ROB CHILSON

MIDNIGHT YEARNINGS

There comes a time in every rightly constructed girl's life when she has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for buried treasure. This desire had come upon Jan Conway in the autumn of the year. It was the third week of school, and all desire to live had departed from the scholars.

Jan dismissed with a sigh Mr. Ladysmith's discussion of the First Ship and the Founders and reverted to her dreams of treasure. A wooden chest with a round top, and she paused to wonder, why a round top? Anyway, that was traditional -a wooden chest with a round top, reinforced with iron at the comers, and locked with a "massy" padlock.

But where on all Columbia might such a thing be buried? And who was there to have buried it? Jan Conway rued her lot, born on a colonial planet which had only two events in its short history: the Settlement, and the Rebellion. And the latter had only lasted two weeks.

Something cold, but affecting her like the heat of a suddenly opened stove door, passed across Jan's face: Mr. Ladysmith's gaze. Guiltily she brought her regard back to the room and straightened, trying to seem as if she had all along been attentive.

"You might be standing on a pleasant lea," Mr. Ladysmith said dryly. "Have glimpses that would make you less forlorn --a sight of Proteus rising from the sea, or dear old Triton blowing his horn. However --" When he dropped her, Jan looked wonderingly about the school room. Everything she saw was so mundane as to bring a yawn to the statue of First Ship Captain Willamette.

That booklover, Chris Brinker, said, "Honor is a mere scutcheon," and looked at Mr. Ladysmith for approval.

He gave her a short look--Mr. Ladysmith didn't take even Chris Brinker for granted --and nodded. "Indeed it is, as the Second Faction was soon to learn." Jan found herself unaccountably jealous of Chris Brinker. Mr. Ladysmith had never looked at her like that. She consulted her dictionary, but couldn't find

"scutcheon."

Later, Mr. Ladysmith rebuked Edric Tancredi, who was boasting of his travels -he'd been to Canyonhead at Grand Rapids. "Beware you do not suffer a fall like that of Pombo the idolator," said he, "and of the other, the thief Slith." Still smarting, Jan knew she'd never find that in the dictionary either, and raised her hand.

"How do you spell 'Pombo, 'sir?" she asked. Mr. Ladysmith looked at her for a moment, realized that she was sincerely curious, and nodded, mostly, she saw, to himself. He spelled the word clearly and watched curiously as Jan wrote it down. So did Chris Brinker. Next time she was on the terminal, Jan had the library search Poetry for

"Pombo." No match. Worried, she broadened it to Literature in general, and it gave her a short story title: "The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolator." It was very short, so she read it on the spot. It ended with this strange Pombo feeb falling off the edge of the Earth into space, falling and falling. Wow, thought Jan. What a weird idea.

She looked at Mr. Ladysmith. Edric was liable to fall off of Columbia? At least, fall off of the truth. Jan sighed. Impossible to understand Mr. Ladysmith. Maybe he meant both.

At last recess, Jan purposefully sought out Chris Brinker. It was almost hot out, so everybody else had left off their jackets and were running and yelling. Chris wore her jacket and huddled in the shade at one side of the school yard. When Jan approached her, Chris seemed to shrink into herself a little. She always did that; Jan had seen it ten thousand times. Now she noticed it, but she had other things on her mind.

"What does 'scutcheon' mean?" she demanded.

"It means 'nothing.'"

Jan hesitated. "You mean it doesn't mean anything?" Mr. Ladysmith had understood her, and it had meant something to him.

"No, I mean scutcheon is nothing. It means nothing you see?" Chris was still defensive.

"Oh. Then --Honor is a mere nothing --that's what you were saying."

"Yes." Still defensive.

"Then why didn't you just up and say it?" Jan demanded, more vehement than she had meant to be. Chris got stubborn if you got pushy.

"It's from Shakespeare," Chris said stiffly.

"Oh." Jan stared at Chris, not knowing how to proceed. After a moment Chris said, "It's from Henry the Fourth, Part one. I've --my parents have an audiovisual of it."

"Oh." At least she hadn't read the book, as Jan had at first feared. "Is it good?"

"Oh, yes."

Jan scuffed her toe in the dirt, at a loss, and was rescued by a yell from Philly Wu. "I gotta go!"

"Whaddayou wanta do, Jan?" Bobby Wilson asked, or demanded.

"Dig a hole," she said vaguely, thinking of treasure. Chris Brinker laughed, to the others' irritation. Jan took no further part in the argument about what game to play. When it was settled, she played Run Sheep Run without much interest, to the exasperation of her friends.

"Pay attention, Jan!" BeBe Feder cried. "You're gettin' dumb as Chris Brinker!" When dear old Triton rang his bells for the end of recess, it was as big a relief to Jan as to Chris. The remaining classes of the day, seeming endless, eventually ended. Jan was slow in getting out of the classroom. BeBe Feder, Philly Wu, and Bobby Wilson ran on without her. She heard Philly say, "Never mind that stupid Jan, she's walkin' around in a daydream." Then they were gone, their feet thunderous on the boardwalk. Jan walked home slowly, not caring, her mind far away from Port Michigan.

Might there not have been pirates in space, she asked herself, who might have chosen Columbia to hide their treasure in? The thought of pirates in space was so romantic a notion in itself that she spent the homeward trip garnering the treasure rather than digging it up, zooming through space, pouncing upon unsuspecting ships and orbital factories, terrifying everyone while laughing sinisterly and twirling her mustache.

When she got home she was immediately sent out to play, for her sister JoAnne had been forbidden to go to a picnic on Melancholy Heights with the other girls and boys from high school, and was rebelling all over the house. Momentarily Jan regretted not being older than eleven. With a sigh she took a doughnut and two cookies and departed, spurning the offer of an apple. Phil, BeBe, and Bobby were gone when she went around to their houses. She looked for them in a shrubbery cavern, a baseball field, and an abandoned shed which they frequented, without luck. Lastly, she tried the docks on Starport Bay. Resentfully she thought: they've abandoned me.

Jan stood looking out over the waters of the bay, remembering the glorious time last summer when the tramp starship Rosa had planeted in unexpectedly. Now the ship was long gone, and she was still stuck here on dumb old Columbia, where nothing had ever happened, where nothing would ever happen, and nothing could ever happen. Philly and Bobby and the other boys had talked a lot about stowing away. Now Jan wished she had.

Jan was late getting in to supper. "Jan! Where have you been?" her mother cried.

"Hurry up and set the table!"

Dreamily Jan did this, and stood staring dumbly at nothing until her mother came in and started rearranging the plates and flatware, saying, "Take up the green beans, Jan, put them in the crock --Jan! I swear, if it isn't one girl it's the other --"

When the meal was served, her mother went and bullied JoAnne out of her room and to the table, where she declared, red-eyed, she wouldn't eat a bite. As Jan was also silent and their older brother absent at the Academy, it was a quiet meal, punctuated by the conversation of the dog in the next yard with an enemy two blocks down.

"I would so have been home before bedtime," JoAnne said sullenly, but her mother declined to take the bait.

"Dad, did you ever read Space Ranger and the Pirates?" Jan asked. He looked up from concentrating on the audiocast of the news murmuring quietly over the table. "Why, no, I don't believe so. How about Treasure Island? I read that," he said.

Jan hadn't. She had merely seen the A/V, so she said only, "It had a big treasure." She fell to dreaming of mountains of "pieces of eight" (whatever they were) over her roast beef, and had to be reminded by her mother to eat. Absently she consumed beef, potatoes, gravy, yams, green beans, and a tomato sliced and salted.

Trouble came when she asked for dessert, and her mother told her she'd already had it. "Three cookies that I know of, and a doughnut --"

"But I didn't spoil my supper! I want dessert?

Being somewhat well fed, Jan accepted a broad molasses cookie. Nibbling it, she stood looking about the front room for--Proteus, or Triton, or --She did not know what she wanted, but she wanted it unbearably. She pulled out a book almost at random, sighing, and lay down on the couch with it: Edgar Allen Poe illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

Jan turned immediately to the full-color illustration for "Eleonora," which depicted a young --a very young man sitting next to a younger girl, younger even than JoAnne, and nude. She had breasts, though small, and surely had her period, too. Jan sighed, and looked at the young man. He wore only a sort of shirt that came below his hips, leaving his legs bare. Jan contemplated this picture for some time, thinking of her ideal, a high school boy named Irwin Blane, about whom she had told no one, even BeBe Feder. The near passage of her unseeing mother caused her hastily to blow the cookie crumbs out of the book and flip to the front, where she reread "The Cask of Amontillado."

"Jan! Jan, come dry JoAnne's dishes!" her mother cried. Jan awoke with a start and went into the kitchen, where she stood drying the same plate over and over, reveling in ancient dungeons and old bones.

"You little feeb!" JoAnne cried. "Dry the other dishes too! Morn!"

"Jan, have you done your homework ?" her mother asked.

"Ye-essss. . . " * * *

Shades of the prison house have closed upon the growing girl," Mr. Ladysmith said, and Jan came back to school with a start. It was his old saying, only this time it was she they were all giggling at.

"S-sorry, sir," Jan said, too startled for caution. "My mind wandered." The class caught its collective breath at this boldness; Chris Brinker turned a mutely horrified gaze upon her. Mr. Ladysmith cocked one eyebrow at her, studied her for an embarrassing moment.

"A girl's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long'

thoughts," he said, nodding. To her relief he dropped it there, though she hadn't done her homework either.

Bobby, Philly, and BeBe were subdued at recess that day. They were all yarded for a week, because last night they had snuck off to Melancholy Heights and broken up the post-picnic post office with a barrage of ripe haws and unripe crabapples.

"Serves you right, dumb feebs," Jan said, smarting at having been left out.

"Yeah, yeah, too bad," said Bobby. "You didn't get yarded."

"So what?" she said resentfully, and didn't walk homeward with them that night either.

Instead, she read Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, interrupted by dishwashing. Bullied by her mother, she also did her homework.

"No, I won't help you," said her mother for the umpteenth time. Jan was not disappointed, but it had been worth trying.

"Why don't we have graveyards on Columbia, Dad?" she asked, at bedtime. Her father looked up from his eternal rainfall records and said, "Why, because we're a low-population frontier planet, Jan. Partly because they take up space, but mainly because we haven't the workforce to maintain cemeteries." Boy, you couldn't have anything on Columbia, no pirate treasure, no ancient tombs, no dungeons --the town jail didn't even have a basement -no nothing. Since she went to bed, listlessly, without protest, she got there almost an hour before her usual time. When she awoke, it was still well before midnight by her bedside clock.

Jan sat up. All was still; even the dogs slept. Big Moon flooded the silent world with silver light. Jan padded to the window in her gown and peered out into almost blinding light. The streetlights cast colorful green glows on trees black in the silver light. There wasn't a sound.

Jan was wide awake. She came to a decision.

Hastily throwing off her nightgown and putting on the pants, sneakers, and shirt she had cast aside that night, she raised the window. It was less silent than the door, but seemed safer. Ian opened the screen and stepped cautiously out onto the porch roof. She had done this often enough, though never at night, and made her way quickly to one of the comer posts, down it. Jan hesitated. A track went by a block or two over, murmured into stillness. Faint tinkly music and quiet laughter reached her from the docks tavern frequented by the small raffish element of Port Michigan society. Far off, a dog barked.

The yard gate would creak, possibly betraying her. Jan went to the corner, leaped up, caught a limb, and swung herself over the fence, which was but little higher than her waist.

It was nine blocks to the Memorial Garden, and Ian saw no one. She kept to the shady side streets, avoided street lights, and moved quickly and quietly. It must, she thought, have been some time before midnight when she reached the garden, panting more from excitement than exertion, and crept through the great stone gateway. There were no gates. The gatehouse was a ceremonial building, which in fact contained tools, flower pots, a mortar-box, and so on; as it was never locked, she had seen within it often enough.

Never by night, however, and just now Jan did not care to look inside. Instead she stepped into the shadows of the garden. There was a high fieldstone wall around it, overgrown with various climbing flowers, chiefly honeysuckle near the gate.

Here near the gate were the older cairns, most of them quite primitive, simply piles of rock with names and dates of birth and death carved on them. Jan supposed that these were the "rudely carved" tombstones of the elder days of Old Port Michigan. Actually, they were quite neatly done with a molly-cutter. Farther on were the more modem and stylish cairns. These were tiny ziggurats or

"hanging gardens" --Mr. Ladysmith had made a portion of Babylonian culture vivid for his students. Each of these cairns was a series of stein walled with big blocks of stone, mostly crude amethyst or rose quartz from the Swartz Mountains, with names and dates set into them in stainless bronze or gold. The steps themselves were planted with a wide variety of flowering or decorative plants.

Not that all the "honored dead" of Port Michigan "slept here." Some people followed the custom of casting the ashes on the waters of Starport Bay south of town, and the Konopkas had always sprinkled their ashes on their flower beds. Their flowers looked the same as anybody else's.

Jan wandered through the neatly kept gardens. Fall flowers bloomed; already there was a drift of yellow leaves, burned up by too much summer before the first frost. The dew sparkled in the moonlight. Willows leaned over cairns. Dogwoods stood thoughtful. Along the wall was a row of barrel-shaped cairns commemorating First and Second Ship folk.

Jan seated herself on the lowest step of a cairn in the middle of the garden. Big Moon looked blankly down at her. Its light painted the world black and silver. A raccoon came around a cairn, saw her, froze, sniffed, froze, then whisked away at a movement. Jan felt like --like a nature sprite. She felt that she belonged here, that like the raccoon she was apart of all this. Part of the night. It was a strange, wild feeling.

The scene reminded her of the illustration in the Poe book, and Jan debated taking off her clothes. However, she was only eleven and flatchested, and Irwin Blane wasn't here. Besides, it was chilly, now that she was sitting. The dew was quite thick; her sneakers were soaked. Somehow it wasn't as romantic as wandering around a sunlit valley with a cute boy in a short shin. She thought of Irwin Blane in a tunic.

It came to Jan that she was not scared. This was the oldest Memorial Garden on the planet, and nearly full. Surely here, if anywhere, ghosts would linger. It wasn't a bit spooky. Less spooky than some of the side streets with their great overhanging shade trees.

Disappointed, Jan thought: haunted houses.

Traditionally, a haunted house is an empty and scary old mansion. But Port Michigan was short on mansions, empty or inhabited, scary or nonscary. In fact, she could only think of one house sufficiently romantic, with turret, gables, cupola, carved porch pillars, and gingerbread, to qualify as "haunted": the old Gareth house. It was currently inhabited by Mr. Ladysmith, his sister, and his aunt, old Miss Ling the Librarian.

Going through the Memorial Garden gateway, Jan pondered the question: did Mr. Ladysmith have a dog?

This was a part of Port Michigan she didn't know quite so well, though it wasn't far from home. Arrived at the Gareth house, she stood panting in the shadows of a stone wall overhung by tree limbs, then jumped as a dark shadow moved. Jan put her hand on her chest and tried to catch her breath, staring big-eyed at the top of the wall. A shadow darker than the shadows of the trees moved there.

"Pfff!" it said.

Taking a deep breath, Jan stepped closer to the wall and looked up at a black tomcat. It snarled silently down at her, its eyes glowing ghastly in the tree-cavern of the night. Huge it was, and hideous. Its glaring eyes radiated hatred, its face was a seethe of old scars and new scabs, its ears were notched and ragged, one canine was gone.

"H-hi, Patticake," Jan said, breathlessly. He was old Mrs. Ping-ping Norton's

"leetle Meow," the most savage and fetal cat in Port Michigan, father of half the kittens and terror of half the dogs.

Patticake spat at her again in disgust and went away along the top of the wall. He vanished in the night. A sound of claws scrabbling bark told of his course into the trees; then all was still behind him.

Somewhere, a dog barked.

Jan caught her breath again and, heart hammering went round the comer and through the gate. The Gareth house was silver-plated by the moon. Every curlicue of its rococo decoration was visible, stark against inky shadows. At one end of the house a street light poured a flood of color over a tree, brilliant green picked out with a sprinkle of yellow-edged leaves. Moths flew about the light, seeming to glow.

But what shortened Jan's breath again was the sight of a light in a window on the ground floor.

She stared at it, fascinated. It was the only lighted window she had seen on her midnight odyssey, perhaps the only one in all Port Michigan. What was he doing up at this hour? she thought indignantly, and crept across the yard under the trees toward the window. Maybe he was wakeful because of the ghosts. But somehow ghosts now seemed a childish fancy. Jan felt that there were even more dangerous things abroad; felt that she had brushed near to--something vast, powerful, instinct in the night. Something antithetical to that light in the window. The night itself, or the spirit of nightness. At that moment it spoke.

"When she all alone beweeps her outcast state, and looks her last upon the light, silent on a peak in Darien --"

Jan jumped and half-stifled a shriek.

Mr. Ladysmith stood under the trees by the wall, in deep shadow. She saw the gleam of his teeth, the dark line of his mustache above them, the twinkle from the caverns of his eyes. He stepped out slowly, wearing his white suit but not his hat.

"I am half sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shalott," he said. "Unlike her, you seem to revel in them. It's the witching hour." Jan decided that he was asking her what she was doing here. She hadn't prepared an explanation --hadn't foreseen needing one --and didn't quite know the answer, herself.

"I couldn't sleep," she said, with a touch of sullenness.

"Ah, my affliction also. The world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, hath really neither--but I forebear. Still we are here, as on a darkling plain." He looked up at Big Moon, which had a halo around it. "Or a lightsome one. Why should we be here? No one has ever answered that." Jan didn't think he was questioning her; still, with Mr. Ladysmith, you never knew. "Maybe I better go home," she said.

"There speaks the directness of youth, a reproach to the folly of age," said Mr. Ladysmith. "May I walk you home?"

Jan hadn't intended to walk, but acquiesced. Rather to her relief he was silent most of the way. The quieting of her mood allowed sleep to creep up on her. He took her hand when she stumbled. Once, the distant howl of a dog startled her. Mr. Ladysmith squeezed her hand. "A lone dog, a wild dog," said he. "Keeping fat souls from sleep."

At her house he asked, "How are you going to get in without waking everybody?" Any other grown-up would have insisted on waking her parents. Jan said, "Up the porch and through the window. Boost me up?"

"Of course." He lifted her lightly, she scrambled up, returned his "Good night" quietly, and made for the window. As she opened the screen, she turned to look, and he was going out the gate. Any other grown-up would have waited to make sure she didn't fall, or something.

Next day Mr. Ladysmith seemed the same as ever, last night might have been a dream. His dry wit, the sarcasms that kept the students in check, had not altered. He was still an enigma whose reactions no one could predict. But for Jan, watching him covertly, he was a fascinating enigma. The thing about last night that impressed her most was the walk home. All windows were dark. Nobody was awake. All the fat souls were asleep, except for her, and Mr. Ladysmith, and that distant dog who had howled. At the study hour, she got use of the terminal. She keyed it to search Literature for a reference to "Lone Dog." "Poetry," she added as an afterthought.

It presented her with a poem about a "lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog and lone," depicted as "keeping fat souls from sleep," and refusing to herd silly sheep.

So there it was, she thought. She looked at Mr. Ladysmith, sitting sleepily in his chair. So there we are.

He had made them read some poems about a shepherd and his girlfriend. As Jan sat looking at him, she heard the murmur of the classroom as if it were for the first time. She thought: he's lulled by the murmuring of the students in the immemorial elms.

True to the promise of the circle around Big Moon, it rained that day. They had to play in the gym at recesses. Jan and her friends effected a reconciliation, and it was as if they'd never quarreled. However, once she sat down next to Chris Brinker, who sat watching the fun forlornly.

"Did you ever read the one about Pombo?" she asked.

"Pombo?" Chris asked warily.

"You know --this Pombo feeb Mr. Ladysmith mentioned in class a couple days ago," said Jan impatiently. "I looked him up."

"No, I didn't," said Chris, eyeing her curiously. "What about it?"

"Well, it's just a real weird story," Jan said, lamely. "I really liked it. I never found Slith, though."

The rain had ended by the time school let out. She walked her friends home to the parting of the boardwalks, and then had the evening on her hands. Acquiring two cookies, she sought the back yard of one Pete Gillooly, where was domiciled a vicious dog named Flinders. Displacing a carefully loosened board in the back fence, she crawled through and whispered hoarsely: "Flinders!" No answer.

"Flinders!"

No answer but a canine snore. Jan knocked on the dog house. "Flinders!" Flinders came awake with a yawn and a creak of jaws, heard her voice, growled faintly by reflex, and came out and around the doghouse, shaking his head and grinning. Jan fed him the remaining cookie and pulled his ears while he ate it.

"Let's go dig for buried treasure," she said. Flinders was agreeable. So, hidden behind the shrubs and dog house, they reveled in the search, with but one interruption. Pete Gillooly came out to feed his dog, and Flinders had to go and be vicious while Jan lay low, not to reveal his dark secret. After supper, Jan spent the evening in her room, drawing and not doing her homework. She drew pictures of nymphs and shepherds in idyllic settings reminiscent of Memorial Garden, a lone dog howling at Big Moon with a circle around it, and a man in white with a thin dark mustache, standing in shadow and looking down on a nude, moonlit nymph seated on a vine-covered rockpile. Jan had some talent at drawing and had done well in her classes, so these pictures were merely terrible, and they gave her great satisfaction. The next day Mr. Ladysmith mentioned some dumb Earth politician who had cared too much about what everybody thought, and Chris Brinker seized the opportunity to hold up her hand and say, "It does not become adventurers to care who eats their bones." Mr. Ladysmith smiled on her and agreed, and she smiled in delight at Jan.

Jan, on the other hand, came in for a frown from Mr. Ladysmith. This was twice in three days that she hadn't done her homework.

"What was all that about ?" she demanded scowling of Chris at lunch.

"It was about Slith," Chris said. "See, I read Pombo, and it mentioned Slith, so I knew Slith was by the same writer--Done Zany. 'The Probable Adventures of the Three Literary Men.'"

Jan hadn't thought of that. She seethed and pouted the rest of the day, feeling jealous, left out, put upon, and vaguely insulted by Mr. Ladysmith and Chris Brinker. At the same time, she found the pranks and simple, rugged jokes of Philly, Bobby, and even BeBe rather childish, at recess. She was the last one out of the room, but for Mr. Ladysmith, who waited, sleepily, as she gathered up her books. Jan paused and glared at him. As she had expected, he had a letter for her parents.

Accepting it, she demanded, "Why don't you sleep at night?" Mr. Ladysmith blinked, smiled faintly. "I am cohabiting with the Muse, and am become a brother to dragons and a companion to owls." Darn him, anyway! Jan took a deep breath, expelled it in disgust, and stomped out, with a final searing glance over-shoulder.

It was Friday, and there was much hope among her friends that the yarding would be ended with the weekend, but no parent had given word yet. Jan tried to join in, but found she didn't much care.

She saw Chris Brinker walking by herself, her head down and her silky hair half-concealing her face, kicking at the loose boards of the boardwalk. Wonder what that feeb is doing tonight, Jan thought. Prob'ly nothing. Just reading. She never got letters.

Jan moved restlessly and irritably around the house till after supper, waiting for the shoe to fall. She was careful to do her homework and dry dishes without being told, but it was with the conviction that nothing would help. Again she found herself drifting off into daydreams. Not till after the dishes were done did Jan's mother quietly ask her to step up to her bedroom. She opened a Bible and took out the pictures Jan had drawn. The most damning one, the one with her nude self and Mr. Ladysmith looking down, was on top. Jan's heart stopped, started up again with a thud that shook her chest.

"Jan, I don't know what's wrong with you. For days now you've been doing your chores badly, and now I find you haven't been doing your homework. You're like a sleepwalker. I have to call your name three times to get your attention. I swear you're as bad as JoAnne, and not even a teenager yet. . . " Jan didn't look up, as More went on in her usual way. How could she not see that that was a picture of Jan and Mr. Ladysmith? It was so obvious, the suit, the mustache, and herself --And the scantily clad nymphs, couldn't she see that they were all Jan, too?

"Well, one thing's for sure. You're to do no more drawing in the evenings, young lady, till you can show me that you've done your homework. Afterward you can draw all you like. . . ."

"Yes, Mom," she said, head hanging but heart beating furiously in relief.

"But if you don't straighten up and fly right, my girl, we'll have no more drawing at all. Remember that!"

"Yes, Mom."

Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know! Jan ran down the hall to her room and flung herself on the bed. The tears were already coming. Butting her head into her pillow, Jan wept extravagantly.

Not draw again? How could her mother even hint at it? They were pictures of someplace a long long way away from here. Someplace Jan knew she would never see. She would spend the rest of her life on Columbia, among people like her mother who didn't understand.

Jan raised her head at that thought and without wiping her tears looked around the room. A blind unreasoning panic, a feeling of being trapped, seized her and she jumped up and rushed around the room in a frenzy, knocking her dolls off the dresser, kicking the beanbag footstool across the room, upsetting the wastebasket, sweeping all the bedclothes off the bed. She finished by running at the door and banging her head against it, as she had done when a child.

"It's all right," she heard her mother say, evidently to her alarmed father, as she sat amid stars on the floor. "She'll be all right in the morning." The blow calmed her, but Jan knew that she was far from being all right. In a further excess of deep, desperate weeping she flung herself onto the bed again, groped for the displaced pillow, and buried her head in it. She awoke sometime before midnight, chilled, groped for the covers, then remembered and came fully awake. The house was silent, and Port Michigan also. Jan wrapped a blanket around herself and stared out the window. Big Moon was less round than it had been two nights ago, but was still very bright and alluring.

Her mother was wrong. Jan knew she was forever changed; she would never be "all right." Never be a fat soul, sleeping in the night. And nobody, nobody, nobody would ever understand her. Then she remembered. Maybe -It wasn't yet midnight. Inn dropped the blanket, opened the window cautiously, then retreated and got her jacket. Outside, across the roof, and down. Again she swung over the fence rather than use the gate. Moving rapidly through the night, Jan felt that she was in her element, that she belonged here. A kind of wild joy surged within her, and when a distant dog howled, she felt like howling back at him and waking a few fat souls. I wonder if Chris Brinker is awake, she thought. Finally she came to the old Gareth house, and crept through the gate with her heart beating fast. And the window was lit.

With a great though unconscious sigh of relief, Jan looked around the yard and was surprised not to see Mr. Ladysmith. Motion within the window attracted her, and she crept across the yard.

He was studying.

Jan was too disappointed to think. He was working away at a computer, and he had two or three books open and unopen around him, and there was a typewriter and a clipboard, and a bunch of notes stuck to a weak-valence board. Studying. Brother to dragons, companion to owls, for that?

Angry, Jan hit the window with her fist, and was gratified to see him jump; a computer stylus went flying. Mr. Ladysmith turned an astonished gaze on her. It was a moment or two before he recovered.

Crossing, he opened the window and copied her attitude: elbows on the sill, chin on fists, his nose pointing down at her nose pointing angrily up. He smiled faintly instead of scowling.

"'Twas even, and the mome raths outgrabe. They'd lost their way home, you see."

"How come you can't sleep?" she demanded irritably, dismissing his nonsense. Mr. Ladysmith offered his hand. "Come in and I'll show you." That's practically the first time he's ever come right out and said what he means, Jan thought, clambering through the window.

He stood in the midst of all his labors and waved his arm. "I'm writing a book," he said.

Jan scowled. "So?"

Mr. Ladysmith turned to her, smiled. "Not like your father's books, nothing practical or sensible. Fiction. Literature, I hope." Her father called his books theses on weather and climate, and they were unutterably boring. Fiction? Jan thought. "Can I see?"

"You may."

Suspended in space within the computer's viewplate she saw: all crude and distorted philosophies, this was, he thought, the worst. If suffering has no purpose, it can have no value. "I do not consider that true religion," he said mildly. But he saw, with a pang, that she did not understand. She recoiled in shock.

"Wow," Jan said. Morn would recoil in shock like that. "I didn't know there was a real live author on all of Columbia, except like Dad."

"Oh, there are a number, mostly men and women with leisure. They write very mild milk-and-water romances, either set on Columbia, or on some never-never-land in space just like Columbia but even sappier."

Jan nodded. "Clover for fat souls."

Startled, his eyebrows moved. "Quite so."

Jan sat down and stared at him. Mr. Ladysmith sat down also and stared back, patient, friendly. Jan didn't speak for a long time, working it out. "Wow," she said at last. "You can go anywhere, be anybody, have all kinds of adventures."

"And be home for dinner," he said, nodding. "Nasty, uncomfortable things, adventures. And you?"

"Me, what?"

"Do you also want to escape from Columbia and the dolts that dwell therein ?" He reached out and gently touched her cheek, and Jan remembered she'd been crying, felt the dried tears. But she was in no wise embarrassed. She looked steadily back at him.

"Well. . . . "

"This past week, I thought it seemed that, oh, you didn't quite know what it was you did want, but that your heart fairly ached, you wanted it so."

"Well, yes. But I don't know about writing."

"Drawing, perhaps. Art. You do well in that class."

"No," she said instantly. Then: "Maybe." The years and the kilometers seemed to stretch before her to the end of time. Places to go, things to see, and all within herself. It was like stowing away on a starship, only she knew all the places she would see would be magic. "And maybe I'll try writing. I like to read. --Not clover," she added hastily.

"No, not clover. Well, lass, Columbia has need for us, though it won't like us much." He grinned at her, like Bobby Wilson getting ready to duck her. Jan grinned back and wriggled all over like Flinders. But in her mind she was Patticake. "Can I read your book?"

"Well, it isn't finished, of course. But there's a hard copy on the desk; you may at least begin to read it."

Jan took it over to the window. There was a wall light there, and pleasantly cool air swirled in. The printscript was titled Long Ago and Far Away. It started in the middle, with a man arguing with his mother about what the neighbors might think. She read only three pages, with mounting joy, before she had to stop, thinking. Someday I'll be doing something like this. Writing or drawing or something. Maybe everything. You hear me, Chris? Well, listen to this.

She stuck her head out the window, looked up at Big Moon, and howled loud enough to wake all the fat souls for miles around. Behind her, Mr. Ladysmith chuckled as he, too, in his way, howled.