Founder Effect

The shop teacher had let Gilberto Pena and Kay Nkwocha stay after class to work on their projects. Gil was nearing twenty, and these days the fiction of schooling him had worn thin. New faces showed up every year, and old ones went away — cured, they said, or at least stabilized. No one would come out and say it, but Gil knew he was the only one they thought was too dangerous ever to be released.

He worked up his courage. "Hey, Kay, could I take a look at what you're doing?"

A guarded look, and a pause. "Yeah, sure, Gil." He went over and was close to her. She wasn't exactly a small girl, but Gil was still more than a head taller. He could smell the shampoo in her dark, wavy hair. "See," she explained, "it's a heat engine, internal combustion. There'll be a piston that goes in this cylinder." It was as long and skinny as a stylus.

"Is this the same kind they used back on Earth?"

"Basically, but it'll have modern digitals. See, here's the cavity for the electronics." Her delicate finger pointed to a palm-sized rectangular box that stuck out from the side of the cylinder. The oil on her hands was a shade darker than her skin.

"You're real creative. Did you study historical designs?"

"A little. I found some plans for some old tools that used one-cylinder engines, but you'd have to be nuts to engineer one the same way today." She seemed to be warming to her subject in spite of herself. "They made some pretty weird stuff. You ever heard of a lawnmower?"

"No, what's that?"

"You grow a field of grass, but you use this tool to cut it back every couple of weeks, so it's like a short haircut."

"But that's not enough time for the crop to flower and ripen, is it? My family used to grow wheat. Earth's climate would have been way better, but —"

"No, they were growing it as a kind of carpet."

"A carpet — they'd step on their crops, on purpose?"

"I told you it was weird."

It seemed unlikely, but they hadn't had to terraform Earth, so there hadn't been any shortage of arable land.

"So you burn fuel with the oxygen in the air?"

"Yeah."

"Dome pressure, or outside?"

"I'm making the interface so you can tune the fuel mixture for either one."

There was an awkward pause. She looked up at his face, and he felt the heat in his cheeks.The whole idea of arranging this situation seemed stupid to him now. He saw her chest rising and falling under the greasy coveralls. It was now or never.

"Let me show you something." He pulled out his calcpad, opened it and laid it on the table of the silent mill. Their bodies were blocking the view of the security cameras. He opened the pad, and inside was an orange poppy, pressed flat. Ag, like shop, was one of the subjects you could repeat for credit. Kay picked it up and laid it in the palm of one hand, looking at him with an expression that didn't seem like anything he'd expected — relief? "Uh, I guess we'd better start cleaning up," he said. "It's getting late." He gathered his calcpad and went to get a broom.

Afterward, Gil cringed every time he thought of the interview in the shop, even though some part of him still hoped for a sign from Kay. The term ended, and she was no longer in shop class at the same time he was. In chapel, Gil sat in the pews, while Kay sang in the choir with the boy altos, closely observed by the security cameras and the big, stern painting of Noah.

He could see now that the way the school had handled the arrival of a female student had been smart. St. Agnes School was for kids with Atavistic Violence Disorder, but they were all medicated, so there wouldn't be any caveman behavior. The surveillance recordings weren't really necessary, and they were mostly a bluff anyway, because it would take too much time to go over them all routinely.

But a girl was a whole different ballgame, because of sex. Gil's therapist had told him that nobody knew the exact genetics of Ham's Curse. Atavism might be recessive or dominant, or it might come from a bunch of different genes. Anyway, Gil could tell they couldn't stand the idea of an atavist boy touching a girl — any girl, even if she was an atavist herself. So they kept her just out of reach. She ate with them, and took classes with them, but in the evening she went back to her own room, which was in a space carved out of teachers' territory just for her.

By now Gil knew the building's ins and outs better than anyone. He tripped a circuit breaker and told Mr. Nguyen, the building manager, that he thought he knew where the problem was. It was Wednesday night, when Mr. Nguyen played bridge over the comm. Gil was dispatched with a toolbelt and Mr. Nguyen's admonition to be careful with AC. Gil dismantled a partition and stepped into the hallway that led to Kay's room.

Knock. Now everything would come crashing down on his head. Kay would scream her head off when the world's only convicted murderer showed up at her door. They would lead him away, very gently and nonviolently, and they would give him meds that would make the ones he was on now seem like a glass of warm milk.

No answer. Knock. There was no camera in the hallway, but his wrist comm would show his location to anyone who bothered to check the logs. He had a pass from Mr. Nguyen, but that wouldn't explain why he was loitering here.

He knocked a third time, louder. He had checked Kay's location before he started, but he checked again. His comm said she was still in her room — or at least, her own comm was.

If she was really in the room, she would assume he was a teacher, and she wouldn't ignore the knocks indefinitely. So she wasn't in the room, and had left her wrist comm behind, which was strictly forbidden. She must be up to something, and he didn't want to interfere, but he had taken big risks to come here, and didn't want to lose what might be his only chance. He decided to walk around the areas that Kay had access to, counting on his toolbelt to bluff his way through if he ran into anyone.

The search didn't take long, because the area she had access to was just a hallway leading to an alcove next to an emergency airlock. The only place she could go was outside, and if she did that it would trigger a security alert when her skinsuit's comm changed its location. Her suit was hanging on the rack in the alcove. He peered through the porthole into the lock and made sure there was nobody in it. Light was streaming in through the porthole in the outer door. He could tell from its blinding brightness that a mirrorsat was passing overhead.

It was later that night, after his roommates had gone to sleep, that he stumbled across the answer to the puzzle. He remembered the light from the mirrorsat. The satellite would have made images of the surface as it passed over. On his tablet he brought up views of the surface outside the airlock, from the time when he had been searching for Kay. A tiny black dot was moving around on the background of ice and dirt outside the school. He backed up and started the sequence again from an earlier time. The dot came out of the airlock, went to the garbage container, and then went back to the airlock. There was no other explanation: Kay had gone out without a suit.

He commed her in text mode. The call would be logged and recorded.

[Gil? It's late.]

[Sorry. I had an idea about that integral you were trying to do.] Gil's calculus was almost nonexistent, and Kay knew it.

[?]

[You know, the one with the unknown in it. Anyway, sorry, I shouldn't have bothered you so late. I should have talked to you earlier in the day. Nice day today. Not too cold.] He waited, and she didn't send anything back. [I guess it would be easier to show you in person, but I don't want to butt in if you want to solve it yourself.]

He waited again, and this time she was the one who broke the pause. [Maybe you could give me a pointer. Thanks, Gil.]

[Good night.]

[Night.]

He took off his wrist comm and stuck it under his blankets, then slipped out again through the partition. Kay let him into her tiny room. She sat on the only chair, which left the bed for him. He pointed at his ear and raised his eyebrows.

"No, I'm pretty sure the room's not audioed," Kay said.

"Okay. Like I said, I don't want to stick my nose in your business."

"But?"

"But I care about you. Look, you know I wasn't raised in the domes."

"Yeah."

"So I have some experience that you don't. Anoxia is dangerous. It sneaks up on you. You get stupid and silly, and the whole time you think you're acting normal."

"What makes you think I might be exposed to anoxia?"

"You might want to wear a white hat next time. You really stand out against the ice, in an overhead view."

"Oh. I guess I'm not as smart as I thought I was." She gave a sickly smile and didn't volunteer anything further.

"Kay, you don't have to tell me what's up if you don't want to, but I just don't think you're taking the danger seriously enough. Look, this isn't going to improve your opinion of me, but maybe you'd better hear the story of how I was convicted of killing my father."

Her eyes widened. "I —"

"It's relevant. Listen for a minute." He took a deep breath. "My dad had the world's biggest, baddest case of AVD, but he was never diagnosed or treated. A farm's not like a dome, where they keep close tabs on people. One night we had to go outside, and he got mad about something and started swinging a hammer at me. I tried to wrestle it away from him, and we fell down on the ice together. It was all pretty confusing, and I can't be totally sure what happened. I ended up back inside, and I waited for him to come in, but he never did. When they found him, there was a big crack in his helmet. He still could have just walked back. It wasn't far, maybe fifty meters, but the anoxia messed him up. From the trail in the snow, they figured he'd been crawling around in circles."

"But — that's not really murder!"

"Tell that to the tribunal," Gil said, but he was glad she had said so. He had tried many times to decipher those events, to decipher his own nature. "The point is, you could pull your stunt nine times in a row, and the tenth time not make it back because your brain starts chasing pixies. And anyway, why are you doing it?" He pleaded with his hands. "What's in the garbage container that you want?"

"You said you didn't want to stick your nose in."

"I don't want to, but I have to." He stood up, his big body filling the cramped space. "Don't you see?" He pounded his fist into his palm — his father's gesture. "There's nothing in my life, nothing I care about. I want to protect you."

Kay put her finger to her lips. He realized that he had raised his voice, and that his face was getting wet. She stood and put her arms around him, her head on his chest.

"Gil, I care about you too." He felt her words through his chest. "You might be the only good man I've ever known on this messed up world." He knew that couldn't be true, but it felt good to have her in his arms anyway. "I still don't know you that well, Gil — but I don't want you to get hurt either." She stepped back, still holding one of his hands. "I've been going to the garbage container to get food. Do you know the food is drugged?"

"What? They give me my meds as pills."

"Me too, but those are just the personalized ones, like if you're on antidepressants or something. The general ones are in the food: antiaggressives mainly, but some other stuff, too, I think. Once you're a certain age, it gets impractical to force you to take pills if you don't want to. You can put them under your tongue and pretend to swallow, or there are a million other tricks. Can you imagine a bunch of regular aggression-averse people wrestling an atavist down on his back and forcing a pill down his throat? Drugging the food makes it easy. In the refectory I take small portions and pick at my food. Then afterward I throw it back up in the toilet. The teachers' food doesn't have the drugs in it, so I find their food garbage and eat it."

"But why? Don't you want to be normal?"

"I am normal — we're normal. Normal human beings like the ones who lived on Earth."

"I mean normal like everybody else, not like a bunch of gorillas who slagged their own planet!"

"A bunch of gorillas that included Socrates and Simon Bolivar."

"If they were so great, how come God had to wipe them out and start all over again?"

"This society didn't get created by a miracle, Gil. Have you ever heard of the founder effect?"

"No."

"Don't pout at me. Suppose a storm blows a bird to an isolated island, where that species has never lived before. The bird lays some eggs there, and these birds succeed in their new environment. Now if that mother bird has something unusual about her, the shape of her beak or the way she sings her song or something — all the birds on that island are going to end up with that, right?"

"Okay."

"Okay. Now put yourself in the shoes of those nasty neanderthals back on old Earth, who are trying to colonize a moon called Europa. Do they just pick a bunch of candidates randomly?"

"No, the Arks were only for the chosen few. 'Like Noah, perfect in their generation.'"

"Right, but try to imagine what that means without the religious sugar on top, okay? What criteria do they use to pick the colonists? Well for one thing, these people are going to have to live together in close quarters, without getting so annoyed at each other's body odor that they settle it with knives and clubs, right? And they'll be crammed together like that for centuries, vulnerable and just barely surviving, while the terraforming gets going. So you give these people all kinds of psychological tests. You try to pick the ones that are smart, and brave, but you also pick the ones that won't try to solve their problems with violence, no matter how mad they get."

"So you're saying we're like the birds?"

"No, I'm saying the people outside this jail are like the birds. We're the dangerous throwbacks, remember? That's something for you to think about, all right? I think you'd better go now. You're taking a big risk by being here — they're afraid of you, you know."

Two days later Kay missed morning roll call. Her suit's location signal had cut off in the middle of the night. The school's precautions against escape had always been fairly lax. The location was isolated, and there was nowhere to go on foot. If Kay's plan was to make her own way outside the domes and survive indefinitely in the partially terraformed wilderness, Gil didn't think her chances were good. He and his father had known some independent plainsmen: leather-faced hermits, with strong backs and bad teeth.

Gil was assigned to a search party with two other boys. It was late afternoon outside, and temperatures were dropping. The school was on the equatorial canal, and it was likely that Kay would have headed either east or west along it. Gil's party went east.

The search parties — all city boys, except for Gil — quickly lost their enthusiasm as the evening cold showed its teeth. His two companions began to lag behind. He led them into a stand of old steelwood trees that were tall enough to hide him, and then he pulled ahead some more. The compressor brought the smell of pearlwort and rich dirt into his helmet. He reached into his belly pack and pulled out the pair of wire cutters he had brought. Reaching over his shoulder, he cut off his suit's radio antenna. He trotted away through the trees at the greatest speed he could manage without letting his strides take him above the treetops.

He emerged from the trees and stopped, looking out over the icy plain to the east. The sun had almost set behind him, and the shadows of the trees stretched out grotesquely across the ice, their leaves fluttering gently. If Kay had indeed chosen to head east, then this was the time when her shadow would be the easiest to see, especially if she was moving.

The sky lost what little color it had had, and the stars came out. He cleared his helmet's polarizers. In its rear-view mirror, a bright light on the ground caught his eye. He had taken plenty of teasing about the helmet mirror from the other boys at the school, but now he was glad to have it. A mirrorsat was about to pass overhead, and its light was sweeping up behind him. He made his helmet's polarizers dark again with a voice command, to avoid being dazzled.

When the flash arrived, Gil was undistracted by the light, the blast of heat, or the sudden clouds of mist that came roiling out of the frost. In the harsh light, he saw motion by the bank of the canal, about a kilometer ahead: Kay. By the time the light had gone away again, the landscape was shrouded in a thick fog. As the air cooled the fog turned to snow. Gil turned on his chest lamp and bounded over the landscape like a gazelle.

The snow thinned out, and the full disk of Ganymede rose on the horizon ahead. He took a long leap, and his thoughts drifted to what Kay had been wearing the last time he'd seen her, and how her hair had been arranged. He was at the top of his arc when he heard a bang and then felt something whack his left foot. The impact set him tumbling slowly. He landed on his back, bounced, tumbled, and skidded to a stop in a patch of hairgrass. He'd been hit by something, but it had only cracked the thick insulation on the bottom of his boot. He pulled himself into a crouch and up onto his feet, looking around in the dim Ganymede-light. The realization came to him: Kay had shot at him with a gun. Where was she? Without working radios, there was no way to reason with her. This was what she was like, unmedicated: a psychotic killer. He could try to run, but he might blunder right into her, or she might shoot him in the back.

Could he find a place to hide? Over there was the canal. He couldn't see down to the water's edge from here, which might mean that if he went down to the shore, Kay wouldn't be able to see him. He ran to it. The shore was a steeply sloping, glossy plane of ice, the surface of the canal still liquid. He saw a big, dense patch of reeds along the bank and crept down to it over a pile of rocks. There was ice at the base of the reeds, but the stalks were alive and green, so there must be liquid water underneath. He stepped cautiously into the thicket, and his feet broke through the crust immediately. He waded out into the reeds until he was in water almost up to his knees and could no longer see the banks. The cold started to seep through the insulation of his suit. His suit's heater kicked on at full power, but most of that wattage was being dissipated in a futile attempt to heat the canal. Waves of pain began washing over his feet and calves.

Ganymede mounted higher in the sky, and time passed. Mercifully, his feet went numb. He debated the relative merits of dying from a projectile in his back, or as he was — would he fall unconscious and slump into the water, or would he be frozen upright, like a statue? Another mirrorsat arrived, and its light splashed over the canal. He felt vulnerable and exposed. Should he run for it? In the bright light, he knew he could cover ground fast, and probably outdistance Kay rapidly. She wasn't experienced with surface work. He was still debating the decision when his eye picked out motion through the reeds. She was at the crest of the canal's bank.

He took a deep breath and stumped the three meters back to the shore on his numb feet, hoping she wouldn't be looking in his direction to see the reeds swaying. He reached the rocks that he'd climbed down along and lay flat behind the biggest one he could find. The circulation started coming back into his feet.

He peeked between the rocks. Kay stood at the top of the bank, her weapon unholstered and pointed at the sky. He recognized it: it was the "engine" she'd been building. She was shuffling awkwardly along the slippery crest of the bank. Her gaze swung past him, then back, and he knew she had caught a glimpse of him through the rocks. She brought the gun down. He scrambled up the rocks as fast as he could. When he reached the top of the bank without feeling a bullet, he turned to look at her. Her knees were bent, and she was tottering on the smooth ice. She lost her footing, tipped over, flailed, and went sliding down the icy bank and into the canal.

The gun had gone flying, and he hadn't seen where it had come down. He didn't know if she would realize that she should turn off her compressor, which would now be sucking in water. This was his chance to escape, but he hesitated. He could see her under the water: thrashing, obviously disoriented.

He climbed back down the rocks and crawled along the slippery shore to where she was. He could see her under the surface, and she wasn't moving anymore. Wishing for a rope, he turned off his compressor, sat down with his legs in the water, and let himself slip in. The bubble of her helmet was almost invisible in the water, and for a moment he wondered whether she'd somehow managed to undo the safety catches and take it off. The cold was rapidly seeping in through the insulation of his suit now. He'd better do this quickly, or he'd end up dead in the canal along with her. He stretched an arm down and caught her wrist in his hand. Now how was he going to get back to the shore? He thought he'd seen a vid once of someone swimming in liquid water, and it seemed like they used their arms to propel themselves, but he couldn't do that without letting go of Kay. Instead he tried kicking his legs and succeeded in propelling them back to the beach.

Her helmet was more than half full of water. Her compressor was still running, and a stream of water was now shooting out of the exhaust. Air was bubbling up inside her helmet. He turned her so that her mouth and nose were out of the water, saw that she was breathing, but she didn't seem aware of her surroundings. Her gauntlet showed a steady pulse, blood oxygen low but rising. He awkwardly pulled her limp form up into his lap to get her out of contact with the ice, and settled down to wait.

After a while, she stirred, and looked around in bewilderment.

"Gil?" He could hear her faintly through the air outside.

He touched his helmet to hers. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, I...was it you I was shooting at?"

"Yeah. Who'd you think it was?"

"Onoh."

"Onoh?" He remembered an unpleasant boy, newly arrived at the school the previous day. "Why'd you want to kill him?"

"He wants to kill me. Have you seen him?"

"No."

"We'd better get moving before he comes along," she said. She was agitated. "Where's the gun?"

"Just a minute. Maybe you'd better explain to me what's going on. Your engine was really a gun."

"Oh, Gil, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I shot at you, and I'm sorry there isn't time to talk things over. They want to kill me, and that puts you in danger too."

"They?"

"Gil, can we please just get off of this exposed ice, I mean right now? It's not safe here."

"Okay." Maybe if he went along with her he could talk her down from this jag she was on.

The climbed up the rocks. "All right," she said, shouting so that he could hear her, "hang on a sec while I find the gun." She fiddled with her gauntlet, and there was a pinging sound. They turned to look in the direction the sound had come from, and Gil's more practiced eye was the first to pick out the little black shape against the dirty snow.

He trotted over and picked it up. "Is this thing loaded?"

"Always assume the gun is loaded. Gimme!" The gun was still pinging.

"No."

"Flood it, Gil, we don't have time to mess around."

Gil didn't let the sacrelige distract him. "I'm not messing around."

"Gil, I'm an idiot, okay? But you've never even fired a gun. A pistol isn't an easy weapon to shoot accurately with."

"I'm more worried about how not to hit anyone. I'm going to throw it in the canal."

"Wait! If we're unarmed, what in Noah's naked ass do you intend to do when Onoh shows up?"

"Kay, how long have you been off your meds?"

"Yeah, there's that, too. You haven't been unmedicated for very long. You wouldn't be able to shoot him, even if you wanted to."

"I don't want to, and anyway that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is that you're not thinking straight. Kay, nobody is out to get you. Onoh isn't out to get you. Onoh doesn't have a gun."

"Because there aren't any guns on Europa."

"Right."

"You're holding one." Gil didn't know what to say to that. "You know I'm good at the engineering stuff, but do you really think I could invent a practical, working design for a totally modern projectile gun? No way. And this is a modern design, with a radio interface and everything. It's a monkey copy of one I used before."

"So you're saying this was designed here on Europa? That's crazy! Nobody who wasn't an atavist would even have a use for such a thing."

"Gil, being a so-called normal doesn't stop anyone from doing bad things. It just means they're averse to aggression. A normal designed that gun. A normal just wouldn't be able to overcome his inhibitions against pulling the trigger."

"So what's the point of making a tool that you can't even bring yourself to use?"

"You hand it to an atavist, maybe a young kid who hasn't been in treatment yet, because she hasn't been diagnosed. Then she uses it. Very useful for coups, assassinations, et cetera."

"Ham and Canaan! So it's a war?" It felt strange to say the word. "You're on one side, and Onoh's on the other?"

"No. The same faction of normals used us both, but I didn't like being used. Now give me that gun and get lost!"

Gil saw a tear run down her cheek and pressed his advantage. "I saw Onoh's suit when they brought him in. He has a yellow shoulder patch. He knows what he's doing on the surface, and you don't. That red patch on yours means you've logged less than a hundred hours of surface time. If I leave you out here, you don't stand a chance against him. I left someone on the surface once before, and I'm not going to do it again." Plus you went off your meds and now you're paranoid and violent.

She turned away from him and put her fists on her hips. Faintly, he heard her count to ten, and then she turned around again. "Okay, Gil, if you want to think you're being gallant and protecting me...I just want you to know that I don't buy all that patriarchal stuff they indoctrinated us with. And don't throw the gun in the canal, all right? It could come in handy. I have its digitals coded for half a dozen dirty tricks that could save our skins."

Gil stowed the gun in his belly pack without any further discussion, and they set off, moving slowly at his insistence, for a decommissioned shelter he knew of that wasn't marked on the standard charts. Whenever a mirrorsat came overhead they froze in their tracks to keep from being seen, while the heat blasted the landscape around them. When they had reached the tiny shelter, crawled inside, and shucked their skinsuits, she seemed suddenly very small and vulnerable. Her suit had given her some nasty blisters, which she had never mentioned during the long hike.

The shelter's stock of food was old but still edible. Kay ate ravenously. Between bites, she asked, "When's the last time you ate?"

"I dunno. I'm not that hungry."

"That's not what I mean. I mean we'll be seeing the unmedicated you pretty soon. What's he like?"

Gil didn't answer immediately, and Kay went back to her food.

"Bad," he said after a while.

"What's bad?"

"Me, unmedicated." He tried to say it in a straightforward way, without betraying the confusion he had been wrestling with. "Look, Kay, violence is wrong. Only animals use violence. We can go back. We can live like civilized people."

Kay looked at him for a long time, with a sad look in her eyes. "I'm sorry, Gil. You might have had a choice at one time, but it's gone now, and it's my fault. To them, we're culls. You're right, in a way — they do define us as animals. Now that they know we're hard-core atavists, we're in the same category as the chicken they used to make this soup."

"Where have you been intending to go?" She had accepted his plan to come to this shelter, and they had never discussed what she'd been planning before he got involved.

"We've got a whole planet."

"Most of it's not that hospitable."

"But some people live independently, right? It can be done. And anyway, I didn't have much of a choice. If I'd stayed at the school, they would have found me one morning with my neck broken."

They had enough food to last them for the rest of the 43-hour night. They talked, ate, and talked some more — it felt strange to Gil to be able to say whatever he liked, with no snoopers listening in.

They slept. A squall woke Gil, and when he opened his eyes he saw Kay staring at him with the intensity of a bird. She reached out and put her hand on his hip.

The storm died down, and when the sky was beginning to show signs of lightening, they went outside and sat on the shelter's ground-insulated porch.

"When's the last time you ate school food?" Kay asked.

"Tuesday night, I think. I just had suit syrup after that, and then the rations here in the shelter."

"Congratulations, I think you're officially unmedicated." She took his hand, and laced her gloved fingers between his. A sizzle went through him — as strong as if the gloves hadn't been in the way, as if he'd never touched her before, and the night before had never happened. "You seem to have passed through it okay. Look at that pretty blue star."

"That's Earth."

"Oh. You know, we don't have to make the same mistakes they did. There was a time when we old-style Homo sapiens lived in harmony, and in balance with nature. We're not naturally bad, any more than a tiger is."

"Was. You really believe that about harmony and balance?"

"Maybe. At least some of us turn out good. I'm glad it's you I ended up here with." She put an arm around him. "You're my noble savage. I don't think I could ever care for a normal. I never want to have anything to do with them again."

A whirlpool of emotions was twisting inside Gil's chest. He couldn't remember when anyone had ever suggested that there was anything at all worthwhile about him, and Kay seemed to be drawn to the very part of him that made him the most afraid. A mirrorsat came overhead, and they basked in its warmth side by side, their helmets touching.

He saw something move in the garishly illuminated trees. "Did you see that?"

"What?"

"Stay here a sec." He still had the gun in his belly pack. He had let Kay show him everything about her toy, but had never seriously considered using it. Now he knew that he had to protect her, no matter what. He glimpsed the figure again through the trees, and circled around behind it. He took off the gun's safety, and held it pointing at the sky, with his finger resting on the trigger guard. It was a man or a boy, with a yellow patch on the shoulder of his suit. Onoh.

He imagined the scene: Onoh dead, and himself a hero. He hoped desperately that it was in his nature to do what he had to do.

He followed him to the edge of the clearing where the shelter was, and saw that Kay was no longer on the porch, although she was undoubtedly watching from a good hiding place. By now she would have seen the interloper's face.

Gil yelled to be heard through the thin air. "Put your hands up, Onoh, and turn around."

He turned around, but he didn't have his hands up. "You gonna shoot me, kid?"

Gil brought the gun down level and aimed it at Onoh's chest. He put his finger on the trigger. "I said put your hands up."

"I don't think you're gonna shoot me, are you?" He began walking toward Gil.

"Stop!"

"If I don't, will you shoot me?" Onoh grinned, and his teeth flashed white in the mirrorsat's light.

"Don't make me." Gil saw Onoh's muscles tense. He willed himself to pull the trigger, but his finger refused to bend.

Onoh covered the remaining distance between them in a single leap, bent Gil's wrist to the side, and pulled the gun out of his hand. He turned the gun on Gil. "Kay made this, didn't she? I'm glad you gave it to me, 'cause someone could have got hurt. These things weren't made for normals like you. Now come on and walk in front of me to the shelter."

If he waited for his chance, they might still be able to get the drop on Onoh. He walked in front of Onoh into the clearing, and caught a glimpse of Kay huddled in the deep shadows underneath the porch. If he threw himself on Onoh and knocked him down, Onoh might be able to shoot him, but then Kay might be able to surprise Onoh and disarm him.

He knew now that he was a normal. He hadn't intentionally killed his father, and he would never be able to hurt anyone intentionally. I don't think I could ever care for a normal, she'd said. I never want to have anything to do with them again. It had only been a dream that Kay cared for him the way he cared for her. Now the dream was over. He was ready to give his life for her.

They were close enough now that he could pick out Kay's head and arms in the shadows. Onoh would see her any second now. Gil got ready to turn around. Then he saw Kay break her statue-like pose and do something to her wrist gauntlet. There was an explosion behind him. When he turned around he saw Onoh still standing, but a fountain of blood was spouting from his wrist, and his visor had been shattered by the blast.

Kay's voice came faintly. "Gil, are you all right?"

He couldn't bring himself to turn and look at her. Onoh's stiff body slowly toppled onto the ice.

Ben Crowell teaches physics at a community college in Southern California. He is an amateur violist and likes to go backpacking in the Sierra.