can't see me, he told himself. Not really. It's only a cybernetic tropism, a clever faking of human reactions.

"Why don't you give him the green?" the youthful Dimitri said. "There is so much of it. All he needs is the green."

Dimitri numbly shook his head. The words of his double sounded so plausible. Half an hour in the unspoilt past would draw his son back to consciousness. Yet the suggestion was nonsense, pure noise. Certainly, behind the portals stretched all the meadows of time, but what use was it to maroon the two of them in some Jurassic wilderness? No human could survive completely on his own and the time of men had never been reached. One of the most rigidly enforced rules of the council was 'No Teams'. Never was more than one human at a time allowed in the Yemndi domes, while pregnant women were altogether barred. The government didn't want to risk a breeding pair escaping in the past.

"Maybe sheer effort isn't enough," his double continued. "Maybe you need hate. Hate fueled by love."

Dimitri rose. "You sound like an oracle. I don't need the advise of a goddamn recorder!" He waved his arms. "Go! Go!"

Perhaps some of his emotion registered, because the ghosts oblidgingly started to fade. The last he heard was the thin, frightened wail of his baby son.

7

It took him three hours to contact his sister. Marianne was high enough in the prestigious Astronautical Corps to rate a secret number. In the end he had to use the override of Disaster Control.

"Renfew phoned me about poor Sergio," Marianne immediately said. Dimitri nodded, surprised by a sudden surge of warmth for his supervisor. Renfew was thoughtful that way. No doubt he was trying right now to drum up support for his friend. Dimitri's sister had been an obvious choice.

"I'm so sorry! I tried and tried, but there's nothing I can do!" Dimitri knew that her own husband was overdue for a liver transplant. It would wipe out most of Marianne's medical account. "I was thinking of suspended animation. The comet drugs." His sister shook her head. "That's only a fancy word for hibernation. The heart slows down all right and the breathing becomes very shallow. It retards aging, but that won't stop virusses from multiplying. The opposite in fact, because the immune system slows down too."

"I didn't know."

"Is there anything I can do? You need money?"

"No. It wouldn't be any use. Even if I could get the shots Sergio missed the side effects would kill him."

8

He had met the Grandmaster twice before. Dimitri could only stand him for only a short time. The loss of his limbs had left Von Brechten a quite bitter man, his face etched with lines of selfpity and petulance. Von Brechten just wasn't one of your saintly sufferers. Still, both men had at least felt a grudging respect, the brittle kinskip of fellow fanatics. The satellite relay to Seoul was even worse than usual, providing Dimitri with a wavering two dimensional picture, the borders fringed with color. Von Brechten peered in the screen while his retinal implants scanned the face of his caller. He was a veteran of the illfated second Persephone expedition, kept alive long past his productive life by a generous state pension.

He raised one of his juryrigged manipulators in a clumsy salute. "Dear enemy, how good to see you. Still clinging to your precarious fifth position?"

"As if you didn't know!" Dimitri forced a smile. He had forgotten how utterly wretched Von Brechten looked, the merest sketch of a man.

And he's only three years older than I.

Von Brechten leaned closer to the screen, his torso raised by whirring servos. "I have been number one for a long time now, my dear Dimitri." He paused, his Adam's apple bobbing.

"And it's killing me!" His manipulators trembled under the surge of sudden passion. "For years I have been waiting for you bastards to challenge me. To climb beyond your stupid Jurassic!" The spidery fingers clenched into fists. "I need an enemy!" he wailed. "Someone to keep me alive!"

The line was too beautiful to pass up. "And you have no enemy but time."

"Exactly! Exactly! You understand." He pursed his lips.

"Sometimes when the pain is especially bad I make a dream. I'm standing in front of the portal, looking out over a grassy plain, snowtopped mountains in the distance." He closed his eyes and his face grew almost serene. "Yes, white mountains in the light of the setting sun. Mammoths are grazing and in the distance I see a tiny thread of smoke rise in the still air. A fire not made by lightning nor by any other force of nature. And then..." He took a deep breath, let it escape in a hiss. "Then I'll know I'll have reached the Age of Man." He opened his eyes and Dimitri saw the peace evaporating, leaving only painful yearning.. "But I need you, I need you my enemies. To reach that moment I have to feel the the wolf pack breathing in my neck."

"You're too good. We'll never make it. We simply don't have your genius." The Grandmaster nodded. "True perhaps. So I'll tell you the secret of my succes, young Brutus. It's fury! It's hate, pure and simple. Don't woo Time, I say! Rape her!" He kept nodding, his eyes growing glazed. "Hate her, rape her," he mumbled.

"I'm not a good hater," Dimitri said. He didn't know if that was true any longer, but he wanted to goad von Brechten, to keep him talking. If anyone knew a way into the green it was the Grandmaster.

"You don't have to be a good hater," Von Brechten said in a flat voice. "It comes in vials of five milliliter and the name is Thyrosone 12." He licked his lips. "Thyrosone 12. Extremely addictive and quite illegal."

9

It took him five days and half the money he had borrowed from Marianne to locate the black medic. The man lived alone in a five person appartment and served a hundred year old brandy in goblets of cut glass. Ostentious display of wealth: Dimitri gave him another month at most. The excessive power drain of the appartment alone would serve to alert the monitors.

"It a wartime drug," the dealer explained. "Iranian originally. It was used during the Second Jihad, but shortly afterwards discontinued. The side effects were something fierce." He opened a small box. Five vials rested on simulated velvet. "Distilled rage coupled with insane selfconfidence. Makes for good soldiers. Except that they tended to forget who exactly the enemy was. Zeroed a lot of their own officers." He took a vial between thumb and indexfinger. "I won't ask what you need this for. Take one and you'll come out all right. Two and you're hooked. Three and the only thing they can do is put you in a big cage and throw the keys away."

Dimitri pushed his nine ounces of refined germanium across the table. "I'll take all five." 10

The crowds swiftly parted before him while he swiftly pushed the stretcher through the pleasure district. Citizens of the high density belts had very sensitive antenna. Not that they needed them is his case: his rigid body fairly radiated anger, the red joy of a berserker. He had prudently left his gun at home. The simpleminded weapon was far too attuned to his moods: no doubt it would have mowed down any commuter who even slightly obstructed him. Dimitri's palms and fingertips tingled, so preternaturaly sensitive, that each dump of stretcher sent waves of delicious agony through his whole body. To maim, to kill, to hear the lovely snap of a spine!

All his feelings were heighened and his love and protectiveness for his son was almost unbearable intense. Tear the stars from the sky for you, he thought, batter a tunnel through Time.

*"You leave your weapon outside," the guard murmered. The man still didn't recognize Dimitri, though he visited this timeportal at least four times a week. No doubt the job bored the guard.

Dimitri wheeled the stretcher to the entrance of the dome. The guard languidly raised his weapon. "Hey, you're a moron or something? You can't take him in there. Everybody knows the first rule. No teams." He still sounded bored.

Dimitri shrugged. "So scan him. He isn't functionally human. He doesn't exist." The guard peered inside the cylinder. "Greenache, huh?" For the first time a flicker of emotion crossed his face. It was revulsion. "All right, take him inside. He's no woman and you aren't pregnant."

The Yemndi stirred on her pedestal, waving a front leg. Come inside, ancestor. Spend your precious minerals on this, the ultimate videogame.

The timeportal still showed the stagnant far future. Grey sands, the whole world a lowbudget zazen garden, not even enlivened by artfully arranged pebbles.

Dimitri squinted against the dazzling pointsource of the aging sun and inserted his wafer. Flecks danced in front of his eyes. One became the emaciated face of his wife, ravaged by Ruhrdeco.

"At least he has you to take care of him," she said. "At least he has you." Words she had never spoken, Ruhrdeco being mercifully swift, the first symptom an irreversible coma.

The portal spasmed and the dwarfish sun was gone.

Ancient Earth's glowing magma oceans radiated their fury.

He felt an answering hate.

Change! Evolve! Build me mountains!

*There was a sky of torn sulphuryellow clouds. Silhouettes wheeled in the storm. They were still wrong, clad in cold flesh, unfeathered.

Go! Move! Evolve!

His nervous system pulsed, his ganglions burning like captive suns, searing his flesh. Evolve!

And suddenly the dark green forests were festooned with intricate flowers. The Upper Cretaceous! He had passed the sombre needleclad hills of the kingdom of dinosaurs. He never saw his own name replacing the Grandmaster's on the scoreboard. An inscandescent streak of fire crossed the blue sky, and suddenly the whole world was winter. Blizzards raged.

He felt a wild elation. The planetoid had fallen, killing the imperial lizards. Noone has reached this far! I'm the first to see their Fimbulwinter, their Gotdammerung. He tasted blood, the welcome pain of a bitten tongue.

He rode the shockwave of his fury, his longing.

The luxurious jungles were gone. Grass inundated the plain like a green flood. Eocene?

Miocene?

He felt his control slipping, the monstrous tug of the deep past. One minute more, he prayed. Give me just another winter. Give me the redhaired mammoth, the fleet gazelle. A flash of white, so short he could have imagined it. Let it be the Ice age, please God, let it be the Ice Age!

He tugged at the stretcher, keeping the portal steady by pure desperation. It crossed the interface, sliding half a meter above the waving grass.

He jumped and fell face forward in the stiff grass. He struggled upright, his muscles weak as water.

We made it. We made it. To the green world, the blue sky. I'm in your dream, Sergio!

He scanned the horizon. There was no thin thread of smoke, but he knew there would be one of these days. This was the age of man.

He unsealed the cocoon and laid his son in the fragrant sedge. Flies buzzed. The unlined face seemed very relaxed. A tiny smile curved Sergio's lips.

"Soon you'll wake," Dimitri whispered. "Soon you'll wake."