Who"s to say which is more worthwhile, pushing atom bombs far out into s.p.a.ce or one of these little things I do? Well, I do know which is more important, but if I were the junco I"d like being rescued.

Sometimes Grandma goes out, though rarely. She gets to feeling it"s a necessity. She wears sungla.s.ses and a big floppy hat and scarves that hide her wrinkled-up face and neck. She still rides a bicycle. She"s so wobbly it"s scary to see her trying to balance herself down the road. I can"t look. She likes to bring back ice-cream for me, maybe get me a comic book and a licorice stick to chew on as I read it. I suppose in town they just take her for a crazy lady, which I guess she is.

When visitors come to take a look at her I always say she isn"t home, but where else would a very, very, very old lady be but mostly home? If she knew people had come she"d have hobbled out to see them and probably scared them half to death. And they probably wouldn"t have believed it was her, anyway. Only the president of the Town and Country Bank-she rescued him a long time ago-I let himin. He"ll sit with her for a while. He"s old but of course not as old as she is. And he likes her for herself.

They talked all through his rescue and really got to know each other back then. They talked about tomato plants and wildflowers and birds. When she rescued him they were flying up with the wild geese.

(They still talk about all those geese they flew with and how exciting that was with all the honking and the sound of wings flapping right beside them. I get goose b.u.mps-geese b.u.mps?-just hearing them talk about it.) She should have married somebody like him, potbelly, pock-marked face and all. Maybe we"d have turned out better.

I guess you could say I"m the one that killed her-caused her death, anyway. I don"t know what got into me. Lots of times I don"t know what gets into me and lots of times I kind of run away for a couple of hours. Grandma knows about it. She doesn"t mind. Sometimes she even tells me, "Go on. Get out of here for a while." But this time I put on her old tights and one of the teeny tiny bras. I don"t have b.r.e.a.s.t.s yet so I stuffed the cups with Kleenex. I knew I couldn"t do any of the things Grandma did, I just thought it would be fun to pretend for a little while.

I started out toward the hill. It"s a long walk but you get to go through a batch of pinons. But first you have to go up an arroyo. Grandma"s cape dragged over the rocks and sand behind me. It was heavy, too. To look at the satiny red outside you"d think it would be light, but it has a felt lining. "Warm and waterproof," Grandma said. I could hardly walk. How did she ever manage to fly around in it?

I didn"t get very far before I found a jackrabbit lying in the middle of the arroyo half dead (but half alive, too), all bit and torn. I"ll bet I"m the one that scared off whatever it was that did that. That rabbit was a goner if I didn"t rescue it. I was a little afraid because wounded rabbits bite. Grandma"s cape was just the right thing to wrap it in so it wouldn"t.

Those jackrabbits weigh a lot. And with the added weight of the cape....

Well, all I did was sprain my ankle. I mean I wasn"t really hurt. I always have the knife Grandma gave me. I cut some strips off the cape and bound myself up good and tight. It isn"t as if Grandma has a lot of capes. This is her only one. I felt bad about cutting it. I put the rabbit across my shoulders. It was slow going but I wasn"t leaving the rabbit for whatever it was to finish eating it. It began to be twilight.

Grandma knows I can"t see well in twilight. The trouble is, though she used to see like an eagle, Grandma can"t see very well anymore either.

She tried to fly, as she used to do. She did fly. For my sake. She skimmed along just barely above the sage and bitter-brush, her feet snagging at the taller ones. That was all the lift she could get. I could see, by the way she leaned and flopped like a dolphin, that she was trying to get higher. She was calling, "Sweetheart. Sweetheart. Where are yooooowwww?" Her voice was almost as loud as it used to be. It echoed all across the mountains.

"Grandma, go back. I"ll be all right." My voice can be loud, too.

She heard me. Her ears are still as sharp as a mule"s.

The way she flew was kind of like she rides a bicycle. All wobbly. Veering off from side to side, up and down, too. I knew she would crack up. And she looked funny flying around in her print dress. She only has one costume and I was wearing it.

"Grandma, go back. Please go back."

She wasn"t at all like she used to be. A little fall like that from just a few feet up would never have hurt her a couple of years ago. Or even last year. Even if, as she did, she landed on her head.

I covered her with sand and brush as best I could. No doubt whatever was about to eat the rabbit would come gnaw on her. She wouldn"t mind. She always said she wanted to give herself back to the land. She used to quote, I don"t know from where, "All to the soil, nothing to the grave." Getting eaten is sort of like going to the soil.

I don"t dare tell people what happened-that it was all my fault-that I got myself in trouble sort of on purpose, trying to be like her, trying to rescue something.

But I"m not as sad as you might think. I knew she would die pretty soon anyway and this is a betterway than in bed looking at the ceiling, maybe in pain. If that had happened, she wouldn"t have complained. She"d not have said a word, trying not to be a bother. n.o.body would have known about the pain except me. I would have had to grit my teeth against her pain the whole time.

I haven"t told anybody partly because I"m waiting to figure things out. I"m here all by myself, but I"m good at looking after things. There are those who check on us every weekend-people who are paid to do it. I wave at them. "All okay." I mouth it. The president of the Town and Country Bank came out once. I told him Grandma wasn"t feeling well. It wasn"t exactly a lie. How long can this go on? He"ll be the one who finds out first-if anybody does. Maybe they won"t.

I"m nursing my jackrabbit. We"re friends now. He"s getting better fast. Pretty soon I"ll let him go off to be a rabbit. But he might rather stay here with me.

I"m wearing Grandma"s costume most of the time now. I sleep in it. It makes me feel safe. I"m doing my own little rescues as usual. (The vegetable garden is full of happy weeds. I keep the bird feeder going.

I leave sc.r.a.ps out for the skunk.) Those count-almost as much as Grandma"s rescues did. Anyway, I know the weeds think so.

Snow in the Desert

NEAL ASHER.

Neil Asher (~nealasher) lives in Chelmsford, England. His short fiction has been published for several years in the UK small press. Books include Mindgames: Fool"s Mate (1993), The Parasite & The Engineer (1997) Africa Zero (2001), and Runcible Tales (1999). The aforementioned are all short story collections and novellas. His first novel, Gridlinked, a kind of James Bond s.p.a.ce opera, was published in the UK in 2001, and his second, The Skinner, in 2002.

Both books are set in the same future-the "runcible universe," where matter transmitters called runcibles link the settled worlds-and are forthcoming in the U.S.

"My aim is to entertain," he says, "not blind people with my brilliance. I"m from the school of Arnold Schwartzenegger SF."

"Snow in the Desert," published in Spectrum SF, where several of Asher"s stories have appeared, is proof that s.p.a.ce opera in the most traditional sense (related to the western) is still being written with verve and sincerity. It certainly is hyperbolic. Our hero, a long-lived albino gunslinger, is hiding out on a frontier planet because there is a bounty price on his b.a.l.l.s. Everyone wants his genetic code because he may be the only immortal human. It is interesting to compare this to the Moorc.o.c.k story on page 458.

A sand shark broke through the top of the dune, only to be s.n.a.t.c.hed by a crab-bird and shredded in mid-air. Hirald squatted down, wrapping her cloak around her and pulling up the hood. The chameleon cloth shaded to match the violet sand, leaving only her Toshiba goggles and the blunt snout of her singun visible. It was a small crab bird, but she had quickly learned never to underestimate them. Should the prey be too large for it to kill, the bird would take pieces instead. No motile source of protein was too large to attack. The shame was that all the life-forms on Vatch were based on non-Terran proteins, so to a crab-bird, human flesh was completely without nourishment.

The bird stripped the shark of its blade-legs and armored mandibles and flew off with the bleeding and writhing torso, probably to feed to its chick. Hirald stood up and reappeared; a tall woman in a tight-fitting body-suit, webbed with cooling veins and hung with insulated pockets. On her back she carried a desert survival pack, to create the right impression. Likewise, the formidable singun went into a b.u.t.ton-down holster that looked as if it might hold only a simple projectile weapon. She removed her goggles and mask, tucking them away in one of her many pockets before moving on across the sand. Her thin features, blue eyes, and long blond hair were exposed to oven temperatures and skin-flaying ultraviolet. So it had been for many weeks now. Occasionally she drank some water, just in case someone was watching.

He was called, inevitably, Snow, but with his mask and dust robes it was not immediately evident that he was an albino. The mask, made from the sh.e.l.l of a terrapin, was what identified him. That, and a tendency to leave corpses behind. The current reward for his stasis-preserved t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es was twenty thousand shillings, or the equivalent value in copper or manganese or other precious metals. Many had tried for that reward, and such was their epitaph: they tried.

Snow understood that there might be bounty-hunters waiting at the water station. They would have weapons, strength, and skill. Balanced against this was the crippling honor code of the Andronache.

Snow had all the former and none of the latter. Born on Earth so long ago that he doubted his memories, he had long since dispensed with anything that might impede his survival. Morality, he often argued, is a purely human invention, only to be indulged in times of plenty. Another of his little aphorisms ran something along the lines of: "If you"re up s.h.i.t Creek without a paddle, don"t expect the coastguard." His contemporaries on Vatch never knew what to make of that one, unsurprisingly as Vatchians had no use for words like creek, paddle or coast.

The station was a metallic ovoid mounted ten meters above the ground on a forest of scaffolding.

Nailing it to the ground was the silvery tube of the geothermal energy tap that powered the trans.m.u.ter-which made it possible for humans to exist on this practically waterless planet. The trans.m.u.ter took complex compounds, stripped them of their elementary hydrogen, and combined that with the abundant oxygen given off by the dryform algae that turned all the sands of Vatch violet. Water was the product, but there were many interesting by-products: rare metals and strange silica compounds were among the planet"s main exports.

As he topped the final dune Snow raised his image-intensifier and scanned ahead. The station was truly a small city, the center of commerce, the center of life. He frowned under his mask. Unfortunately, he needed water for the last stage of his journey, and this was the only place he could get it.

Snow strode down the face of the dune to where a dusty track snaked toward the station. By the roadside a water-thief lay dying at the bottom of a condensation jar. His blistered fingers scratched at the hot gla.s.s. Snow pa.s.sed by, ignoring him. It was a harsh punishment, but how else to treat someone who regarded his fellow human beings as no more than walking water-flasks? As he neared the station, cries from the rookery of hawkers and stall-holders in the ground city reached out to him, and he could see the buzz of activity in the scaffold maze. Soon he entered the noisy life of the ground city; a little after that he pa.s.sed through the moisture lock of the Sand House.

A waiter spoke to Snow, "My pardon, master. I must see your tag. The Androche herself has declared the law enforceable by a two-month branding. The word is that too many outlaws now survive on the fringe." The man could not help staring at Snow"s pink eyes and bloodless face.

"No problem, friend." Snow fumbled through his robes to produce his micro-etched ident.i.ty tag and handed it over. The waiter glanced at the briefly revealed leather-clad stump that terminated Snow"s left arm, and pretended not to notice. He put the tag through his portable reader and was much relieved when no alarm sounded. Snow was well aware that not everyone was checked like this, only the more suspicious-looking customers.

"What would you like, master?"

"A liter of chilled lager."

The waiter looked at him doubtfully.

"Which I will pay for now," Snow added, handing over a ten shilling note. The waiter, obviously alarmed at such a large sum in cash, hurried off with it as quickly as he could. Many eyes followed his progress when he returned with a liter of lager in a thermos stein with combination locked top, for here was an indication of wealth.

Snow would not have agreed. He had worked it out. A liter of water would have cost only two shillings less, and the water lost through sweat evaporation little different. Two shillings, plus a little, for imbibing fluid in a much more pleasant form.

He had nearly finished his liter and was relishing the sheer cellular pleasure of rehydration when the three entered the Sand House. He recognized them as killers immediately, but before paying the slightestattention to them he drained every last drop of lager from the frictionless vessel.

"You are Snow, the albino," the first said, standing before his table. Snow observed her and felt a leaden inevitability. Even after all these years he could not shake his aversion to killing women-or this time, young girls. She could not have been more than twenty. She stood before him attired in monofilament coveralls and weapons harness. Her face was elfin under a head of cropped, black hair spiked out with goldfleck grease.

"No, I"m not," he said, and turned his attention elsewhere.

"Don"t f.u.c.k with me," she said with a tiredness beyond her years. "I know who you are. You are an albino and your left hand is missing."

He returned his attention to her. "My name is Jelda Conley. People call me Whitey. I have often been confused with this Snow you refer to, and it was on one such occasion that I lost my hand. Now please leave me alone."

The girl stepped back, confused. The Andronache honor code did not allow for creative lying. Snow glanced past her and noted one of her companions speaking to the owner, who had sent the nervous waiter over. The lies would not be enough. He watched while the owner called over the waiter and checked the screen of his tag reader. The companion approached the girl, whispered in her ear.

"You lied to me," she said.

"No I didn"t."

"Yes you did!"

This was getting ridiculous. Snow stared off into the distance and ignored her.

"I challenge you," the girl said.

There, it was said. Snow pretended he had not heard her.

"I said, "I challenge you!"."

By the code she could now kill him. It was against the law but accepted practice. Snow felt a sinking sensation as she stepped back.

"Stand and face me, coward."

With a tiredness that was wholly genuine Snow rose to his feet. She s.n.a.t.c.hed her slammer. Snow reacted. She hit the floor on her back, the front of her monofilament coverall punctured and a smoking hole between her pert little b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Snow stepped past the table, past her, and was almost at the moisture lock before anyone could react.

It rested on the violet sands at the edge of a s.p.a.ceport, which was scattered with huge flying-wing shuttles, outbuildings and hangars. It stood between the s.p.a.ceport and the sprawl of Vatchian buildings linked by moisture-sealed walkways and the gla.s.s domes that covered the incongruous green of the parks. And in no way did it resemble any of the structures around it. It could be found on a thousand planets of the human Polity, and it was the reason for the spread of the human race across the galaxy.

The runcible facility was a mirrored sphere fifty meters across, seemingly prevented from rolling away by two L-shaped buffers to either side. All around it, the gla.s.s-roofed embarkation lounges were puddles of light. Within the sphere, the Skaidon gate performed its miracle every few minutes: bringing in quince-mitter travelers from all across the polity, and sending them away again.

Beck stood back from the arrivals" entrance and through it watched the twin horns of the runcible on its dais of black gla.s.s. He watched the shimmer of the cusp between those horns and impatiently checked his watch, not that they could be late-or early. They would arrive on the nanosecond. The runcible AI would see to that. Precisely on time a man stepped through the shimmer, a woman, another man, another woman. They matched the descriptions he had been given, and his greeting was effusive as they came through to the lounge.

"Your transport awaits outside," he told them, hurrying them to exit. Beck"s employer did not want them to stay in the city. He wanted them out, those were Beck"s instructions; among others. Once they were in the hover transport, the man he took to be the leader caught hold of his shoulder.

"The weapons," he said.

"Not here, not here," Beck said nervously, and took the transport out of the city. Out on the sand Beck brought the transport down. Once the four climbed out, he joined them at the back of the vehicle, from which he took a large case. He was sweating, and not just from the heat.

"Here," he said, opening the case.

The man reached inside and took out a small, shiny pistol, snubnosed and deadly-looking.

"The merchant will meet you at the pre-arranged place, if he manages to obtain the information he seeks," Beck said. He did not know where that was, nor what the information was. The merchant had not taken him that far into his trust. It surprised him that he had been allowed even the knowledge that hired killers were on Vatch.

The man nodded as he inspected the pistol, smiled sadly, then pointed the pistol at Beck.

"Sorry," he said.

Beck tried to say something just as he became aware of the arm coming round his face from the man who had moved behind him. A grip like iron closed around his head, locked, wrenched and twisted.

Beck hit the sand with his head at an angle it had never achieved in life. He made some choking sounds, shivered a little, died.

Snow halted as two proctors came in through the lock. They stared past him to the corpse on the floor. The elder of the two, gray-bearded and running to fat, but with weapons that appeared well-used and well looked-after, spoke to him.

"You are Snow," he said.

"Yes," Snow replied. This man was not Andronache.

"A challenge?"

"Yes."

The man nodded, a.s.sessed the two Andronache at the bar, then turned back to the moisture lock. It was not his job to pick up the corpses. There was an organization for that. The girl would be in a condensation jar within the hour.

"The Androche would speak with you. Come with me." To his companion he said, "Deal with it. Her two friends look like they ought to spend a little time in detention."

Snow followed the man outside.

"Why does she want to see me?" he asked as they strode down the scaffolded street.

"I didn"t ask."

Conversation ended there.

The Androche, like all in her position, had apartments in the station she owned. The proctor led Snow to a caged spiral stair and unlocked the gate. "She is above."

As Snow climbed the stair the gate clanged shut behind him.

The stairway ended at a moisture-lock hatch next to which depended a monitor and screen unit.

Snow pressed the call b.u.t.ton and waited. After a few moments a woman with cropped, gray hair and a face that was all hard angles peered out at him.

"Yes?"