The Lesson of Her Death

other imposing electronics. Kresge said, “All this for one perp?”
    Standing as straight as the barrel of a goose-gun, Neale said, “A lawbreaker’s a lawbreaker, Deputy, and a killer’s my least favorite kind.”
    “Yessir,” said Kresge. “I’ll go along with you there.”
    Corde hoped someday soon he could play the eye-rolling game with Kresge. He said to Neale, “Where’s Gilchrist now?”
    Neale said, “TacSurv says he’s in the room.”
    Kresge asked, “Tac? …”
    “Tactical Surveillance. They say he’s in the room but we’ve got a glitch. He’s taken in two innocents with him. A couple prostitutes.”
    “His profile isn’t a lust killing but he’s very unstable.”
    Neale said, “We’ve got a Sensi-Ear on him. He’s paid the ladies already and now they’re getting down to fun and games. If he goes rogue on us we’ll do a kick-in and nail him but if not it’s our policy to wait until we’re out of hostage situations. Is he the sort who’d take a hostage?”
    “He’d do anything,” Corde said emphatically, “to escape.”
    “Okay,” Neale said, “subject to your go-ahead, sir, we wait.”
    The wind swirls into the low bowl of the cemetery and slips inside Jamie’s one-piece wrestling uniform.
    The boy shivers and stands up. He carefully walks around the portion of the grave in which Philip’s body lies and he leaves the cemetery, walking slowly to the Des Plaines River. Here the water’s course is narrow and as close to a rapids as a Midwest farmland river ever gets. Upstream a quarter mile it forks and swirls around a small, narrow island filled with brush and dense trees. You can’t wade the water but you can reach the islandby a thick fallen birch, which he and Philip crossed hundreds of times to reach the Dimensioncruiser that the island so clearly resembles. Jamie crosses the tree now, looking down into the turbulence of the sudsy phosphate-polluted water and once across walks the familiar path past the cruiser’s control room, the engine room, the xaser torpedo tubes, the escape vehicle.…
    Jamie stops. He sees on the other side of the island a night fisherman, casting leisurely out into the water. Jamie is bitterly betrayed. Furious. This is their private place, his and Philip’s. No one else is allowed here. In the days since Philip died Jamie has come here nearly every day to walk the cruiser’s decks. He angrily resents this man’s invading the island, taking it over like a Honon warrior. The fisherman turns and looks at the boy in surprise then smiles and waves. Jamie ignores him and walks sullenly back through the island.
    Jamie stands under pines crowned with dusty illumination from the lights of Higgins. He pitches stones into the water. In the gurgle of the torrent he imagines he hears the chugging rhythms of Geiger—the searing guitar riffs, the screams from the sweating hatter of a lead singer. He suddenly feels two mosquito stings on his arms. After the insects drink for a moment he smashes them viciously, leaving bloody black spots on his forearms. He listens to the roar of the water.
    Do. Yourself
.
    You gotta do yourself
.
    You. Got. To. Do. Yourself
.
    The sky, long past blue, is now the gray color of a xaser torpedo before it detonates. The clouds separate for a moment and Jamie sees the first star of the evening. He feels a cloudburst of agony in his soul, the pain gushing through him. He is gripped with coarse panic and runs to the birch bridge. He steps onto the tree.
    Do yourself. You gotta do yourself now!
    Jamie walks halfway across then stops. He lifts his arms, like Dathar-IV standing on top of the State Governance Building Bridge, a thousand feet above the solarcrystals, Honon troops closing in from either side. Jamie Corde stretches his arms high above his head, two eyes closed, balancing on twenty toes, above a single abyss of racing water.
    By the power of Your wisdom,
by the strength of Your might,
guide me, O Guardians,
to the Lost Dimension,
from darkness to light
.…
    He drops like a meteorite into the dark rage of water. He feels a scraping pain against his ear as the side of his head smacks the tree on his way down, then a cold colder than he’s ever felt envelopes his body, squeezing every last bit of breath from his lungs.
    Jamie Corde looks up, he sees water, he sees blood and he sees in the tunnel of blackness above him a single star, which he knows is the eye of a Guardian, agreeing to lift him away, safely into a