JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

Yuki fell into her chair again as if her legs had gone out beneath her. And she buried her face in her hands, crying inarticulately like one of those sad creatures swimming in a vast ocean she could not glimpse, but which was essentially the air all around her.

Earlier that afternoon, after Caren Bistro had left, Janice Poole had come out from behind her desk and smiled at Stake lasciviously, as much as she dared to do within range of the camera that monitored her classroom. She whispered, "Want to come home with me after I finish up here?"

He gazed over her shoulder. Atop a counter that ran the length of the room were a number of tanks containing various animals, from fish to insects to rodents to a group of Kalian lizards much smaller than the edible glebbi, though these short-limbed specimens still had long, serpentine necks upon which perched smiling crocodilian heads. These creatures were piled atop each other in an unmov-ing orgy. At most, one of the periscope heads would turn lazily this way or that. At last, Stake said, "Umm, I'm not feeling that great tonight. I haven't been sleeping well."

"Ohh, really?" Janice stepped closer to him as if her proximity, the aura of her lust, might sway him. "Hey," she said. "Am I your girlfriend now or what?"

Now he looked directly at her, and smiled. "Am I your boyfriends?"

"Hm. Plural, huh?"

He grinned, felt a little guilty. "Sorry. Look, I really am tired. I'll call you tomorrow, all right?" And then he headed to her classroom's door. "Thanks for your help just now."

Janice folded her arms and raised an eyebrow at him. "Mm," was all she said as he left.

Now, he was back in his flat on noisy, colorful Forma Street. And now, alone, he almost regretted not going home with Janice after all. He remembered those lizards, taking mindless comfort in the contact of each other's bodies.

That, in turn, made him think of Thi Gonh.

Unanswered questions haunted him to this day, as if she had taken them to the grave with her. But he felt confident that she was still alive. This was because he had tried to find her, and had at least glimpsed her footprints before they vanished into obscurity. He had never returned to her world, her dimension, after the war-that was true. But he had called here and there. Sent messages. Sifted through the net. The first footprints had been clear enough, in fact.

When the 5th Advance Rangers had met up with his group and they had left the captured monastery, releasing the clerics detained during the occupation of it, the combined force of soldiers had taken the two Ha Jiin prisoners with them. It wasn't until the third day that an air cavalry vehicle had been able to rendezvous with the group, and carry the prisoners away for further, official interrogation. Sometimes prisoners were used in exchange for captured Colonial Forces soldiers. But Stake had feared that the Earth Killer would be too great a prize to trade. Too heinous a criminal to set free.

During those three days that they dragged the prisoners along with them, they had even engaged the enemy a few times (and it was in one of these brief firefights that Private Devereux, whose life Thi had spared in that clearing, was killed by another Ha Jiin's bullet). But it was from his fellow soldiers, many of them now camouflage-faced clones, that Stake felt the greatest threat. Not to himself, but to the blue-skinned woman. With Sergeant Adams now in command, he didn't have it within his power so much to protect her. Or be left alone with her. As it had turned out, however, the trek had been too dangerous and Adams too bent on his mission for any abuse to have been directed at the woman, besides the occasional hateful comment. Yet when the cavalry ship landed to spirit her off, Stake's anxiety had become even greater than before. Now, he would not be able to protect her at all. Now, in all likelihood, he would never see her again.

Standing in his dingy apartment, staring sightlessly down into the bustle of the street, Stake remembered her eyes as she had entered into the craft and glanced back at him before the door slid shut behind her and the soldier escorting her. He remembered that there was nothing to remember about her eyes. Blank, dark, as mysterious as those of the lizards that had gazed back at him in Janice Poole's classroom. Black, flashing bright red, and then gone.

Upon returning from the field to the allied city of Di Noon, he had called this office and that officer, sent urgent and repeated messages. He urged anyone who would listen to show mercy to the Earth Killer, relating the story that her own companion had revealed to him-how she had herself taken mercy on three Earth soldiers vulnerable within her gun sights.

She had not been released to the Ha Jiin until after the war had ended, but it wasn't that much longer in any case. Still, as Stake continued to follow her situation, primarily through the news media and military reports, there had come yet another direction for his concern. After hearing the same testimony from her companion that had won her leniency with the Earth forces, her own government tried her for treason. But there was her record to take into consideration. Though she had spared three Earthmen in a moment of weakness, that did not return life to the many other soldiers she had not hesitated a moment in dispatching. In the end, the Earth Killer had been awarded her freedom, dismissed from military service. And her people had given her a new moniker, half out of contempt, and half out of a kind of humor based on lingering respect.

She was called the Earth Lover.

The footprints of the Earth Lover had disappeared into the blue jungles of her planet after that. Trailed off into a private life somewhere, hidden from notoriety and shame. A woman turned patriot turned murderer turned pariah. Another live war casualty.

To this day, she remained as much a cipher to Stake as he was to himself. Was it her living ghost, or his own, that rattled its chains in the halls of sleep more disconcertingly? Or had he and she become one entity in a way, in an abstract form of his mimicry, his empathy? In trying to find her, he wondered, had he as much been trying to find himself?

She's using you, Private Devereux had told him. To keep from being executed by his men. Letting Stake make love to her, to prevent being raped again by the others.

In an alley below he saw two dogs of different breeds sniffing at a burst trash bag together. Like the lizards. That unthinking, instinctual need for companionship. He hoped that at least it had been this between them. Not just her using him. If not love, if not even affection, at least this. Was that too much for him to have asked of her in return?

As he had countless times before, he replayed her face on the screen of his mind, as she had appeared when he was atop her. She had seemed to have honestly lost herself in pleasure on two or three occasions. On one such occasion, her eyes had slit-ted almost entirely closed until only a sliver of white showed, as if she had gone into a trance. And she had cooed, in the softest tone he ever heard from her, "Ohh, ban ta like. Ban ta like."

Later, he had asked Private Henderson what "ban ta" meant. He had replied, "Ah, that would mean 'your lover.'" Then realization had shown in the other soldier's face. But he had said nothing. A good man, that Henderson.

And she had always called him Ga Noh. The chimera. The shapeshifter.

He recalled her eyes open, another time, as he crushed himself into her as though he might fuse their bodies, her left leg hooked in the corner of his elbow, her knee bent back to her ear and her foot bobbing, bobbing in the air with thrusts that were almost violent, almost rape. But those wide eyes were not hateful. Or afraid. Did memory distort them into something passionate?