I saw  --  her  -- I suppose one must say, but who the hell knows?   Come to think of it, maybe Hell does know.   Anyway, I saw her first in the toilet of a biker bar in a smudge on the map outside of New Tampa.   Beach towns attract all types and this place was no exception.   The biker bar was literally across the street from the lesbian club and green salad bistro.   Tres chic, ne c'est pas?   The lesbians had better music and less smoke, but the bikers had a pool table, so naturally Claudia homed for the higher health risk and male-to-female ratio like a born pigeon.   I didn't belong on either side of the street, but I was Claudia's guest for the week, so I did the polite, playing Ruth to her Naomi.   And thy social cohort shall be my social cohort.

We pushed open a blank wooden door into a cave-like hall and I knew right away that it was a mistake for me to be there.   Introverts really ought not to frequent bars.   Especially INTJ's.   We constitute about one percent of the human race and in a bar we stand out like a pimple on a movie star's nose.   At least, I do.   Psychologically, I don't belong  --  much of anywhere, I guess.   There's something in my personality that brings out dormant qualities in everyone.   Whatever you are squashing down, that's what will come up around me.   This can be a problem in a bar where people are prying the lid off their inhibitions with little chemical crowbars.   Or a small town on the moon where there's only one school.   You get my drift.   That's pretty much why I volunteered for a solo flight to Pluto.   (I might be crazy, but I sure ain't sociable.)

Claudia, of course, whose alcoholic mother turned her loose on the beach from age 3 on up, is now an attractive, tanned widow, about 55 (so who can tell, these days?) with a pleasant, friendly manner.   But for all her casually innocent looks, she has pari-mutuel eyes and sphygmographic guts.   She can size up a man, a make, and a margin before I can blink twice.   She was perfectly at home here.  She gravitated toward a pool table, locked into orbit, and collected a few lesser satellites while I was over asking the bartender for an orange juice, just plain, thank you.   It was really cheap, too, and fresh.   Fresh orange juice on the moon is an unheard of luxury.   I stood around sipping my plain juice, watching the game for a while, devoutly hoping no one would speak to me or require being spoken to.

This was what Claudia called 'showing me the town'.   With long, sweeping glances I took in several views of the Uptown Crowd: mass quantities of dark leather, greasy hair, tattooed appendages, tight skirts hoisted as high up the mizzen mast as they could go without coming abaft the beam.   Not the A-list for a garden party.   Not a soul was drinking tea.

Explicitly bored and vaguely uneasy, I began a conversation with the one person in that room who could be counted on to listen to me: myself.   It was an internal dialogue, of course.  People on the moon who talk out loud to themselves tend to find themselves being interviewed by   large-bodied, official-looking persons wearing crisp blue uniforms or long white coats.   Seventy-five percent of human beings are extroverts.   They actually get energy from being around, interacting with, talking to other people.   They get high, like being on a drug, from socializing.   Weird, but true.

So why was a nice introvert like me angling for a berth on the Mars-Pluto Expeditionary Force?   (I dunno, Josephine, you tell me.)   Well, it's like this (I said to myself), when Mama died in the line of duty up there on Luna Base (you're the luna-base if you ask me  --  why do you want to be locked in a tin can for the next 45 years?   I ask you.)   Shut up, I was talking about Mama and how she wanted so bad to be the first human to set plasticoated foot on the Planet Pluto.   And when she died in that meteorite shower (while saving the lives of 5 other people, for the record), well, it was obvious.   Someone from the family had to step into her size 9's and I was elected.   (Elected by default.   Why can't Joey do it?)   Because he's only 14, you dodo.   (The dodo is extinct because of human arrogance.)   I know, don't remind me.   Passenger pigeons too.   And a lot of other plants, trees and animals that I don't want to think about right now.   So let earth go to the dogs (dogs would take better care of it than most of these sons of bitches)  --  look, earth may die a slow, poisoned death but I'm not going to be around to watch, ok?   I'm going to spend the rest of my life in a tin can, all by myself, going to Pluto, and maybe not coming back.   (You'll get lonesome) I'm an introvert, remember?   (Even introverts need some social outlets  --  or inlets as the case may be.)   So did the Colorado river but that is thoroughly dammed and so am I and so is the planet.   If the Mother is dying, there is nowhere to go except to pay a social call on the Lord of the Underworld.   We're all going to hell, one way or another, so I might as well go direct.   Pluto or bust.   Pluto AND bust.   Single ticket to a lifeless planet, express route please.   Thank you.   (How polite we are.   Even in Hell, good manners are so important.)

Having reached this new low in my meditations, I decided it was time to move around a little.   Claudia was in the midst of an intricately planned shot, obviously well-occupied.   The dance floor, sticky with spilled soda  --  unless it was recycled beer, hard to tell  --   was not inviting.   The potential dance partners were even less so.   Well, as an experienced social avoidant, I know that when there is nowhere else to go, you can always go to the toilet.   I threaded my way to the jane like a Cretan with a clue.

A sweet stench of caked purple chemicals was the olfactory melody to the visual bass of multi-stall, filthy gray metal and grimy linoleum floor.   A utilitarian hymn to the Creator of human refuse.   Evidently, the Feng-Shui principles of interior design had not filtered down into the ranks of armor-plated manufactories and chain-metal decorated road warriors for whom only the sky was a high enough ceiling.   At least this one had unidentifiable brown stains and greenish blobs adhering to its an-acoustic tiles.   I shrugged, thinking with new respect of the ship Inanna's graceful corridors and the clean lines of her sleeping quarters.   One could do worse than spend one's life inside a tin can.   (Have you considered suicide?   It's an even more direct route to the underworld, and far more cost-effective.)   Oh, shut up.   (Manners, manners!)   Speaking of manners, how these folks would function on Luna Base I could not fathom.   The sanitation marshals would beat the living dodo out of anyone who left a toilet like this and then dispose of the person's earthly remains.   Perhaps the Earthlings would adapt?   Humans are said to be very adaptable, but maybe that only applies to infants who absorb their natal environments like Wickier sponge batting absorbs oil spills.   I was born on Earth and I know I have missed her ever since I left for the moon   ...  (I will not, WILL not weep in a biker bathroom until I have washed my damn hands.)   I occupied my whole mind with the task of sanitizing the seat area sufficiently for human use.

Glumly, I came out of my chosen stall, and that was when I first saw Angel.   She was so tall and so white;   I don't mean Caucasian, I mean paper-white   --  when paper was white that is. (The anti-dioxin crowd finally got chlorine regulated as a restricted substance.)   Soft, poreless skin, white as moondust.   If sunlight bleached human skin instead of darkening it, that's what Angel looked like  --  a reversed beach comber.  She wore loose white unisex pajamas with long sleeves and shin-length trousers.   Big loose pockets.   Real cotton, not synth.   Her hair was white too: very short and kind of spiky, standing up on top, innumerably pointed, like wet ruffled feathers or a pale dandelion.   She was splashing water all over her face and head, standing between me and the sink.   She caught sight of me in the unbreakable metal mirror.

"I'll just be a minute," she said.

"No hurry," I said, and I meant it.

  Idly, I wondered if purple chemical cake was better or worse for lungs than second-hand tobacco smoke.   I waited.   Another woman burst in, drunk and swaggering.

"GRROUTtataWAY!" she slurs.

I get out of the way.   She stalks past me on shaky sea legs and goes into a stall.   She doesn't bother to close the door.   Standing, she straddles the seat I had carefully cleaned and hikes her skirt up.   No underclothes.   She lets fly with everything she's got and she's got it all.   As more fundamental human odors overpower the purple cake, I start singing a catchy little tune to myself:  (Urine, Uranus!   Urine-Uranus!   You're in the methane now, and guess what's coming down?)

Angel splutters like people do when they are suppressing laughter and she catches my eye in the mirror.

"Hot out there," she says sociably.   At the time, I thought she meant the bar, but now I'm not so sure.

"Hotter outside, but at least the air is breathable."

"It's better on the beach.   Take a walk?"

"Sure."

I said sure, but why the hell did I?   I'm not sure.   I don't know who this woman is.   A white slaver? A snow addict?   What's the matter with my native caution?   Where is my common sense?   The biker gal is finished and she surges toward me with a belligerent list.

"You don't belong here," she snarls.

Her ancestors were partly African and mine partly Asian, but that isn't what she means and we both know it.   I get the impression she is trying to protect me.   Strange, but true.

"You're quite right," I say politely.

"You beher git outtahere. Gonkhead."

"I was just planning to leave, but I need to check with my friend,"

"FRUCK-ats, your friend!" she starts out, but Angel gently intervenes.

"It's all right, Marjorie."

Biker bitch's glazed eyes loosen their narrow grip on my face and drift way up to meet Angel's big blue ones.   She nods, hypnotized, and comes back down to peer at me.

"You with Angel?"

"Ah, yes, I think so."

"S'good.   Angel's good.   She's take care of you."

She pushes out the swinging door roaring for another beer.   Irrationally, this drunken assurance comforts me.   I check my brain for leaks.   (What planet do you think you're on, space-chick?)   Angel has no objection to meeting my friend, so we both go to the pool tables.

And it's all right, it really is all right.   Claudia recognizes Angel, knows the company dorm where she lives, knows she used to be a social worker and is now into marine ecology.   Everything OK.   (A-OK, ready for launch.   Pluto, here we come.   Pale horse-power of the Apocalypse complete with tax-free Rider!)   Will you shut up?   Please?

Outside the air is hot but clean.   Ever since gasoline got tightly rationed and so many of the coal-burning power stations were wrecked by eco-terrorists and earthquakes, the pollution index has gone down to pre-Chinese war levels.   Florida is lucky, all that sunshine and sea-wind translates into a lot of power cells  --  literally and figuratively.   The space program kept itself together when the economy was falling apart by providing superior wartime surveillance and weaponry.   Calcutta became a Black Hole, but here in NorAm Incorporated, it's have ship will travel.   Once they started mining the asteroids for minerals, they became as entrenched as any of the old style bureaucracies, and now they have the market-muscle to corner everything they need for this mission to the outer planets  --  including crew.   Where you gonna go to be alone?   Just about every job on the First Four planets is some kind of team: medical, missionary, marketing, construction, computer, chemo-catalytic  ....  Everything is done in holy togetherness, by teams of damned, heat-seeking, blood-sucking extroverts.   Just going to work tires me out.   Vampires, I've been living with vampires all my life.   (My, my, aren't we in a bad mood?)

Yes, we are.   But getting away from the biker crowd  --  any crowd  --  makes my spirits soar.   The ocean!   I'm going to see the ocean!   In person, no less.   How beautiful is the sea  --  beautiful still, though it is not safe to swim in anymore.   I've heard of surfing, seen old movies, but these days the only good surfers are dead surfers.   Sometimes people with incurable cancer take up the sport because its a quicker way to go.   Not me, bo.  (No, we're headed for the slow death.)   For God's sake, leave me alone.

And for a while, my inner critic does leave me alone.   It is enough to fill my starved senses with the vast, wind-crowned heavens, the lights and colors of late afternoon on Earth.   The industrial district, crowded with tall warehouses and shadowed alleys, is built right up to the edge of the electrified wall that keeps unauthorized people off the beach.   This gone-to-seed looking guy  --  a Japanese-Hispanic mix, I think (I'm MexiMandarin, myself)  --  starts following us as we approach the access gate.   Angel turns around and walks back toward him.   I think this is a bad idea, but it's her town.   I go with her.   At a crossing, the sun shines, brilliantly level, full into her face.   I have a brief moment to study her features from the side. Her expression is placid and stern and oddly beautiful.   Definitely not an Angel of mercy  --  more like Wrath, perhaps, or Justice.   She could have been Hawaiian, except for those blue eyes and that long, narrow nose.   Startled, I see that there is bluish smoke curling inside her nostrils.

Deep sea divers and EEV teams sometimes get stress-release hydro/oxy implants to boost their stamina for dives or rescue missions.   I've never seen one that gives off blue smoke, though.   Either she has a very special implant, or she is breathing a different air from the rest of us Earthlings.

The guy stops when he sees us coming  --  we're about twice as tall as he is  --  and he gestures frantically to the apparently empty alley.   Four other guys come out of the corners and shadows to back him up.   Angel does not hesitate or slow down in the least.   Same steady walking pace.   Just outside of knife-reach range, she stands and speaks to the first guy.

"Good evening.   What is your business here?"   She is not asking about his economic occupation.

"Your bizness is my bizness, babe,"  he says, grinning like a commercial.

"My business is shell collection.   Are you here to collect shells?"

She rolls up her long sleeves, revealing a long, silvery tube half-embedded in the flesh of her right arm, ending in a palm nozzle.   A cyanizer.   Death by little spray droplets.   No wonder she breathes blue.   In her left hand is an honest-to-God frag gun, Mars issue, loaded with I.C.E. needles.   Not chips.   Needles.   Jesus.   What company is she with?   You can take out a whole battalion with just one of those things.   I know, my Mama was a Marine in the Second Chinese Police Action.   She doesn't  --  I mean didn't  --  talk about it much, but I know she saw at least one rioting mob dissolve into pools of organic jelly as their body metabolisms accelerated out of control.   Maybe that's why she adopted so many of us Yellow Fevers.   That's what they called me and my three sisters at school.   I remember crying about it and Mama  --  she understood.

She said,   "Honey-child, honey-skinned child, you are a yellow fever  --  you've got burning brains.   Burn to learn, child-o-mine.   Put coals of fire on their heads."

And my brothers said they had heard it all before.  The shagcarpet-for-brainers had called them Inkwells, because of their racial lineage.   My oldest sister, from the Blackfoot Nation, was called BlackBottom (or worse) until she defeated the school's antique chess computer and   won the All-Moon Decathalon (male and female competitors) in the same year.

"Then," she said, with that hilarious deadpan non-expression she can put on, "Then they called me Diana."

So I took pride in the cruel name.   It meant that I was a true Blackwell.   I was one of the family.   (This is not a good time to cry, space cadet.   Wake up.)

"There's more than one way to collect shells," I mutter, but they hear me.

The lead guy's friends start talking to him urgently in another language.   It's like Spanish, but not Spanish.   Italian, or Portuguese, maybe?   I hear the syllables "ahn-Hell, ahn-Hell" repeatedly.   "Angel, that's Angel!" they are telling him.   One breaks out into Franglish  --  French I understand. I translate freely from the Apache:

"Menlo Park Industrial, man.   Don't mess with her.   Don't mess with any of them.   Leave her alone, Panchiko, let's get out of here  .... "

"Are you a shell collector?" Angel repeats.

Her voice is quiet and cold, like blue moonlight, drifting down from an immense, white height.

"No, ma'am," says Panchiko sullenly, "Just passing through."

"Go in peace, then, and be kind."

"Yes, ma'am!"

They all answer together, like they were in church, and they cross themselves hastily as they flee.

Angel watches until they vanish down the alley, then we return to the charged gate.   It is DNA coded and I have to touch the pad with both hands before it will let me follow her through.   I feel a zap go through me.   Not just palm-prints, then.   Full DNA reading just like that.   Major technology, here in the burbs of New Tampa.

Now we're outside the wall and in the open air.   We cross the dry sand at an angle, approaching the damp flats at a leisurely pace.   Slowly, peacefully, we draw near the ancient waters of life.

For a while, Angel does all the talking.   This suits me just fine.   I don't have much to say and I can handle one-to-one socializing.   She describes her job, mostly: how the shells and   skeletons of marine animals are tested for mineral content  --  how some forms of life have evolved that actually eat and thrive on the more poisonous forms of human garbage.   Life gets strange under extremes of pressure.   One of these fish, lives in the polar regions, is so full of radioactive heavy metals that the aged specimens are harvested for the space industry  --  it is cheaper than mining.   The tentative generic name for this fish is Leukophagus.   They haven't species-typed it yet.

There is more  --  fresh water this, salt water that, deep sea the other  --  but I am only half listening.   Here I am on the beach!   Earth's most magical, transformative, ever-changing land.   The sky is delicately tinted with pale shades of blue and rose, grey and white.   The sea is a soft, lucid green.   The sound, the salt, the sand, the sun, combine to scour the soul clean of stains.   Hail to thee, Oceana, Queen Mother of Terra.

Angel striding along beside me on the empty beach, now keeps a bless�d silence.   After a while, I say something myself.   Introverts do like to talk sometimes, but there is hardly ever anyone listening.

"I learned to sail, a little bit, when I was a child."

"Where was that?"

"In Annapolis. Before the East Coast Floods."

"Not so long ago."

"No."

I fell silent again and so did she.   Annapolis, that lovely little town, is underwater now,   along with New York and Japan.   Gone.   There are vids if you are interested  --  lots of them in Inanna's library.   Lots of orphans.   I should know  --  plenty of us on the moon and Mars.   Exiles, they call us.   Some people say God is dead, others say, no, just on vacation.   (So who's minding the store, that's what I wanna know.)

Shared silence can be a healing thing.   There's something really special about a companion who understands long silences.   Just to be aware together, without talking  --  it opens up a space in the heart: a space vaster and windier than any beach or mountaintop, bigger even than the interstices of the stars.   I don't often get there, though.   Too much talking, crowds, vidscum  --   all that noise closes it off, shuts me down tighter than a tin can.   There used to be more wilderness in the world.   There is some still  --  Yellowstone, I hear, is an armed camp.   You have to be very rich or very important to get in.   There are even wilder places where industrial pollution has made deserts of high degree.   A lot of redwoods are gone.   I suppose there are pockets of old forest somewhere.

But I am a modern woman, raised on the barren moon.   All I know about survival is techno-installed, radio-based.   I know how to boil rice using lunar daylight and a double-shielded borax barrel.   But grub for roots?   Build a yurt?   Vids can only give you so much and then you are on your own.   I could go to the wilderness all alone, I suppose.   But stay where a broken leg is a death sentence?   That's not the way I want to live, either.   (Well, what the hell do you want?)   I want a way out of Hell!   I answered myself, suddenly feeling the full force of the anguish that drove me off the moon to New Tampa, Florida, North America, Incorporated.   It had felt like I was going home.   Ha. What a joke on me.   Five years of training in a closed-system pseudo-military cell with walls the color of biker-bar bathrooms, then a little house in emptiness all mine for the next forty-five years.   And nobody is coming home.

It was my only chance for getting off the moon and I took it.   They paid my way here, and now I'm committed.   Besides, my mother would have enthusiastically killed for the chance to go and I'm the only one to carry on her dream.

"Are you an only child?" Angel asks.

It takes me a second to reply.   A deep breath of air  --  the free air of Earth.   I don't know what is the matter with me.   Angel has a strange effect on my mind.   I feel disoriented.   Her height and paleness are only the outside, the appearance of her.   I mean, I'm tall, I grew up on the moon, but she is much taller.   And there is a feeling of lightness about her.   She seems to float rather than walk alongside me  --  like a seagull balancing on strong wings in the constant wind.   As if Earth's gravid pull has no hold upon her.   I'm sure she was not born here.   But I was  --  and I feel Earth's settled, constant draw like the detaining hand of my beloved: Don't go.   Don't leave me.   Stay here.   I love you very much.

I can't keep back the tears now, but it's so windy I can squinch my eyes and pretend it's just that.   I answer Angel's question.

"I have eight sisters and one brother."

"Eight sisters!"

"I had two other brothers, but I never knew them very well.   They were a lot older than me.   They  ---  died, last year on Luna Base.   My mother too."

"Ah."

She said just that one syllable.   Nothing looks less sympathetic on paper, but the way she said it  --  I can't explain.   It had my mother's courage and my brothers' families and my own sadness in it.   And yet the sorrow was not the sorrow of despair.   It was not heavy, like grief.   It had a lighter quality  --  I suppose it could be called compassion.  Whatever she felt, I felt lighter than I had for months  --  as if someone had finally shared my loss.   (Maybe the sea air is bracing.)

"And so, you came here to be with your family?"

"Oh, no!   My family is scattered over the Four Planets.   Venus, Mars, Mercury, Luna.   Wherever it's airless with scorching land, that's where you'll find the Blackwell clan."

I salute briskly.   Angel laughs.   It's a pure, heart-lifting sound.   Her voice is deep, resonant, but her laugh is clear as crystal bells.

"I'm the only one on Earth, and I'll be leaving before long."

"Where are you bound?"

My throat constricts as I choke back the words that come vomiting up: Bound for Hell!   Out of moon hell, to earth hell, to true plutonian hell!   Bound body and soul to a contract with plutocratic fiends!   The sun has gone down and light is ebbing out of the sky like blood draining from a wound.   Or like falling asleep in far, outer space.   I force my tongue and lips to shape a rational sentence.

"I volunteered for the Mars-Pluto run."   I try to toss it off lightly, but the words fall like lead sinks in Earth's gravity.  My eyes follow them to the ground.   There at my feet is a beautiful shell.   I stoop to pick it up but when I lift it, I see there is something wiggling inside, and I quickly let go.

"What's that?   Is it dangerous?"   Angel does not laugh at me.

"It's a conch.   A shell.   There is life within.   A mollusk.  Very rare now."

"Is it supposed to be this far up the beach?"

She shrugged.   "Sometimes they get washed up."

"Do you want it for your collection?"

"No.   We do not take the living ones.   We only collect the empty shells."

I ponder this for a moment.   Then I ask,

"Is it better to let it die quickly here or slowly out there in that poison soup?   It seems equally cruel to me, but maybe you know what's best?"

"Where there's life, there's hope."

I look up quickly.   That was Mama's favorite phrase.   Angel pays no attention to my startled face and goes on,   "Perhaps it will find what it needs in the water."

True enough, I think, and gingerly pick up the shell by a non-squirming edge.   We walk to the end of a pier and I carefully release the shelled creature into the sea.

"Did any of your sisters try out for the M-PEF, too?"

"No, just me.   They all got married and have a lot of babies."

"How retro," Angel murmurs.   Now it's my turn to laugh.   I cry too, but mostly it's laughing.

"Yeah, " I say, "Mama used to go on about it.   She didn't have much room on her agenda for babies."

"With twelve children?"

"Oh, we were adopted  --  older orphans.   All but my little brother.   He was the only one born of her body."

"Perhaps he was also born of her spirit."

"Maybe so."

This gets me to thinking.   Remembering.   Back to the final tryout briefing.   Reporters.   Vidbots scurrying around.   Yet another big room full of people  --  a more tasteful room than the one on Luna, but still utilitarian.   Metal.   Gray and beige.  No windows.   Mama don't low no claustrophobes round here.

And for once in my life, it's a room full of people like me: introverts.   Quiet people.   Pleasant enough, many pairs of intelligent eyes, many soft, well-modulated voices.   Tea drinkers, every one, I'll lay odds.   I'm here, and I'm one of them.   And three of us are going to the Outer Planets  --  going as economically as possible: one by one, by solitary one.

We have been through more tests than Job: physical, mental, emotional, and especially psychological.   Our motivation has been challenged, questioned, and negatively reinforced.   This guy, some scientist, I don't know if he even gave his name  --  I'm not much interested in people, especially grinning extroverts who pump your hand like the manic monkey they resemble  --  this guy congratulating me in front of a whole roomful of hopeful candidates who have just learned of their failure  --  you made it!   I made it, I'm going to Pluto  --  Congratulations!   This coffee-nerved jitterbug tells me, he smirks at me and says,

"Since you're going to the Outermost world, all alone, you'll just have to develop a rich inner life!"

"I have one," I say, dropping his hand as soon as politeness allows, or half a second sooner.   Suddenly I am very tired of all the civilized faces and I want to leave very badly.   That's when they tell us we will be kept in isolation chambers for five years to be sure we are fit for the mission.   Five years.   Going absolutely nowhere, except slowly crazy.   I'm at the outside age of acceptance to the program.   And what if the flight is delayed?   Life on Earth is pretty uncertain these days.   Anything could happen: plague, politics, bank crash, another skirmish with the Chinese, another environmental disaster  --  holy horrors, what if they delay the flight for eight years  --  or ten?   I'll be too old to go on the mission.   I could spend ten years of my life imprisoned in a windowless cell, no more than the width of a battleship gray wall away from the blessed rains of Earth.   There is no rain on the moon.

So then, they turn us loose for a week  --  one week, my God!  --  for "shore leave", before they put us in our tidy little boxes for good  --  or evil.   (I could shore leave' them, like Mr. Nobody's business).   And now, here on the beach, it hits me really hard: Five years.   In five years, Joey will be 19.   Fully eligible.   Already qualified for space flight.   He's been a spacejack since he was ten years old, Mama used to let him pilot the freighters while she went moon spelunking.   He could go into isolation now  --  today!   He'd do it too, in a Mercurian minute.   He'd do it for fun, to prove he could, no other reason.   He's like that.   But I'm not and I can't  ---

I'm now crying and crying and Angel is nowhere to be seen.   It's half-dark and I see a few stars in their heavenly  --  Earthly!  --  courses above me.   Big business special offer: only five more days before I never see them again.

Panic takes my body but my mind keeps chattering: I can't, I can't, I can't go to Pluto!   But then they'll send me back to the moon, airless world, forever and ever, Class B laborer, failed astronaut.   My first and only chance and I've blown it.   I can't  --  I've got to get out of here!

I burst out through some gate, I don't know which one, but it lets me out into the dimming streets.   I start running, but the gravity and the heat slow me to a walk.   I look around and realize that I'm lost.   Believe it or not, this is a soothing sensation.   On the moon, you can't get lost.   Everybody knows you and they all know exactly where you are at all times.   If they don't know, they start looking for you.   It's a group survival trait.   My heart slows with my steps, and my brain kicks in again.   Maybe I could get lost in a big way?   Like permanently?

But its a forlorn hope.   NorAm, Inc. Is not a world power for no reason. (Double negative!   Little Jo negates the negation   --  NorAm is nothing if not a great nation!)   Yeah, right.   Does my PINtag have a TracerMbd?   (Of course, stupid, all valuable property is marked with the owner's identity.)   Well, think, dammit!   How long before security comes after me?   Claudia won't call them tonight.   She knew my mom.   She'll figure I'm out having a High Old Time.   As if I need drugs to be strange.   (I'll just wear my natural brain fibers, thank you  --  I'm rather allergic to synthetics.)  Maybe that's it!   Maybe they turned us loose on the town to see if we turn out to be an Unofficial Stimulation Existential Artificial!   (Does that spell USE-A?)   I could scroff down some chemical Carnival and floss myself right out of the program!   (Back to the moon, with a psychFlag permanently attached to your tail.   Start tucking now, and get used to it.)  Okay, right.   Then I'll snail the tag to Claudia with a note and hie me to a None-erry.   Disappear.

How much time do I have?  Three days, maybe four?   You can go a long ways in four living days.   But where, how?  Plane, train, shuttle, feet?   It's impossible.   I know very well that it's impossible, but I go over the possibilities in my mind anyway.   Where's there's life, there's hope  --  I hope.   (And where there's hope, there's one Class-A Certified, Labor-Claimed, moon-brained chump.)   Shuttup, I gotta think.   Plane? No way.   No tag, no credit, jammed holds with strict weight allowances and no A/C.   Forget it.   Bus?  truck?  hitchhike?  Not likely. The roads are earthquake buckled from here to Cahokia, and beyond.   What used to be the Mississippi Valley is now an inland sea.   There are still trains, though, see the tracks?  Yes, trains that are remote-run, computer-driven, travel at near-supersonic speeds, and only stop inside climate-controlled, industry-owned warehouses.   Ok, how do you get inside one of those warehouses?  (How do you get inside one of those whorehouses?   Just open up and let er rip!)   Shut UP!  I can't go back.   I can't go to Pluto.   There has to be another way.   A way for me to live here, on Earth.  (How about debtor's prison?   I'm sure NorAm would be happy to oblige.)

I still don't know where I am, but I'm too fragged to care.   I see a flash of white up ahead, I think I recognize it.   It's Angel, moving through the alley like a seabird, a gull among garbage heaps.   The glimpse of white goes into a side street, and I follow.   Coming around the corner, I halt and fade back behind the sheltering bulk of a dumpster.   I've seen something I don't like.   Standing under the blue emergency light  --  two guys with popguns, talking to Marjorie.   Their backs are to me and there is a train going by so loud that even I can't hear myself think.   Safe for now, but what to do?   The train is past and now I can hear what they're saying.   They are loan enforcers, some shop-shark's goons.   They are pushing Marjorie to pay up on the loan she used to buy gasoline for her bike.   Jesus.   God.   Somebody.   What am I supposed to do?   There's not much crime on the moon.   I mean bullet-fire inside an airdome happens about once in a green Earth.   Besides, my middle-class upbringing has left me at a disadvantage when it comes to weathering the rougher elements of human nature.   I haven't had much exposure to the urban wilderness.   NorAm security Pols would be mighty handy just now, but they are as far away as  ---  well, too damn far.

Besides, I'm the high-priced model here  --  Marjorie is thrift-shop goods as far as they'll be concerned.   I can see them shrug, hear them say, 'Business is business.'   What do they care about a piece of half-human refuse?   (What do YOU care?!   You gonna get yourself killed for some drunk whore?)   Why not, I say, cool as Mr. Canby.   Is it any worse than dying alone in a tin can?   Or the way Mama died?

Silence.   For once, my inner voice has no smartass reply to a serious question. Marjorie tried to protect me and now it's my turn to defend her.   It's a family sort of thing.   We take care of each other.   And, since Angels can't be everywhere at once, it's up to us human beings to help them out.   So.   Maybe if I walk by, casually, like nothing is wrong, say hello to Marjorie, maybe nothing will happen.   They can't shoot both of us can they?  (YES THEY CAN, you flaming idiot!   And rape you both first, get the hell out of here!)

No, I think I'm gonna try it.   Gotta do something.   Maybe just being out there will tip the balance toward humanity.   So I try it and it almost works.

I come out from behind the dumpster, whistling and bopping along on my rubber-souled moonshoes like I know where I'm going.   They all see me.   Marjorie doesn't know who I am or even who she is, she's that far gone.   She's drunk as a hoot owl.   When there were any hoot owls.

"Hey-ey, Marjor-EE," I call out, friendly as Mr. Canby, "What's happening, Hon-o-lu-lu?"

The sharks stare at me like I'm an old movie, or something.   (I love old movies--let's go to one RIGHT NOW!)   The little guy starts to put his gun out of sight, but the bigger one just concretes his eyes at me.

"Marjorie's got business with us," he says, nasty as you can imagine.

"Oh!" I say (Miss Innocent of Ought Nine), "Don't let me interrupt!   I just wanted to know if Marjorie was coming to church with me tonight?"   I let my voice go up, girlishly squeaky at the end of my question.   It floors them for a second.   Even goons have some human instincts.   They look at each other open-mouthed, and then Marjorie says,

"Hull, fartin' NO I'm not goin' nowhur, nobuddy, no REASon  --  " and a lot more like that, except worse.   Her hostility tips the balance toward the Beast.   If only she had answered me politely  ...

"That's what you think, darlin'" says nasty-mouth, "You're coming with us right now and so is Gookie Girl."   He gestures with his cheap gun toward a sagging door in an abandoned warehouse.   (Now what? Run, shit or die?)

"I'm sorry, but I have to go to the church social," I say as if I had been invited to dinner instead of death.

"Do come, Marjorie, everybody asks me about you."

"Girlie, I want you to get your yellow ass over to that wall in a hurry, you got 3 seconds before I shoot."

"Really, sir, I have to be going.   I'm sorry I interrupted your business, but there is no occasion to be so rude."   I sniff and act prim as I prepare my muscles to charge headlong into his guts.   It's only bullets.   Charge a gun and flee a knife.   My Mama wasn't a Marine for nothing.   I'll take one of the pluggers out or my name's not Josephine Picado Blackwell.   There's more than one way to meet the Lord of the Underworld.   NorAm can't charge my family with my debts if I get killed on shore leave.   Insurance will cover it.   So.   End of problem.   (Let's go, Gookie Girl.   Get em!)

"Who's that?" says the little guy, looking over my shoulder.   I don't turn my head to look, keep watching the big guy.   Very old trick.   I might be moon-based, but I'm not stupid.

"Get moving!" Nasty hisses at me.

"Like Hell," I say and kick the gun clean out of his hand.   Little guy shoots.   I hear noise, but I don't feel a thing.   And I can't move.

Next thing I know, there's Angel hovering four meters overhead, and shining.   I mean very bright light, coming out of her skin, for God's sake.   Her white pajamas are glowing from within.   Maybe my eyes are dazzled, but I squinny up, taking a sight on the stars behind her, and I think I see  --  yes, wings.   I gasp and look back down at my fellow humans  --  all minor differences of opinion canceled out for the moment  --  to see if they are seeing what I see, but just then, all three of them disappear.   I don't mean run away or fall down dead.   I mean vanish, kapouf!   Like they were folded into invisibility dough.   No sound, no heat, no flash, no little blue specks, no nothing.   Gone.   I look up.   Angel is rising slowly, drifting forward above the canyon walls of the alleyway, and I take a few steps forward, almost involuntarily to follow her.

Then she's out of sight, and I'm standing in a deep darkness with only the light of the stars and this sense of a passing  --  presence.   I don't know how else to describe it.   Something big.   Not solid, but very, very real.

My brain goes berserk.   What happened?   Who is she?   Or what?   The words Leukophage, mutation come into my mind unbidden.   I know only a little Greek and Latin.   It means White Eater  --  but does it apply equally to the Eater and the Eaten?   The enforcers were mostly white, but Marjorie was mostly black.   "We take care of our own," she had said about the Hell's Angels, but who do they count as family?   I start thinking, crazily, cracking up in all directions  --  remembering everything she told me about fish and fishing.   I remember how crabs and catfish that have the sweetest, whitest, most succulent flesh are said to be bottom feeders.   And there was this other creature, an Angler fish, it has an appendage, a fleshy, phosphorescent bulb that it dangles before its open mouth, a shining bait to bring fishy victims out of the deep dark sea.

Is this bright being only the lighted lure invisibly attached to a voracious, unseen enemy?   Have these three people been drawn out of the dark into final oblivion?   Is she a hell's angel, a heavenly devil, or just an alien catfish?   A bottom feeder?   I giggle in shock.

Then why didn't she take me out with the others!   I was standing right there, ready to kill like the other beasts, no better than them, no more use to society than Marjorie.

"WHY DIDN'T YOU LET ME DIE, TOO!"  I screamed into the empty sky.   I don't know who I was talking to and I certainly did not expect an answer, but I got one.   Not one, but two inner voices spoke  --  and neither of them was me.   I swear by all that's holy, this was not me talking to myself.   I heard these voices.

One of them was Angel.   She said,

"There is life within."   And then I remember something else she said: We do not take the living ones.   We only collect the empty shells.

The other voice was Mama's.   She said,

"Where there's life, honey-child, there's hope."

Stumbling forward, my eyes obscured by a sheet of salt water, I look both ways before I cross the street.   Half a block away, I see Marjorie gently descending to Earth.   She's standing on the crazy-cracked sidewalk.   I run up, too breathless to shout.   I see her face.   She's sober as a statue and scared sharkless.   Before I can open my mouth, she goes down a flight of stairs, half running, and passes through a basement door.   Bewildered, I come after her.   There's a big, tattered banner over the doors, it's a storefront church, a slum meeting house.   Holy Tabernacle.   The Waters of Life.   Rev. Patrick Washington.  I go in.  Small miracle.   It's a 12-step program meeting.   I know, Mama knew.   We do have alcoholism on the Moon.   I tiptoe out, breathing and thinking very hard.   Maybe she'll find what she needs in the waters.

I'm still out here in the deep sea, though.   Thinking about that Panchiko and Marjorie's recently-collected collection shells, I become less worried about NorAm's tracking capabilities.   Then I wonder if I should be more worried.   I am one lost cookie.   Or should I say, gookie girl, is that more appropriate in my current social milieu?   Maybe there's an ecological niche in the urban wilderness for one, extra-polite, slightly suicidal introvert?   Fairly new model, only driven to distraction on Sundays and holidays?

Suddenly, I come out of Fantasyland into Moneyland, the financial district, by faith.   Glass and steel and marble, more electric eyes than you can shake a shell at.  Blocks away, a tall, leisurely, white-clad form climbs the marble steps into one of the Castles of Currency, the Towers of Tin.   I suck in more air.   It seems like I've been walking all night.   I do not run, but I turn in that direction.   With dignity, I go forth to meet my Mintmaker.

There is a person in all white, but it is a tailored suit and I think it is a guy, but I'm not sure.   His hair is not white, anyway.  He takes the Up escalator.   I sit down in a chair in the lobby.  I am very tired.

A well-dressed woman approaches me with purposeful strides.   I'm spotted.   (Like t'leopard!)I'm trapped (Like t'wolf!) I'm history (Like t'dodo!)   Oh, do shut up.   All you can think of is animals because it's back to the stalls for me.   I give up.   Can't think anymore.

"May I help you?" says the dressy lady.

I want to answer, but I can't speak.   I have no rational words, no outer world reasons to give her.  To my unuttered horror, I find I am opening my mouth to emit aloud what my inner voice is whispering!   Out it comes:

"I'm looking for a job."

"Oh, you must be a night owl!   Did you buy the morning Snooze-Reader already?   We just put the ad in half an hour ago.   Come this way please."

The lady has nice manners and a well-modulated voice.   Dazed, I follow her down a long, graceful corridor to the offices of Atlantis Rising, Limited.   They recognize my face, know my name  --  they have seen the NorAm special on Flight to the Outer Planets.  I have a brief chat with the president of the company.   He gives me his card.   I take a cab back to Claudia's house. And that is that.

I mean, that was the beginning of the end of my mission to the Underworld.

Claudia snorted when I gave her the card.

"What's this?   Some kind of New Age UnReal Estate scam?   Selling the promised land to the Faithful in 20 by 30 lots?   Atlantis Rising!   Alzheimer's Rictus, more likely."   She went with me to the second interview.  If I'm a sucker, then so is she  --  but don't count on it.  They showed her tin-tickers that made her jaw drop and her head spin with visions of sugarplum federals.   Not real estate.   Not a scam.   Ecosystems development and reclamation.   Tons of profit in land- and sea-based agriculture restoration.  The largest privately-owned company in the world.  Maybe the four worlds, soon.   Claudia drools over the prospect of them going public.   She plans to trade her second ex-husband's whole portfolio to buy their stock.

They have cloning labs.   Breeding zoos.   They own large chunks of carefully developed farmland, forest and seafloor.   They have stewardship appointments over much smaller bits of pristine wilderness.   They even have a hoot owl  --  two of them, Noah and Naomi.   I met them myself, person-to-animal.   They're going to live in Yellowstone  --  honest to God.

I called my brother on Station Alpha and told him I was defecting to Earth.   He took it in exactly the right spirit.

"YOW!" he screamed, "Step aside, little lady, and let a MAN handle this job!"   This is his favorite joke.   He is about 1.5 meters tall to my 2.67, and anything over .6 Gees collapses his lung tissue to pancakes.  We call him the Mutant, he's only able to survive in extra-terrestrial artificial environments.   So, who can tell which adaptive traits have the most survival value?   He might outlive us all.   Claudia says she will break the news to the rest of my family as soon as I am outside NorAm's territorial waters and radio contact.

I have a job.  There is a new technological breakthrough  --  a realtime Kirilian holovid scanner that registers the dynamic interchange of bioradiance and the carbon-nitrogen dancefloor simultaneously.   My job is to walk around in coastal forests for the next few years, registering and cataloging the major open systems with extrapolations to human occupancy  --  me being the chief occupant  --  and then to oversee the replications.   It's like a job made in heaven for me.

The guy who's telling me about it  --  I forget his name  --  but he says if I take the position I can bring my husband too if I like.

"I don't have one."

He smiles calmly, as if he knows something I don't, and says, "Well, if you acquire one anytime soon, you can bring him along."

And the woman I interview with says something odd too.

"Some people prefer to bring their children into these work settings, but I have an idea that you will be more interested in expressing your inner potential.   For a while."   She smiles  --  a serious kind of smile, so I nod solemnly.  I don't know what she means, but I'm adaptable.

The thing that clinches it for Claudia is when the president says, "If you are interested in our counter-offer, we will buy your option from NorAm."   And he hands me two pieces of paper: a large check made out to Nor-Am and a Release of Labor-Claim Form.

We walk out with them.   Claudia says, "If they were sharks, they would let NorAm come down on your family for labor debts.   Looks like they're on the up and up."

And so am I.   I take the papers to NorAM.   The sign the Release, I hand them the check.   They give me a time-limited diskcopy of the Termination Agreement until the check clears.   This takes a whole day.   Only once do I have a moment of queasiness  --  what if it doesn't clear?  --  but my stomach turns rightside up again when I think of Joey.   I go back, they give me the hard copy of the Release Form, not on paper, but actual parchment, hand-inked and bleached ivory-white, probably with dioxin-producing chlorine.   The seal is pure gold leaf.

There is no ceremony and no regrets are expressed by any party to the transaction.   To me, personally, they are indifferent.   Plenty of introverts where I came from  --  25% of the human race, nearly all employed in jobs they hate.   When I return, Atlantis hands me my travelling papers: a passport, valid on every continent, visa'ed for NorAfrica and SurAsia, among other CorpoNations.  I don't need any shots.   I had them all before I left the moon.   I'm free to go.

Like Huck Finn, civilization has gotten a bit much for me.   I'm lighting out for the territories.   Guess how I'm travelling?   Plane, train, balloon, shuttle?   Nope.   Nope, nope.   Planes, too expensive.   No trains to other continents.   Shuttles, fuel rationed.   Balloon, don't be ridiculous.   I'm going by clipper ship.   That's right, I'm sailing to Byzantium. I've seen the ship, his name is Resurrection.   It's true that his hull is infused with a special acid resistant plastiglass, and the sails are heavy-duty ripstop Nylaron-9; but the ropes are pretty real, a blend of hemp, rayon, and that Newtar quasipolymer fiber.

And the clothes I get to wear!   Gen-u-ine 100% unbleached cotton twill, lined with silk!   Two of the silk weavers, I forget their names, but they're nice folks, brother and sister  --  they are coming with us to inspect mulberry plantations on the way.   The silk and tea operations of Atlantis are 70% worker-owned.   I never saw a prouder, happier bunch of people in my life, and I come from a proud, happy family.   And get this: 75% of the crew are introverts. The extroverts have to learn how to adapt to us.

So, I don't know why I am putting all this down on unbleached paper.   Maybe I'm totally deluded, but so far it's been a lot more fun than other kinds of suicidal gestures.   I never saw Marjorie again and Claudia says Angel hasn't been around lately.   I still don't know what happened in that alley.   I have some ideas about it though.   I suppose, if the Augean stables of human cruelty are ever going to be mucked out, it will take a few Angels to do it.   You collect the tares, bind them and burn them before you harvest the wheat.   Are you a weed, fellah?   Zap!

Life adapts in mysterious ways.   There is the shell of outer life and the life that is within.   And if the human species is being redefined under extremes of ecological pressure, then what does it take  --  what kind of inner life is required, to prevent being collected as an empty shell?   Is hope adequate?   Maybe humor, faith and charity are predispositional conditional requirements?   Does courtesy to others count?  And what happens when the life within is fully developed?   Could a person develop ESP?   Guiding intuition?   Telekinesis?   Do you suppose a regular old human-type body could sprout  --  wings?

When I get to my destination, I will seal this manuscript in a tuffglas bottle and carefully entrust it to the waters.   If you are the one reading it, then maybe it is meant for you.   Blessed are the refined in spirit, for theirs is the realm of the skies.   I thought that particular Beatitude only referred to soul flight, but maybe I should have taken it more literally.   Some folks say God is dead, but think about it.   If God is really dead, then it is high time for the meek to come into their inheritance.   And who do you suppose is going to execute the Will?   Just think about it for a second.   There may be angels among us.